Can you cook?

[OldFred]

Do you consider yourself a capable and competent cook?
Do you enjoy cooking?

I always cook from scratch so choose quick and easy meals to cook or prepare

I suppose the more you cook something the quicker and easier it is

I was going to cook a roast today but the DC vetoed that idea so I ended up frying fresh fish haddock fillet in butter garlic and parsley which we had with a baked potato in the oven with butter and sour cream with green beans

I'll make the roast in a couple of days instead

Oh and lemon with the fish

I am a useless cook. I tend to eat just very simple, basic foods because whenever I try to do an actual recipe it always turns out absolutely awful. Even if I follow a recipe from a book or a YouTube video I always end up throwing most of it away.

There are two or three things which I can cook and I tend to stick to those all the time. The funny thing is, my father was a head chef in West End London restaurants and hotels!

This week I'll be making pasta with a basic tomato sauce I'll knock up

Baked potato with tuna

Chicken breast with potatoes and veg

The roast I didn't cook today

Veg and chicken soup with left over chicken

I do make chicken broth from the chicken carcsss because it's easy and I've been doing that for years

Spag Bol

I eat a lot bread I bake with cheese and pate that can be dinner for me esp if the DC are out and about and just cook what they want when they get home if they don't want whatever leftovers are knocking around

I mean the DC cook themselves whatever they want when they get home

I love a stir fry

Not particularly and no.

I cook when I must and have a handful of things I can make a decent version of - spag bol for instance. But other than that I'm very much an instruction-follower and I need a recipe to follow. I've got no skill in anything cooking related particularly and I don't enjoy it.

Dh is fantastic in the kitchen (thankfully) and loves to cook. And also the dc seem to be following him in that respect thank God 🙏

I can cook and I quite enjoy it but I have arthritis so what I can cook depends on my health. I can bake but I don't enjoy that.

I had to do 3 years of 'domestic science' at school that put me off cooking for years. I could follow a recipe.

I only really learned to cook when I was ill and out of work and I used to watch, "ready steady cook".

Anyone can follow a recipe, whether they want to or not is another matter and those that cba clearly cba!

That's not actually true. You need to know the language of cooking, to know what a simmer is, a rolling boil, that 100g of pastry means pastry made with 100g of flour.

The last recipe I followed was for Pad Thai a couple of weeks ago

I now just chuck in the ingredients without following the recipe because I know what goes in it from that one time

I can follow a recipe and produce edible food, but I'm not a good cook and I don't enjoy it. I find it incredibly stressful, for some reason - I suppose timings and having a lot of different things to remember at once. My partner often takes over when I'm flapping because I get so stressy.

Thankfully he's a pretty good cook so I rarely do it. It does mean I eat food I'm not hugely keen on though (a LOT of pasta with shop-bought sauces) so I am trying to do it more myself, so I can eat things I like. I find if I cook more like batch-cooking early in the day rather than making dinner, it's less stressful. (Thank goodness for WFH.)

I like baking - again don't hugely enjoy it, but I like the precision of following a recipe and getting something delicious at the end. My bakes always come out pretty well.

I'm a very good cook & enjoy it. I like following new recipes but often just wing it & get creative with whatever I have. I cook a lot of Mediterranean & Persian dishes, a lot of veggie stuff and less meat that I used to.

I'm a good baker too but not someone who gets all artistic with the icing and twiddly bits. I follow baking recipes meticulously - it's more of a science than an art!

I'm a reasonably good cook, I do about 90% of the cooking at home. I don't love doing it because I'd rather go out than be at home cooking, so I use a lot of time savers, and do batch cooking, so that limits the kind of meals I make.

I find it easy to follow a recipe and can never understand people who can't manage to do that.

Yes, and I'm really good at it, to the extent that I have a wee side hustle catering for private dinner parties / small functions.

I'm not a great baker, though (mostly because I don't have a sweet tooth, so I've never really developed an interest in cakes or desserts): I can knock together a fairly acceptable dessert such as a crumble or chocolate mousse, but if I take something on that requires anything fancier, I'll pair up with a friend who is much better at that sort of thing than me.

Yes, have been able to cook since I was about 10. My parents were both very bad at it and would happily live on sandwiches, soup, toast and noodles. My aunt (older than both of them) taught me and, importantly, made me fix my own mistakes on the go, and so I think I have a properly old-fashioned basic 'general habit' set of meals by today's standards. No problem following a recipe for anything else, really, as I know what the reason is for including some ingredients and how cooking processes like boiling, roasting, etc, can work (or fall short and affect results).

Not fond of sweet baking as it seems too faffy, but again there are about 4 or 5 baking recipes that I can usually pull off well (bread, scones, cakes and so on).

I consider myself a good cook, and capable of putting a wide variety of good tasty food on the table, in large quantity when needed, and to deal with various allergies/diets/needs etc.

But while I might have been able to go on Master Chef when it was Lloyd Grossman hosting, I am not fancy enough to do well these days.

yes I am a good cook and I enjoy cooking but do get bored with cooking ds favourite meals

give me a few ingredients and I can make a nice meal and quickly too (its about the only thing i can do quickly I faff with everything else), I do not need to follow a recipe and rarely do but love looking through recipe books. I will add flavours that work well (I think this is something that some are good at and some are not)

useless at baking, I can help but interfere and make changes and it just comes out wrong and I do not really enjoy baking

I am not great at roast dinners (I do not like cooking them) and my lasagne is just never quite right

I was so tired after work so I was very grateful to chuck a ham and mushroom pizza in the oven

Not what I'd planned but it hit the spot

Love cooking, and baking, and am told I'm excellent at both. Love finding new recipes, meal planning, buying ingredients. DH can cook but doesn't because I love it so much, I find it a great stress reliever. The only problem with being a good cook is going out for meals is often really disappointing - often I think I could have done this meal far better myself at home. When we eat out we tend to go for things like Vietnamese, Japanese or Thai which I can do a passable version of, but nothing close to the quality and depth of flavours that those who grew up cooking in those countries can produce.