Get yourself a slow cooker. You can make crazy easy and tasty stuff with one. Most recipes just involve chopping up some ingredients and throwing them in the pot to cook for 8hrs.

I cannot express how much a rice cooker and an air fryer make things so much easier.

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. :)

Smoked paprika is a very nice spice.

If you have cats, they will be on the counters. Wash everything before cooking anything. Even if you don’t, probably still should.

Sometimes experiments taste bad. This is okay. We learn yes yes.

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.

If you ever start watching YouTube tutorials around cooking, there’s a reason Binging With Banish is a huge name.

Between ingredient cost, recipe difficulty, taste and the product actually coming out right, I’ve always found him super reliable.

But a huge part of cooking doesn’t come from recipes, it comes from experimentation. Learning how to make a simple pasta sauce from tinned tomatoes and other things is a useful step, because 90% of the ingredients last a while, so you only need to buy a few cheap bits, and can control the flavour yourself to find out what you like.

It’s worth noting that eating at home can still easily become accidentally expensive. Pasta and pasta sauce is a reliable way to keep prices low when cooking, but once you’re cooking with 20 ingredients, it can creep up quickly, although most of these can last weeks, if not months, so you only need to buy them once in a while.

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.

The instant pot pressure cooker is extremely underrated. It can replace a rice cooker and can also make things like chicken tacos, baked/mashed potatoes, hard boiled eggs, oatmeal, and can slow cook in a pinch. Plus it cuts cooking time in half.

Stock up on spices. Depending on the cuisine of yoir choice. I find that pepper and salt are a must have. Paprika, Oregano, Thyme, Basil and Nutmeg are my go-to’s.

Maybe you could try making the pasta sauce next. It is pretty simple actually: Take your protein (like ground beef) and fry it in a pan, season with salt pepper (and paprika if you are fancy).

While it’s doing that, dice some onions. Once the protein is done, take it out of the pan and add the onions. Lower the heat and gently fry them until they turn glassy. Their moisture will also loosen the residue the meat left in the pan, which is full of flavour.

While onions are cooking peel some carrots and shred them. Once the onions are done, add the carrots, and the meat back together.

Add tomate puree from a can, season with i.e: oregano, thyme, rosemary, basil. Paprika is crucial in my opinion as it gives the sauce some extra depth. Fresh parsely is also very nice. I find it elevates a very basic dish to something quite good :3

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.

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!

Just a broad commentary on both recipes and seasoning. My mother refuses to cook anything without a recipe that she strictly follows, even if it’s something she’s been making for decades. I’m on the other side of that and will rarely make actual recipes and instead read a few similar ones to draw from similarities and just wing it. I also don’t measure any spices because it’s all based on taste instead.

Neither approach is inherently good or bad, just enjoy it.

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

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!