How could one go about becoming a better cook?

Learn the different flavors. Then always taste your food as it’s cooking or as you’re putting it together.

Watching the cooking channel.

Is there a friend who can teach you?

quality spices. penzeys is my favorite. Watch the cooking channel. Experiment.

Be willing to try new stuff. My mom couldn’t cook at all, I am completely self-taught. I’m certainly not chef quality, but I’m pretty damned good, and it’s from being willing to try anything. Read all the recipes. I often won’t cook something if the recipe doesn’t have a picture because I’m very visually oriented. Experiment. Most of all, have fun! If you don’t enjoy it, you probably won’t do very well at it. Start simple, check out the “learning cookbooks” from your library. Good luck, @Jude, I’ll be over soon to taste! ;-)

A great book is Culinary Artistry by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page. It answers the questions you have about about what food, seasonings and flavors match well; what “goes” with what. A lot of good cooking is based on a sense of just that. I might get it from a library before buying a $30 dollar book, but I do think this one is special.

I highly recommend How to Cook Everything. The book has great instruction on cooking basics. Get yourself a copy and then just start cooking. I think the best way to learn is just to do it. There will be some failures and missteps along the way, some of them still edible, some of them sadly, not even. But cooking is one of those things you learn by doing. While there certainly is both an art and a science to cooking, cooking is chemistry and you have to do the labs and the experiments to master it.

Also, if you have an iPad or iPhone, there is a How to Cook Everything app that’s very good.

Both the book and the app have great recipes and great illustrations demonstrating preparation and techniques.

What can I say? I’m a big fan Bitmann’s book. :-)

I couldn’t cook to save my life when I was younger. Then I had an accident when I joined the army and I ended up becoming a cook. Now I’m chef-boy-r-dee’ing it across the place. When you first start cooking, there’s alot to take in. There’s the fact that you can make people sick by under cooking or make people mad by overcooking something. You want to start out with little side item like stuff first. People always find it funny when I say this, but cooking ramen noodles is a good place to start. Believe it or not, alot of people mess that up, even though you my like your noodles a certain way, the proper way for ANY pasta/starch item to be prepared involves almost the same instructions, add salt to the water, heat product until it begins to boil, lower the flames/power (electric), stir, and then drain. After you drain, run warm water through it, then add flavorings and serve. Look at any recipe card that has pasta in it and it’‘l be that same structure, give or take 2 steps. As you can see learning how to properly make oodles o noodles can lead you into already knowing how to macaroni elbow noodles. After that, you can get Macaroni salad and Macaroni and cheese. I don’t suggest you even start trying to cook anything complex yet, because most cooking recipes require a really (REALLY) good ability to multitask in that area. But I do suggest you do as lilycoyote has said, get a beginners cookbook. Dont expect to be able to cook a turkey in 3 weeks though, learning to cook requires you learn steps. times, temperatures, taste, and the look of your product. In the military you can actually get in serious trouble for not following the recipe card, even if you know the card by heart. We call that jungle cooking, lol

When my kids were little I got info and recipes from my local university extension service. Does your school have something like that? I learned to make granola from scratch and had an entire folder of great low cost healthy recipies that I collected. It may have been a low income thing, but it’s worth checking out.

Cooking isn’t hard, it just takes a little courage to dive in and do it. You’ll mess up a few dishes, but watch videos online about cooking and get a good all-purpose cookbook like Joy of Cooking. Then, just go for it. Experiment, pay very careful attention to what flavors taste like in the end. The best advice is: start out using as few ingredients as possible. Some of the best, say, spaghetti sauce has only 3 or 4 ingredients.

If your mom is still around, she is your very best cooking source. If you are not with her, then call or email her for cooking directions.

You should not be left out of the herd.

Here’s a great web site, I recommend making whatever you find that appeals to you:
www.101cookbooks.com/index.html

Also, +1 for @lillycoyote‘s recommendation of How to Cook Everything. After you get some practice, you see that most cooking boils down (lol) to a few simple techniques.

2nd Suggestion…how about your other siblings? Would they be willing to share their cooking secrets with you?

My granddaughters are constantly calling my wife for her recipes. Both of them were raised here, but I guess they were not paying attention, when my wife cooked for them.

If you want to know how to make the best cornbread on the planet, my wife will share this with you right here on Fluther.

Just let me know. jp

Oh and, regarding the grad school budget, the basics of so many meals are super cheap: dried rice, canned beans, tomatoes, corn, potatoes, butter. You can make so much with the simplest and cheapest of proteins and starches. Think of the foods of “poverty” and you have what most of the world eats every day.

The Joy of Cooking is a good basic cookbook with sections about various types of foods and techniques.

I would start out by preparing stews of various sorts. Stews, being an amalgam of different ingredients, are very forgiving. A little bit more or less of something is generally not catastrophic.

I do not do baking, but I understand that recipes for baking require a bit of precision. You cannot on whim throw in an extra egg or cup of sugar, or add or subtract a half hour of baking time. If I were to learn to bake, I would get a cookbook and make several different recipes until I got a feel for ingredient ratios and cooking times and temperatures.

It’s interesting, @LostInParadise, what you say about stews. Perhaps they are forgiving, but I have had far more experience with them lately than I have ever had in my life to date. This is because my wife “retired” and is insisting on cooking in order to give me a rest from the duties. I think she cooks stews for the same reason you suggest: they are forgiving.

Well, they may be forgiving, but they also have a strange way of all tasting the same. Which is to say, like slightly overcooked cardboard. In other words, I really, really do not like my wife’s stew dishes, and I have had to try to ban them. She says the kids enjoy them, and while this may be true, it is no excuse. They need to be exposed to more challenging foods if they are to grow up with the ability to appreciate a wide variety of foods.

I would encourage you to challenge yourself, @Jude. Things may go wrong. Indeed, it is likely they will go wrong, but you will learn, and the next time you try that dish, you won’t make the same mistake, presuming you keep notes.

I’ve been making Thanksgiving meals for at least 35 years now. At first it was as an apprentice, but now I run the show and sometimes do the whole thing myself. I do make mistakes, but I know how to cover them over. But that’s not the point.

I’ve kept notes from the times that things did not come out as expected, and what I think should be done differently, and then I’ve done things differently and they came out better. This is what it is like to cook. Things are always changing. You try things different ways. One of the amazing things is that food is rather forgiving. Even with baking. There is a wide latitude in the ratio of the ingredients for most things.

The real talent lies in method. That’s why if you learn a few methods, you can develop a wide repertoire because all you do is change the ingredients a little.

Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food is a very nice, instructive, basic cookbook. I also really like Chez Panisse Vegetables. The best part about both cookbooks is that while some recipes are in a traditional format with exact amounts for each ingredient and so forth, others are simply suggestions for what to use and how to combine them, with suggested variations according to what’s in season and so forth. I’ve learned a lot from cooking from both books!

Cooking shows are fun to watch to get ideas. Watching mom, grandma, siblings, friends & whatnot cook is also helpful because you can watch their techniques and ask about it. experimenting with your favorite foods is always fun. I discovered top ramen, with egg and cheese while on a tight budget (it tastes amazing by the way). && maybe for christmas or a birthday or holiday present you can ask for a cooking class lesson. They have those all over, and they teach you how to cook a few meals. so fun!

I learned from the food channel, never rinse after draining pasta. You lose the starch, which the sauce sticks to.

Tasting is important during the cooking process.

Breakfast may be a great place to start, mac and cheese, veggies

Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. Go for it, drive right in. I went from knowing how to pour Cheerios when I was 17 to what I am today by just being hungry and having no one else being around to cook for me.

Be curious, be hungry. Go for the yummy!

Practice, practice, practice! I like Joy of Cooking for explanations on different techniques, cuts of meat, cooking terms, etc. I also have a Betty Crocker Basics cookbook that has great photos and tips to go with each recipe. It helps to learn proper techniques for measuring and cutting as well as cooking types. If a recipe has a term you are unfamiliar with, you can easily look it up online!

As far as websites go, I like www.allrecipes.com because the user ratings of the recipes are so helpful. If I want to try something new, I look up a recipe there, pick one that has a four or five star ratings, and read a lot of the reviews to see if there are any suggestions or changes that worked for other people. You can also automatically adjust the recipes for how many servings you want. For example, if the recipe says it serves 6 and you only want enough for 4, you don’t have to do that math in your head. I can’t do math in my head.

Also, you don’t need a lot of kitchen gadgets. A regular assortment of pots and pans, a couple of decent knives, a good mixer, maybe a food processor, cutting boards, a meat thermometer, and versatile baking dishes.

Finally, trust your eyes and nose. If a recipe says to bake something for 25 minutes but it looks done to you after only 20, trust yourself. If you’re right, make a note on the recipe for future reference. Ovens, stoves, and even cookware can affect cooking time, so what’s written in the recipe isn’t written in stone. Look for other clues to doneness, like temperature, color, feel, etc. After a while, you become more efficient and learn to trust yourself.

A good place to start is with student cook books. They have cheap simple recipes which are good places to gain basic skills. As you become more skilled and know which flavours go with what then you can start to build on these recipes and make them your own. If they don’t work don’t worry just try something different the next time. I don’t know anyone who has cooked an amazing feast every time they try and cook something new. You do need to see what doesn’t go well sometimes to be able to realise what does! I started cooking with dad and also using student cook books. I still use them for basic ideas or cooking times for certain veg etc. but always add my own twist now I have more confidence.

Box mixes to start with.

It doesn’t hurt to get some advice from people who can cook like a relative, friend or even a tv chef. Experimenting is another way to learn since what many of us thinks tastes good is relative to our own personal preferences. The latter is how I learned. Try practicing making things from recipes from old (or newer) cooking/baking books even if it is something simple at first.

I am the youngest of three girls, so my mom and sisters always shooed me out of the kitchen when they were cooking. I started out with no cooking skills at all. As a 17 or 18-year-old, I started collecting my gran and my mom’s recipes. Getting them to write them down was like pulling teeth. By the time I got my own apartment, I had my recipes from the family and many that I clipped out of ladies magazines and then the fun began. (This was before the internet.) I also got a copy of “The Joy of Cooking” which I would suggest. It is a great book that gives explicit instructions. My mom also couldn’t cook when she got married, and she had the old red and white Betty Crocker Cookbook (which they are selling again after all these years.) It is even more basic, with even more basic instructions. Cooking shows certainly helped me, but not until I was a good cook already. I think the techniques they teach would be a bit advanced for you.

If anyone is interested in purchasing a cookbook that my g/f’s mother wrote, contact me.

Here is the book: Ships of the Great Lakes Cookbook.

I can get it to you for ten dollars plus shipping. :)

Amazon has the reprint of the 1950’s Betty Crocker Cookbook that all of our mother’s learned to cook from. Just search for “betty crocker’s picture cookbook.” It is red and white. If nothing else, you will get a kick out of the 1950’s illustrations.

The best way to learn how to cook is to have someone you know and trust, who is already an experienced cook, to teach you. Find a few people who you think might be willing to help you out and propose to them that you’d like to get together once a week or once a month, whatever works for you and then think up 10 or 12 whole meals or single dishes that you’d like to learn to prepare.

I’m thinking

Macaroni and Cheese

Mashed Potatoes and Gravy

Lasagne

Pot Roast

Fried Chicken

Enchiladas

A Whole Roasted Chicken

Pizza from scratch

A few different soups such as: Minestrone and Fresh Tomato and Navy Bean and Chicken Noodle

Fried Rice

Pancakes and Recipe

Spaghetti and Meatballs

Get yourself at least one good all purpose cookbook. Like How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

Bookmark several cooking terminology pages, so when you are reading a recipe, or watching a cooking show and you’re not sure of a term, you can look it up. Here’s one from Epicurious and here is one by Better Homes and Gardens or get yourself a good book about cooking terms such as Barron’s Cooking Guide Food Lover’s Companion

Start watching cooking shows. Some of the best ones, for beginning cooks, are Rachel Ray (because she doesn’t use tons of ingredients, and she’s very straight foward and easy to listen to and uses basic techniques that can be utilized by most people) Paula Deen is pretty good too (although a lot of her dishes are very rich and fattening and yummy!) but she shows and tells you exactly how to make the dish. Sunny Anderson is also good for newer cooks. She makes some really fantastic stuff, but her descriptions and means of presenting the info are very easy to understand.

I would recommend watching lots of cooking shows, but we aware that some of them will be very intimidating and not quite as helpful for a beginning cook, such as Martha Stewart, Bobby Flay and Emerile Lagasse (but watch anyway, because you’ll be inspired).

Make sure that your teacher (whether it be a relative or a cooking class teacher) teaches you how to use knives properly, and which knives are meant to be used for which items. Using the wrong knife for a job, will make your work a lot harder and if you don’t know how to use knives properly, they can be dangerous. Don’t be intimidated by knives, just make sure you know how to handle them properly. A nicely equipped kitchen will have a big Chef Knife (for everything from chopping veggies, chopping nuts and cubing meat), Carving Knives (for turkey, chicken and roasts) a serrated edged Bread Knife, some Pairing Knives (for removing peels, and cutting cores out of mushrooms and cauliflowers and small chopping tasks) and a Frosting Pallette Knive

Here’s some good info from Consumer Reports on how to choose the best knives for your needs.

I just recalled an old thread in which we all talked about Essenstial Cooking Equipment There’s a lot of good stuff on here.

Make sure your teacher shows you how to properly use measuring equipment. Especially, when you are baking, you need to get the ingredient amounts just right, although with other types of cooking it’s not as necessary, but you still need to know how to use the equipment. Another thing to know is that when you are baking, there is a difference between sifted flour measurements (which means that you will actually sift your flour into a measuring cup, and never tamp it down!) and measuring out a cup of flour and then sifting it into a recipe. The amount of flour will be quite different, so make sure you understand if you need to sift into a measuring cup, or measure out an amount and sift that amount.

Make a point to read a recipe all the way through at least 2 times before you start to cook. You want to make sure that you really understand all of the steps and the timing involved, and that you have all of the ingredients on hand, plus all of the necessary equipment.

Make it easy on yourself and practice setting up your Mise en Place. This is a term that refers to the act of getting all of your items (ingredients and equipment) in place before you start to cook. And put your items out in the order in which you will use them in the recipe. That’s why, when you watch cooking shows on TV, you’ll see the Chefs pouring in the ingredients from little glass bowls, rather than standing there measuring stuff out. That’s because they’ve already measured out each individual ingredient, or done whatever prep they need to do (like chopping onions or cubing meat) and put each of those ingredients in a separate dish, ready to go. You can use all sorts of containers from tupperware, to custard cups to soup bowls for your mise en place containers, but it’s nice to get some items that are used especially for this purpose like These. So instead of measuring your salt and your sugar and your butter and your chopped vegetables and cubed meat right over and into your recipe bowl, measure out all of these things into individual containers and line them up in the order in which they need to be used, along with any utensils and/or pans or bowls that you will be using. Don’t get yourself all worked up because you need to search for something right when your roux comes to a boil.

Now for some basics.

How to Make Hard Boiled Eggs

How to Cook Pasta

Temperatures for Meat and Other Stuff (Note: when cooking meat, you should always use an Instant Read Thermometer. You put the shaft of the thermometer into the deepest part of the meat, without touching the bone, to get a correct reading)

How to Cook Dried Beans

How to Make Roux

So find some willing teachers, pick a recipe, make sure you have all of the correct ingredients and equipment, read through the recipe at least twice, get your mise en place in place, ask lots of questions to make sure that you are very clear about what is happening, don’t be intimidated (it’s just food, and even if it comes out wrong, just dump it and try again until you get it right) Watch lots of cooking shows, start an online file in your favorites and start saving recipes and cooking techniques. Clip and save recipes that you find in magazines or the local paper. Go to an Asian grocery store or to your local Farmer’s Market and check out all of the interesting produce (ask questions about what things are and how to prepare them) engage in conversation with little old ladies in the grocery store about how to cook this or that, ask your friends and relatives what their favorite foods are and if they have any interesting sauces or vegetables or condiments that they’ve used or tried in restaurants, taste new things as often as you can (whether it’s a Brussels sprouts recipe that your cousin made or Tom Kha soup at your local Thai restaurant) then try figure out what’s in the dish. Stock your pantry with all sorts of different types of vinegars (Balsamic, rice wine, red wine, sherry) and some good olive oil and canned tomatoes and beans and dried pasta and dried beans and grains and don’t forget about your spice rack (everybody needs a little bit of cardamom every now and then).

And get yourself one of These

Good luck and have fun!

I still need to practice Mise en Place. I don’t know how many times I’ve ran around looking for someone who had an egg or two I could borrow or had to drop everything and run to the store because I start mixing up ingredients and THEN realize I’m out of something!

Of course, I have learned some great substitutions that way…

@MissAusten I can tell I haven’t done mise en place when I can’t remember if I put the vanilla in yet or not.

One of the hardest things to learn, especially when cooking a full meal is timing. My Mom is the queen of timing. It boggles my mind to imagine how she knows when to put in the turkey, and when to start the potatoes and how long to cook the cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving or Christmas. These are things that she’s made a million times, that she learned from her own mother, so she doesn’t even use recipes for this type of a meal. She only uses recipes when she’s cooking something new, or doing some baking. I can do that with a few of the dishes that I’ve made numerous times, like my macaroni and cheese with pan roasted mushrooms, but with most things I need to use a recipe.

A friend and I were talking a few days ago about wood stoves and how hard it must have been for women, back in the day, to prepare a meal without the benefit of standard temperatures or kitchen timers. Back then you really needed to know how to cook and be able to change things or fix them or substitute other items. I also read something awhile back that the 2nd most common cause of death for women back in the pioneer days, was stove fires, 2nd only to childbirth.

So that would be another thing that I would add to my list. Safety! Know how to position your pot handles on your stove so that you or someone else doesn’t knock them off. Always stay in your kitchen when using the oven or stove, do not leave fire or pots un-attended. Learn how to use knives, properly. Know how much pots and pans, loaded with food or boiling water can weigh, so that when you attempt to take a pot from the oven or the stove, you have the physical strength to lift it. And use good pot holders and oven mitts so that you don’t get burned. Pay attention to loose clothing and long hair and jewelry that can get tangled up or catch on fire if they get too close to your stove flames. And food safety itself. Keep hot foods hot, keep cold foods cold. Don’t let food set out on your counter for more than 2 hours. When you are cooking meat, do not use the cold raw meat juice (from the original package) to pour into a gravy or as use as a marinade. Make sure that you keep your raw meat and meat juices away from your cooked meat and other foods. Use separate platters for raw meat and juices and a new platter for your cooked meat, do not cross contaminate. Before you start cooking, clean your counters with disenfectant spray or Wet Wipes, and again after you are finished cooking. Use separate cutting boards for meat and vegetables. Make sure to wash your cutting boards in the dishwasher. Avoid re-using sponges and dishcloths (I wash the sponges in the dishwasher after each cooking adventure, and use clean dish cloths each time) Have a bottle of hand sanitzer handy, so when you touch your nose or your hair or the lid of the trash can, use a dab of sanitzer before you start touching the food or your utensils again. And make sure that your food, especially meat, seafood and eggs are thoroughly cooked. Pay attention not to touch raw meat and then to touch veggies, wash your hands in between doing this.

Here is some food safety info regarding keeping leftovers in the Fridge and Freezer

Here’s some info on Avoiding Cross Contamination

And more info about how to properly cook food to the correct temperature and how to safely store food and why you should not leave food sitting out for more than 2 hours. Here

Once you get used to these safety guidelines, they will become second nature to you.

@janbb The other day I was measuring flour for bread, one cup at a time. As always, my mind wandered and then I realized I didn’t know if I’d put in three cups or four. Some of my cookbooks have little checkmarks in pencil next to recipes where I’ve given myself actual reminders of how many times I did a certain step so I wouldn’t lose track!

@MissAusten I know, I know!

@MissAusten One trick I did learn, at least about adding wet ingredients to flour, like vanilla, is to put each spoonful in a slightly different area in the pile of flour, so you can actually see the number of puddles you put in there. That won’t work too well for putting flour in a bowl, though : (

@Kardamom Good idea and no links!

Cooking class.