this recipe is one of my favourite things to eat. it’s am gonna break it down into phases for you, so it’s not so difficult at first.

first time around, just fry 500 grams of ground beef until nice and brown. while it’s cooking, make this sauce :

1/4 cup low sodium soy sauce 4 cloves garlic finely minced or grated 1 tablespoon sesame oil 2 tablespoons brown sugar 1 tablespoon rice vinegar 1 tablespoon ginger root grated 1 teaspoon chili garlic sauce (sambal olek)

once the beef has finished cooking, add the sauce to the pan, and cook for a minute or two. serve it over rice.

if you like that recipe, then you can make it fancier and tastier.

this time, you want to first chop up an onion, and cook that until translucent. when you first put the beef in the pan, chop up some baby bok choy, (or something similar), into strips. wash it. then when the beef is almost finished cooking, add the bok choy to the pan. cook until it starts to wilt. (usually my pan is very full from the bok choy, but don’t worry… it will decrease in size as it cooks).

once the bok choy has wilted, add the sauce like before, and cook for 1-2 minutes, and serve over rice.

next time you make the recipe :

before you start cooking, get a carrot, and shred it. place it in a bowl, and add 1 Tbsp rice vinegar 1/2 tsp sugar pinch of salt mix that up, and leave to sit while you do the rest of the recipe. congrats - you just made ‘quick pickled carrots’ which sounds fancy when you tell people.

make the rest of the recipe as before, but this time, also cut up some green onions, so that when you’ve finished cooking, you add rice to the bowl, put the ground beef on top of that, then add your shredded carrot, and sprinkle some green onions on top. now you have a fancy presentation, and even more flavour!

the ultimate version of this :

do all the cooking and prep mentioned above, but this time also dice up some cucumber. you will also need a few extra garnishes here : sesame seeds, Kewpie mayo, sriracha, crispy fried onions, and crunchy fried garlic.

this time you are going to plate everything in separate piles. rice, beef, cucumber, carrots, and green onions. then you want to drizzle really thin lines of Kewpie back and forth, across the whole dish. then rotate the plate/bowl 90 degrees, and do the same with sriracha, being careful here, if you don’t want too much heat. then sprinkle the sesame seeds, fried garlic and fried onions over everything. congrats - you have now made a restuarant-worthy and trendy Korean Beef Bowl!!!

feel free to ask questions, because i think there’s a huge chance that i didn’t explain this very well. good luck on your culinary journey!

America’s Test Kitchen. Super great information and taught in a way that doesn’t require specialized tools. It’s PBS so no sponsorships or anything. Lan Lam is my favorite. They have full episodes on YouTube as well.

https://youtube.com/@americastestkitchen

Also, use this for recipes. It’s open source and free. Also you can use their import tool to scrape recipes of ATK workout paying. I do recommend supporting them, but sometimes you don’t have the money. The app looks real cool for atk.

RecipeSage:
https://recipesage.com/
You can even “add it to your phone’s desktop” and it will behave like an app. :⁠-⁠)

Soup is the garbage disposal for your fridge. As long as it’s not actively rotting, throw it in a pot and boil in for two hours, it will taste pretty good. The more different things you add, the better it tastes.

Any time you eat meat, keep the scraps/fat bits/bones, stick them in a container in your freezer. Toss that in the soup pot.

It’s old, but I taught myself to cook watching Good Eats. His stuff isn’t always the best, and some of his methods are out of date now. He makes you understand what you are doing though, not just showing recipes.

I’m re-watching through with my kiddo now as he learns to cook and it still holds up. He’s in middle school and just started a home cooking class and has been cooking circles around his classmates.

Yooooo this community slaps, what is going on? Literally every post a useful piece of advice. You rock!

My top three resources for cooking:

Alton Brown. I’ve been a fan of his for over 20 years at this point. He used to make cooking shows for the Food Network, but has been making YouTube videos that are, IMO, his best work yet. He’s like the Bill Nye of cooking. Each episode is a deep dive into a topic, with explanations of the science and history behind the steps of the recipe.

J. Kenji López-Alt. He’s behind Serious Eats and has a YouTube channel. Serious Eats in particular prefaces their recipes not with filler stories like some sites, but detailed explanations of the decisions they made for the recipe, and often different options you can take. When I want to cook something new, I will usually look for a bunch of recipes from different sources to get a feel for what they have in common and how they differ. If there’s an article on Serious Eats, especially by Kenji, I can probably just stop there.

Brian Lagerstrom. These are the most conventional cooking videos on the list, but he’s also THE most directly practical cook on this list. By that I mean, there have been more occasions where I’ve seen him make a recipe, decided to try it out, and actually done it fairly soon after with success. The recipes are very well-explained, and sometimes even shows you why you should do things a certain way by showing you what happens if you don’t. Every food presenter will workshop recipes, but it’s rare that they show you the failed versions to teach you something!

All of these are great for explaining the process of cooking. It’s one thing to just copy a recipe, but understanding the why behind it is so much more useful to teaching you how to cook in general. That helps you build overall skills, and develop the ability to modify recipes, improvise, and maybe even develop your own recipes.

I’ll also second Chef John and Babish. When I go looking for a specific recipe, they’re names I look out for and know have good information. I also quite like Adam Ragusea, but he is the reason I installed SponsorBlock. (He’s gotten much better, but there was a particularly annoying period where he was REALLY chasing ad dollars. Can’t really blame him, he has a family and wanted to make a career of the channel, and did.)

Best of luck! Cooking can be fun, and such a good skill to have. :)

Honestly most home cooking is not very hard. You do need to be taught a few basic concepts, like how to chop vegetables, what different cooking methods like frying/sautéing/baking/roasting/etc refer to, but once you have the basic concepts down, you can do the majority of recipes you find online.

For learning the basics, there are quite a few cookbooks aimed at complete beginners. I was staying with a friend and rifling through her cookbooks—she had one aimed at students that spent time explaining all the basic cooking concepts at the start of the book before you get to the recipes.

Where the skill comes in is stopping following recipes and being able to come up with a dish that tastes good. It takes a while to learn good flavour combinations, when’s the right time to add an ingredient, how exactly to cook each ingredient, etc. But I would say a beginner can follow the majority of recipes I see shared around online. Just look for recipes that sound like something you actually want to eat. Read the instructions to check they don’t sound too hard, and then go for it. Good luck, and enjoy your cooking journey!

You might be tempted to go buy a bunch of equipment but you can get really far with the basics once you’ve learned good technique:

• a decent paring knife and 10" chef’s knife (Victorinox fibrox are decent quality and not too expensive as knives go)
• an end grain wood cutting board
• a medium sauce pan
• one or two sheet pans
• one 8" or 10" stainless steel skillet
• a spatula and some wooden spoons
• a pair of tongs
• stackable measuring cups and spoons

That will get you very far. If you find you’re enjoying cooking and want to improve your kit, you can add things as you need them (whisk, masher, boning knife, stock pot, etc.). Try to avoid buying unitaskers. You can mince garlic with a knife, so unless you’re mincing a ton of garlic, a garlic press is probably not a good investment because it only does one thing.

There are a ton of video tutorials for learning knife skills online but if you want something printed, Henkels has a Complete Book of Knife Skills that I’ve found very useful.

You’ll want to keep your knives sharp. You can learn to do it yourself with a double sided 400/1000 water stone and a video tutorial. A ceramic pull through sharpener will do in a pinch but they’re pretty hard on the knives. Metal pull through sharpeners will destroy the edges of your knives, so don’t buy one of those. Also don’t use anything motorized because the heat can damage the heat treat and wreck your knife.

You will read on the Internet that cast iron is the One True Material for skillets and frying pans. People who say this are in a cult. Cast iron pans are great for searing because they retain a lot of heat but stainless clad aluminum will give you better control and more even heating, Teflon will give you better non-stick performance, etc. Personally, I reach for my stainless steel skillet most often, which is why I recommended it above. You may also read that you should never wash cast iron with soap because it will ruin the seasoning. This is bunk. The seasoning is chemically bonded to the surface and you can’t scrub it away unless you’re physically removing material with hard abrasives or caustic chemicals. Soap and a scrubby will not hurt your pan. Do thoroughly dry anything cast iron after you wash it, as it will rust if you don’t.

There is probably a restaurant supply in your area and they are probably open to the public. That’s a great place to get things like skillets, sheet pans, racks, ramekins, tongs, etc.

Pick up (or borrow from the library) a cookbook that teaches cooking technique through recipes. These are some of my favourites:

• Ruhlmann’s Twenty - Michael Ruhlmann
• The Food Lab - J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
• Salt Fat Acid Heat - Samin Nosrat

It’s nice to see people taking an interest into new stuff, especially their food! Not every meal can (nor should) be a gourmet meal, but there are many easy and cheap options. I see many suggestions regarding rice and stews, both great base options, but might I recommend soups! I also highly recommend getting a hand blender to easily make good and nice-tasting soups (or smoothies in the summer :) ).

I’ll even throw in an easy recipe:

• 1kg tomatoes
• 1 zucchini/courgette
• 1 bell pepper or sweet pepper
• 2 onions
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1L of bouillon (water + bouillon cubes is the easiest)
• cooking oil (pref. olive oil) Optional additional spices:
• basil
• oregano
• sage
• thyme

Dice the onions and mince the garlic (or chop it finely). Cut the tomatoes, zucchini, and pepper into small pieces. Bake the onions, garlic, and bell pepper in some cooking oil on low-medium heat until the onions start to brown. Add the tomatoes and zucchini. Put the lid on the pot and leave for 5-10 minutes. If the tomatoes are soft and the skin starts to come loose, they’re good for the next step. Add the bouillon and any other optional spices and bring to a simmer. Boil for at least 30 minutes, but longer is perfectly fine. Blend the soup - be aware that it’s hot, so wear long sleeves and oven mitts. Serve immediately or keep it for a day to let the flavours set.

This is a great base soup that you can tweak as much as you like. Want a sweeter soup? Swap the pepper for some carrots or pumpkin! Want a more acidic and fresh taste? Add some white wine vinegar. You can also add some chickpeas or meatballs and vermicelli after blending if you want a more filling soup. Be sure to boil the soup for some time after blending in that case.

Here is a killer recipe:

two boxes of kraft shells and cheese.

one can of peas

one can of tuna

Cook the shells and cheese, drain, and immediately add the tuna and peas, and just stir in the “cheese” and keep it on low, warm, about level three on the dial.

Now, if you want to get “kraftier”, you can cook mixed frozen veggies in a separate pot instead of canned peas, which is much healthier. I add black pepper and sriracha to it, but don’t bother with salt because those damn cheese packets have you covered.

The meal feeds 2-3, reheats well, and takes less than 15 minutes.

I will also use ramen noodle packs, leave out the spice pack, use either spaghetti sauce or curry, add veggies: almost the same jam when it comes to prep. You can hodge-podge this. Usually I use to packets of noodles for myself, but it is way faster and cheaper than spaghetti noodles.

So, this one requires a casserole dish. Man, so easy: easy as cake!!!

1 can 15.25 ounces drained whole kernel corn

1 can 14.75 ounces creamed corn

1 8.25 jiffy cornbread mix

1 egg

2 tbsp butter

1/4 tsp garlic powder

1/4 paprika, but for extra spice punch, use sriracha instead

Mix this all into a bowl and dump it into 11x7x2 greases dish. Bake uncovered at 400 for about 25 to 30 min, test the consistency like you would a cake with a fork, the corners should brown. Double the recipe for thanksgiving. I like mine spicy, so use sriracha.

Loved this as a side for chili.

You may want to think about a progression plan. Since you’re already putting together pasta and sauce you have a great base to start expanding from.

Stage 1: Start by just fine-tuning that recipe. Add a little salt, boil the pasta for a minute less, adjust the amount of sauce. Stick with the version that tastes the best to you. Consider writing that down.

Stage 2: Add pre-made ingredients. Parmesan cheese is obvious. Try different cheeses.

Stage 3: Prep your own additions. Fry up some meat or vegetable, chop it up, and toss it in your sauce. Try other additions.

Stage 4: DIY sauce. Pick your favorite sauce and imitate it.

Advanced: DIY pasta. 3 ingredients; eggs, flour, salt. The hard part is rolling it. If you don’t have a pasta maker, you need a rolling pin and you’re getting a workout.

Congrats! Cooking can be very rewarding. I have a few pieces of advice; they may only be useful to you later, but when the time comes that they’ll be helpful, they’ll still be here.

• Online recipes always skimp on the sauce. Don’t be afraid to 1.5x or even 2x the amount you make if the recipe doesn’t make enough. Spices (except salt) are also a fun place to experiment with adding a little extra amount.
• Premade stuff is fine, even now that I don’t strictly follow recipes I use plenty of jarred sauces, spice mixes sometimes, refrigerated chicken slices (it’s more expensive, but I don’t like raw chicken), frozen/canned ingredients, etc. If you want to make something ambitious but don’t have time to do something long, hard, or complex, premade stuff that’s not too expensive can let you make recipes that are otherwise out of your reach.
• Most cooking reuses the same skills you’ll learn as you make other recipes. Cooking pasta for spaghetti teaches you how to make it for most pasta dishes. Chopping veggies is a skill transferable to like every recipe ever. Rice is easier than you may think and unlocks a whole category of delicious foods. Just keep at it and before long you’ll know way more than you expect just from doing similar steps in previous recipes. Knowing these common patterns in the ingredients and techniques used to cook different recipes is how people eventually learn how to improvise, which is always fun.
• Cooking is art, baking is science. Throwing in extra ingredients in a dinner recipe is a great way to express your personal tastes. Messing with ratios in a baking recipe is much more dangerous.

Most importantly, I hope you have fun and enjoy the fruits of your labor!

Chef John (FoodWishes) and Alton Brown on youtube are good resources. Chef John makes a lot of relatively simple homey-meals. Things you could take to a picnic, or serve at thanksgiving: potatoes au gratin, casseroles, that sort of thing. His oleo-saccharum lemonade is a winner. Alton brown is more of a food nerd. He often makes nostalgic things and always tries to elevate whatever he cooks to perfection.

I recommend starting with soup. It’s extraordinarily versatile and you can make large batches if you’ve got food storage (or hell, sometimes I just stick the whole pot in the fridge and dip in the ladle as-needed. does tie up the pot though.). Soup is an excellent way to use up many leftovers; fried rice is a good ‘refrigerator magnet’ too.

Fellow non-cook that sometimes dabbles here: my favorite easy food prep is a pack of ramen, then add a whole bunch of stuff I like. I cook this according to the directions on the packet, but while it’s boiling I’ll add a teaspoon of my favorite hot sauce, some smoked tofu, maybe some kimchi, corn, beans, and/or whatever I’m in the mood for.

Don’t be afraid to cut corners or make easy “cheat” dishes when you start out. Not everything has to be from scratch or top quality or take you all day to make. I’ve made recipes as hard as beef wellington and I’ve made microwave bean nachos and both hit in the right context. There’s a lot of pomposity in cooking and it’s good in its place, but at the end of the day its just something we do for fun. Don’t forget to have fun when you cook!

My favorite Youtuber is Binging with Babish, others will probably mention him; he is getting very popular in recent years. He is a lot of fun, wholesome, down to earth and the man can cook.

My favorite cookbook is The Flavor Matrix by James Briscione; it talks abot food synergy, pairings and a bit of food science. Overall a good intermediate read.

My favorite recipe is Babish’s level 10 cookies, which is my favorite dessert of all time.

My favorite dish is Bucatini Carbonara, a Central Italian pasta dish made with eggs, cheese, and pancetta or guanciale. Authentic carbonara is a true delight, but (don’t tell the Italians) you can make an easy version with bacon and onions that is pretty dang good.