A howdy hello to everyone,

Getting older has made me realize the deficits in my cooking skills. I was a very picky eater growing up, and started to widen my palate so that I wouldn’t be condemned to eating some form of bread with cheese for my entire life. I love fruits and vegetables, so there’s no problem here. Grains are a bit difficult because of their texture.

I am completely dogshit at cooking. Whenever I try a new recipe, I either burn or undercook the food, resulting in about an hour wasted of poor planning.

This may involve walking back and forth around the kitchen getting ingredients as needed, forgetting to do a step, or forgetting an ingredient that is sitting on the counter away from me.

My motor skills are sometimes clumsy with cutting, so oftentimes the vegetables and fruit are cut too thick, or not to the point where the recipe expects them. When I made aloo gobi, my cauliflower was too large, the potatoes were undercooked, and the other veggies were just a pile of slop. Sometimes other dishes will not be entirely cooked and other parts will be burnt.

Oftentimes I might hate the taste of what I’ve made, so ultimately I will act to not eat anything because I don’t want to waste money cooking then going out. I have been working out and live a much more active lifestyle compared to how sedentary I was in university. Walking around 10 hours a day has made me truly realize the feeling of hunger. An emotion I normally never felt due to stomach problems and perpetual nausea.

I am very good at cooking breakfast foods, but do not want to eat French toast or Pancakes every single day. I’d like to add a broader spectrum to my breakfasts as well, as it is a quite small subset. I tried learning the cookiebookie latex package to write a cookbook as I went, but I gave up on trying to get it working. Formatting documents is an entirely different post.

This is turning into a rant, but for those of you whose special interests are cooking and who have found a spectrum of foods that are nutritious and filling, what advice would you have for me? What cookware do you recommend? Is there a set of recipes you think would be good to introduce cooking techniques? My end goal would be to cook with mostly anything I have on hand to turn it into something delicious and nutritious. Protein rich meals, vitamins, minerals, calories, etc.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    3·
    3 months ago

    Hmm, sounds like you’re maybe aiming a bit too high, with how many ingredients are involved. Like, yeah, it’s good to eventually get there, because it’s nutritious and yummy, but they add quite a bit of complexity in preparation and then getting everything cooked to the same degree.

    I cook a lot, but if more than a handful of ingredients are involved, I need to prepare all of them and put them into little bowls before I even think about turning on the stove.
    And then, yeah, as was already suggested, cooking them separately (microwave or otherwise) and then just combining them at the end, that will also help with not having things overcooked or undercooked.

    But yeah, when I say I cook a lot, most of the time it’s noodles with tomato sauce two or three ingredients + varying spices.
    Maybe you can find some simple recipes you like to eat+make regularly, then try playing around with those recipes (e.g. swap out an ingredient, try out different spices) and every so often you tackle a bigger recipe.

    I guess, maybe you could also pick out a complex recipe you want to make and then try to cook simple meals which involve a subset of the ingredients, so you can get some experience with that ingredient…