Hey, Man. Learn How To Cook

How to learn to cook for you and your family without going to class or watching a bunch of YouTube videos. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Learning to Cook

A stolen Threads thread where I go over their word count thing. (Don’t worry. It was mine.)

1. Get the Allrecipes recipe of the thing or flip through for ideas.
2. Make the recipe. Find it a little bit wanting (or not).
3. Find a recipe that takes it up one notch. Bechamel sauce instead of some alfredo or ricotta thing, for example.
4. Make that recipe. Enjoy. But, wonder if there is more.
5. Find the fancy recipe from that fancy recipe/chef book.
6. Spend hours making it.
7. Realize it’s barely better than your middle tier recipe.
8. Tweak the middle tier recipe.

Get Gooder

Repeat until you can look at recipes and know where the value adds are versus the time wasters that just suck up hours so they can say it’s homemade, or special to that chef or cookbook.

Then combine recipes until you hit the sweet spot. Cherry sauce recipe from one book with duck breast recipe from another.

Tips:

• You can always skip coriander, and no one will ever know.
• Just leave the peas and corn out of stuff. They suck and add no flavor.
• Don’t skip onion. If you don’t like onion, food process the hell out of it. You usually do need its flavor.
• Always grate parmesan cheese from a block no matter what the recipe says. It’s better and you can really tell.
• Except for saffron don’t buy expensive or one-use spices until you know you will need them for more than one recipe. (Saffron is worth it)
• Give fish oil a chance. It smells like ass, but it adds so much flavor and that smell goes away.
• Tamari sauce is the same as soy sauce except you can add tons of it without making your food too salty.
• Get the low sodium Landry’s Seasoning Salt so you can use more. Salt is easy and cheap; you want the “other stuff” from your seasonings.
• Any recipe with the word “crack” in title was a Midwest housewife recipe from the 80s/90s. They mean “addictive” (it isn’t). Ranch dressing flavor is what makes it addictive. Seriously.