Cooking from scratch

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Help! I know I need to up my cooking game but I'm struggling a lot. Everyone I know seems to be cooking from scratch but delving deeper, that seems to differ between people! Some think a jar of sauce and pasta is cooking from scratch, others would say making the sauce and others would include making the pasta.

At the moment we eat a lot of beans of toast, scrambled egg on toast, jacket potatoes and fillings, pasta and jars. It doesn't help that I've struggled with food a lot and don't like onions, peppers, mushrooms, leeks or cabbage.

I want to be a better provider for my children, what are some easy meals I can start introducing that are healthy but not difficult?

Have you tried Gousto? I love to cook but I hate looking for ideas, meal planning and shopping. I’ve got a discount code to get the first box 60% off if you’re interested?

Once you’ve got a decent base of food going (like chicken, potatoes and veggies) you can cook them the same way with different spices.

I do a roast chicken, potatoes and veg with English herbs, soy garlic, honey garlic and cumin coriander. Same cooking style, different flavours.
Also if you get an instant pot you can bung all of it in and place the veggie on the steamer on top for a lovely meal

*sorry each of those condiments are 4 different flavours! Also not sure if condiment is the right word

BBC Good Food have tonnes of easy recipes on their website.

Check out Jamie Oliver’s ministry of food cookbook- Lots of family friendly recipes that are for beginners. The books quite old now so you can get it cheap on Amazon- it was an amazing starting point for me in learning to cook meals for my family

Hugh Fearnley Whittengstalls Every day cook book is easy to follow or have a look at pinterest.
I tend to have a list of easy meals stuck to the fridge, things like sausage and mash, get good quality sausages and add some veg, frozen is fine
homemade pizza with lots of veg, I use the scone base recipe from the Bero book or hugh foccacia recipe
Wraps, I just buy a kit, if you don't like peppers use something like baby sweetcorn instead.
Pasta bake, ham, sweetcorn, peas, cheese whitesauce,
Boiled potatoes, some veg, and meat such as pork chops
roast in the bag chicken with veg and potatoes
Burger, usually veggie in a bun with onion rings, salad, mushrooms
Risotto I do smoked fish but abc food has loads of recipes.
Sausage and baked bean pie
shepherds pie
basically I cycle fairly similar meals on a roughly 3 week menu, we are not particularly adventurous!
Once you get going its get a lot easier

I would look on BBC Good Food. Absolutely loads of good recipes and you can check the comments to make sure they're easy.

I would try and learn how to make a stew (if you don't like onions simply leave them out or use finely chopped carrots instead).

Also learn a basic spag boll. Leaving out onions if you don't like them. Once you can do that you'll be able to make a chilli, shepherds pie very easily.

The easiest meal I do, that my ds loves.....

Slice the tops off some red & yellow peppers. Cut out the seedy core.

Mix some sausage meat with some chopped garlic & parsley (or cut the skins off some sausages and use them instead), and pack the meat mix inside the peppers. Put the peppers in an oven dish and put the tops back on the peppers. Cook at 180 degrees for 30 mins.

Put a pre-frozen garlic baguette in the oven too and wait another 10 mins, then serve together.

Sweetly delicious. Takes 5 minutes to prepare and counts as one of their five a day.

Learn to make basic things like a decent tomato sauce and a decent white/cheese sauce.

You can then use those sauces in different things

Pasta, lasagne, meatballs, as a sauce for grilled salmon or chicken.

A cheese sauce can be used for macaroni cheese, cauliflower cheese, to put into a pie with fish .

Find out how to cook versatile vegetables. Potatoes can be boiled, mashed, baked. Cook extra so with left over potatoes you can make potato salad or pie topping. Lots of vegetables can be roasted. You can stir fry them, steam them.

Teach yourself a couple of basic stews, say a chicken and a beef one. The basics are the same, brown off the vegetables, seal the meat, add a liquid, cook slowly.

It’s honestly not hard, if you can read , watch YouTube videos and have have managed to rear children without damaging them then you have the skills to cook.

Make sure you have decent sharp knives, clear a space to work in, read recipes all the way through and get everything you need ready before you start it makes all the difference!

How many are you cooking for?

I totally agree with viques for learning basic sauces. Once you know them, it's quite easy to make different dish with different ingredients.
Also once you know the basic stew/curry recipes, you can create lots of different dishes too.
Now it's so easy to find any recipe on the internet.

I make a pasta sauce for my children which they like
Roast these with olive oil, anchovies and garlic then blend to smooth the sauce for the pasta
Red peppers
Red onions
Courgette
Ripe tomatoes
Carrots

Give it a try

I like nosh for busy mums and dads.

I'm surprised at how many replies have included onions and peppers in their replies- when you already said you can't/don't eat them!!!

I find things like savoury traybakes and pasta bakes are the easiest- because you shove it all in 1 pan and bake. No need for multiple pans and pots!

BBC food also have many tutorials of the basics
www.bbcgoodfood.com/videos

Totally admire your aspiration to up your cooking game, OP, and I hope it goes well.

I just wanted to comment on this odd phrase 'cooking from scratch'. Years ago it meant something. It meant doing relatively extreme things like making your own pasta, or digging up the horseradish in your garden to make your own horseradish sauce. Now it just seems to mean ... cooking, ie doing something more than heating up a ready meal or unscrewing a jar. It depresses the hell out of me.

My go to’s when i want a home cooked meal with no fuss are a piece of salmon or other fish either pan fried or foil wrapped and baked with some sort of seasoning, chipotle is a favourite, as is plain with a bit of lemon and dill, bbq seasoning from supermarket shelf, any other seasoning mix i have in or just sweet chilli sauce, same with chicken thighs then i serve with rice, salad or veg and new potatoes. Meatballs with a sauce made of blitzed up tin of tomatoes, garlic, jar of drained red peppers and basil onion black pepper and a dash of soy sauce, a tin of butterbeans or cannelloni beans and served with spaghetti.

Oops sorry about the added onion and peppers 😳

You can substitute the meatballs for sausages too.

Thank you so much! For the ideas and tips and also for not laughing at me!

I'm cooking for four; a husband who eats everything and lots of it, a four year old who survives on grapes and fresh air and a one year old who is in the will give anything a go stage! Plus myself obv

I think the whole cooking from scratch idea at least on here leads to competitive posting!

In the end for most people lots of things are used rather than made from scratch. Bread, sausages etc. And who grinds their own flour?!

So put that to one side. Whether something counts as 'from scratch' or not.

What can/ can't you do? How much of a newby?

Scrambled egg/ omlette?
Roast a joint?
Mash?
Jacket spuds?

Iyswim

I think even those of us who mostly cook from scratch will have meals that are based around bought in dishes. It's a spectrum in the end. Almost nobody does their own baked beans or makes their own sausages. I don't suppose we've done home made pies since we've had kids and we've never made our own chicken kievs.

I don't remember the days when cooking from scratch meant making your own sugar from raw sugar beet.

Get a decent “one pot” cook book, preferably an “easy one pot cooking” one, or else google.

Then master one curry recipe, one stew, one casserole, a chilli and bolognese. Make at least a couple of those veggie versions.

Always make double quantities and freeze the extra for days when you don’t have time or CBA.

Once you’ve tried a few, found your favourites, and cooked them a handful of times, you will know them backwards and have a stocked freezer.

Then it’s easy to do fish or a roast once a week (Sunday in this house) and try a new recipe once a week (Saturday).

You don't have to cook everything from scratch but I do think if you can make simple dishes like Bolognese, chilli con carne, shepherd's/cottage pie without the need for a jar of sauce or a Coleman's packet mix then you're doing well. You're allowed to use tinned chopped tomatoes, that in my book still counts as cooking from scratch even if you don't skin and pulp your own tomatoes - reaching for a jar of dolmio however is not cooking from scratch. I would also encourage you to learn to like onions. You don't have to like them raw but they feature cooked in so many dishes that you'll be lacking in basic flavour if you can't get on with them. If it's a texture thing then try grating the onion so it's barely there.

May I ask, you say you don’t like/can’t eat onions, can you eat them cooked down and blended so smooth and undetectable? It’s just they are the base of so many easy meals, mainly as they add a depth of flavour. I would imagine many jarred sauces would contain them.

Anyway, even if you can’t, one of the best things about cooking from scratch is you choose what goes in. So if you don’t like something just leave it out or google ‘what can I substitute x for’!

Also, if you are just starting out and find it a bit overwhelming try combining some elements you’ve made from scratch, with some ready prepped ingredients. E.g if making a lasagne then you may choose to combine a homemade Ragu with ready prepared béchamel.