To find cooking really complicated and stressful?

[Abbinob]

When people are taking about simple recipes and they say things like 'then just chuck in some spices'
Wait what spices? How much? How do people know what spices people are talking about? Am I thick and this is some instinctive knowledge people have?
Whenever I look at a recipe for something it seems to have a million ingredients and I get a bit panicky and I give up
I'm sure when my mum made a curry it was just simple like tomatoes, chicken, yoghurt curry powder. But when I try to find a curry recipe it's all coconut milk and a thousand spices I've never heard of.
I want to cook nice fod for DS but all I can cook is bolognaise, pasta bake and shepherds pie

at weird tins and packets of ingredients on US cooking sites. You will find that on sites run by companies like Kraft and Campbells, etc. But take a look at Epicurious, Food, even Martha Stewart, and you will see American sites actually feature real ingredients. I do know a lot of Americans who add a tin of this and a packet of that and that's dinner, but I also know people who are adventurous and good cooks.

If you want an excellent book of fundamentals, try Mastering the Art of French Cooking 1 & 2 by Julia Child (late great American TV cooking show hostess).

Another American TV cook with great recipes (Italian) is Lidia Bastianich. Look online.

Wrt sugar in tomato sauces -- Sicilian and southern Italian cooking sometimes involves a little sugar in the sauce. If you have a bona fide regional recipe then it wold taste wrong without the sugar.

Great job OP . I've just seen that Mary Berry has a new series called "Foolproof"- it's savoury, not baking. Probably worth a look.

Maths
90% of american cake recipes on individual blogs or american recipe books say take a pack of yellow cake mix. Nothing to do with sponsored sites. I was trying to get recipes for my bundt tin. , thankfully came across Chrysta Wilson's Kiss My Bundt which had real recipes.

As was said up thread the cookbooks aimed at "Blokes" are a good starting point - most of them assume no knowledge and get into geekish detail. Virgin to Veteran and How to Cook in 24hrs are both great - although the style doesn't suit everyone as they both jump all over the place.

Choose a book that suits your style - personally I hate Delia's books but the recipes are bombproof, if unexciting. I have written out the basic recipes so I don't have her voice in my head when making pancakes. I love Chinese Unchopped - others think it is patronising with it's "Wok Clock".

Read any recipe all the way through, check you have all the ingredients and do any chopping & other preping before you start. It takes longer but it means you don't get the "OMFG it is burning" panic halfway through.

To get everything to finish at the right time - decide the time you want to eat and count the times back from there. Eg 5 minutes plating, 15 minutes resting, 45 minutes cooking, 10 minutes preping = 1 1/4 hours.

If you have more than one dish you can use the watching the pot boil time to prep something else. I do a visualisation of what I am going to do so I get the order right and have all the ingredients and utensils to hand - you can see the project manager coming out there.

Practice, practice and a bit more practice. It is like any new skill - you wouldn't expect to be fluent in a language after the first read through of a vocab list. If something doesn't work out try to find out what went wrong and have another go.

If you don't enjoy it - buy one of your family members a cook book and some fancy kitchen kit and let them do it.

My kitchen bookshelves are groaning with American cook books whose cake recipes start with creaming sugar and butter. Of course some cakes involve yogurt or sour cream or a tin of pumpkin, and you are probably not going to churn your own butter.

allrecipes.com/recipes/376/desserts/cakes/bundt-cake/?page=2#2 I recommend the Boscobel Beach Ginger bundt recipe.

www.marthastewart.com/274977/bundt-cake-recipes#232095 More recipes for real cakes here.

American websites like that are not the norm though are they.There was a thread on here a while back complaining about pininterest being full of cake mixes. Most

They are the go-to websites for millions of wannabe bakers, the first to appear in any search I have ever typed for anything from cakes to boeuf bourguignon.

Pinterest is probably the most efficient way to happen upon blogs. I have a cake board on Pinterest full of cakes from all over the place including the US. Recipes I pin tend to be from scratch. There is no shortage of them from bloggers in the US.

Actually, finding recipes on Pinterest might be an idea for the OP.

Unfortunately a lot of US websites do specify packet ingredients. I am planning to make biscuits and gravy and was looking for recipe and had to discount a few that include packet gravy mix (essentially a white sauce with bits of sausage in it) and ready made biscuits (like savoury scones).

When I do mine it will be home made biscuits and sauce made using flour, fat, stock, milk etc.

Yellow cake always makes me smile because I can't help thinking of this, which is probably the last thing you want to be making cake from and also makes me suspicious of Yellow Cake mix.

OP I use a recipe for a great baked risotto that doesn't require hours of stirring. It's really easy and you can add other ingredients if you want to change it a bit.

www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2818/ovenbaked-risotto-

It's just practice. I mostly cook without a recipe, know how to make up meals that will taste nice and can happily chuck in spices or whatever. But I don't know this by magic. I know it because I read lots of recipes, I'm interested in cooking and I have cooked gazillions of meals.

It's a bit like my ds knows how to make up all sorts of pretty cool lego model cars because he's made loads of different cars from lego instructions. And now he doesn't really need to bother using instructions unless he wants to make something really specific.

www.google.com/search?q=biscuits+and+gravy+recipes&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
My google search results for 'sausage gravy recipes'. Even Pillsbury (makers of frozen biscuit dough) has the homemade gravy recipe.

You don't need to use stock in the sausage gravy. It's just a white sauce made with a roux consisting of sausage fat plus flour, plus sausage bits from the pan and crumbled (skinless) sausage, to which milk is added to make a nice, thick, meaty sauce.

Yellow cake is delicious, made with eggs that have not been separated. White cake is made with egg whites only. The yolks give the colour to the yellow cake.

Yellow cake mix can be very nice. American box mixes in general tend to be pretty good. Cans of frosting otoh are vile.

Can I recommend a company called
Tastesmiths ?

They do curry packs, mexican packs and some others I haven't tried yet. They source and provide the spices, chillies, ginger etc. that you need: you just provide the meat, fish and basics and the recipe.
You do the preparation and actual cooking - it's more fun than just chucking a jar of sauce into the pan and I've used them to teach the older kids how to cook.

Sorry - I meant they supply the recipe to follow. It's loose enough for you to alter the heat as well.

I know this will sound nuts bit have you tried a cookbook called the kids only cookbook. I know it's for children but it is so easy to follow and has nice recipes in it all the time!!

Abbinob, you might want to think about getting a pressure cooker. They speed up cooking. You basically chuck fresh or frozen veg, potatoes, water, stock, frozen fish or frozen and fresh meat in, shut the lid, press a button and come back when it is finished almost. And it makes good tasting food.

I bought one recently based on lougle's thread and am very pleased with it. It gives you a chance to get more variety in much shorter time and with less hassle. The posters on lougle's thread are very helpful about recipes and how to use the machine etc.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/2538738-To-tell-you-all-about-my-Instant-Pot-electric-pressure-cooker