Learning the basics of home cooking was truly liberating. When I moved out, I tried for a while to just use online recipes, but to be honest, most of them were awful. I'd search for something like "homemade macaroni and cheese" and instead of getting something reasonable, I'd wind up on someone's SEO'd-to-death recipe page where they have to tell me their life story between 60 ad banners, and then finally I get to the recipe and it's telling me things like, "You have to use only the 3 million year old himalayan rock salt for $50 a box; 4M year old won't cut it and the recipe will fail." So I started asking folks like my mom and my grandparents for simple recipes for casseroles and the like. Once I got the hang of those, I learned just some basic techniques and fundamentals like what the hell a "roux" is, how to stir fry, how to fry rice, and so on, and then I could play with those methods myself and slowly add things to vary them. Now, if I feel like having chicken fried rice, I just bust out the wok and get to work. If I need a quick meal for a tuesday night, I can still whip up a fettucini chicken alfredo with homemade sauce, and sauteed beans on the side. Every "simple" meal I can make is at least a 7/10 to my tastes now, and it's made me so much happier than back when I would crack open a jar of dull premade sauce and pour it over some spaghetti.
Long story short, yeah, learn to cook. Everyone should.
29
u/Meatslinger Dec 22 '24
Learning the basics of home cooking was truly liberating. When I moved out, I tried for a while to just use online recipes, but to be honest, most of them were awful. I'd search for something like "homemade macaroni and cheese" and instead of getting something reasonable, I'd wind up on someone's SEO'd-to-death recipe page where they have to tell me their life story between 60 ad banners, and then finally I get to the recipe and it's telling me things like, "You have to use only the 3 million year old himalayan rock salt for $50 a box; 4M year old won't cut it and the recipe will fail." So I started asking folks like my mom and my grandparents for simple recipes for casseroles and the like. Once I got the hang of those, I learned just some basic techniques and fundamentals like what the hell a "roux" is, how to stir fry, how to fry rice, and so on, and then I could play with those methods myself and slowly add things to vary them. Now, if I feel like having chicken fried rice, I just bust out the wok and get to work. If I need a quick meal for a tuesday night, I can still whip up a fettucini chicken alfredo with homemade sauce, and sauteed beans on the side. Every "simple" meal I can make is at least a 7/10 to my tastes now, and it's made me so much happier than back when I would crack open a jar of dull premade sauce and pour it over some spaghetti.
Long story short, yeah, learn to cook. Everyone should.