You Shouldn't be Intimidated to be a Home Cook

Do you find yourself loading up your grocery cart every week with frozen dinners, boxed mac and cheese, and pre-made meals? Often find yourself eating the same two pasta dishes over and over, because it’s easy to cook and you don’t feel like you have any skills in the kitchen?

It’s becoming easier and easier these days to rely on ready-made meals when you feel like you don’t know your way around a kitchen. Even the rise of professional cooking videos creeping up all over the internet has made cooking look like an intimidating art style that can only be achieved by years of culinary school and a restaurant-quality kitchen in your own home.

That’s really not the case.

Finding inspiration from those high-quality videos and experienced chefs is actually a great way to learn how to make delicious meals for yourself at home. Even if you can’t find all the ingredients or don’t have all the tools that they’re using, you can usually make something just as incredible with what you have that leaves you infinitely more satisfied than a frozen pizza.

But what if I don’t have time?

You have more time than you think. You don’t have to carve out time for self-care later in the evening if you instead choose to spend half-an hour cooking a stir fry instead.

The process of preparing vegetables, putting things together, and ending up with something satisfying both for your tastebuds and for your eyes can leave feeling so good about yourself you don’t need to do anything else that day.

But how do I learn the skills?

The great thing about home cooking is that you don’t actually need a lot of skill, and whatever you do need can be learned pretty easily.

Take knife skills for example. You probably don’t need to know the technical terms the pros use or how to make fancy slice patterns in your fruits; but what you do need to know can be learned quickly and easily from any number of videos on YouTube.

Even if you don’t want to take that kind of time, one of the best knife skills you can have in your toolkit is simply the knowledge that you should cut things to be similar in size so they cook evenly, and the size you cut them should just be based off of how big of bites you want to take.

Beyond that, any other skills are complementary.

But what if I don’t know any recipes?

Good news - you don’t have to know any. You don’t have to know anything about anything to follow along with a simple recipe you find off a Google search.

If nothing is coming up in a search engine that’s sounding good, try thinking back to what you ate as a kid. What was your favorite thing your parents made? Or maybe, is there something you used to eat at your favorite restaurant all the time?

Try looking for a similar recipe, or calling up a relative to see if they can share their secrets with you. Hell, you can even scroll through Instagram and find a picture of something that looks yummy, pick up the ingredients you see, and try to throw something together. If you're not sure of a good way to put them all together, look up an existing recipe with similar ingredients and riff off of that.

But what if I mess up every recipe I try?

There are two secret ingredients: patience and intuition. Don’t ever take any shortcuts in a recipe if you haven’t tested them out before, and trust your gut if something feels wrong.

For example, if a recipe says to put your cake in the oven for 30-40 minutes, but after 40 minutes it still looks gooey? Keep that thing in there, you know it’s not done. Trust your gut, be patient, and take that thing out when you don’t have to question anything about it anymore.

Home cooking is an achievable skill.

A dish I find myself returning to whenever I feel stumped in the kitchen is a simple chicken and rice soup. The first time I made it, I was intimidated that I would mess up the rice and end up with a crunchy bowl of slop instead of a comforting bowl of soup. With careful attention to the recipe and some trust in myself though, I found it was easier than ever to whip up a pot.

The best part is, the recipe is completely customizable to whatever you happen to have in your kitchen. Any veggie can be swapped out for the sweet potatoes as long as they’re a similar density (carrots, celery, potatoes, etc), the herbs can be swapped with whatever you have in your garden, and if ginger and garlic aren’t your thing, leave one or both out. I also like to swap the water for a good quality bone broth from the grocery store.

Apply this customization technique (see, you've learned a technique now!) to any simple recipe and you could be cooking a different dinner every day with very little effort.

And if you do mess something up?

That’s great! Now you’ve learned something about yourself and the food you’re working with. Keep practicing, and next time you’re going to know exactly what, or whatnot, to do. You’ll be a certified home cook in absolutely no time at all.