Someone asked, what is one thing someone who's learning to cook should know?

[christopher575]

Obviously the more interesting comments are listing way more than one. Here's mine:

Watch cooking shows for ideas and instruction but keep in mind that they make it look easy. Do your mise en place so you don't get overwhelmed trying to do several things at once when the actual cooking starts. Learn to clean up as you go or else you'll hate cooking because of the huge mess that you can't deal with until after you eat. Working with recipes is good and necessary but you should also make stuff up. Keep butter in a butter dish on the counter. Mount a tablet to use for recipes and give it its own email address; copy the recipe text into the body of the email and also provide the link. Have a list when you shop but also leave room in your meal plan for taking advantage of things you find on sale or that sound good that day. Get a chest freezer. Get to know all the stores near you and what each of them excel at. Once you're comfortable cooking, meal kits like Hello Fresh and Blue Apron are actually pretty amazing but you should use a calendar to make sure to stay on top of reviewing and possibly canceling each week. One of the most fun things ever is experimenting with leftovers. Be realistic about when you should start cooking so you and everyone else aren't miserable and hungry waiting for the meal to arrive. Taste your food as you make it and definitely before you serve it. Always make all the plates as pretty as possible and keep the ugliest one for yourself. Organize your meal plan and shopping list in a shared spreadsheet and move the items around to match the order you go through the store before heading out. Get takeout at least a couple of times a month. Use, freeze, or share everything; you can't save the world by cutting your own food waste but you can save yourself a lot of money.

Comments

[dr_tectonic]

Mine would be: there are a lot of terrible recipes out there. It's pretty common for recipes to go too light on the seasonings. It's also common for recipes to just flat-out lie about times; you cannot caramelize onions in 10 minutes. If the recipe says "2-3 minutes or until X," go by whether it's X, not by the time. You should follow recipes carefully while you're learning, so you can learn how cooking works, but your goal is to reach the point where the recipe is just a starting point that gives you the main idea, and you know enough to be able to eyeball quantities, make substitutions, and adjust things on the fly to make it taste good with what you've got.

(Note that this does not apply to baking, which demands much more precision; only to cooking.)

[christopher575]

The onions. How can anyone feel good about lying so much in a recipe? They take soooo long.