To think that cooking isn’t hard...

[CrabappleBiscuit]

....as long as you are physically fit and not unwell and don’t have a disability that makes it hard, and have access to a kitchen and equipment (disclaimer)

Friends who say they or their partners ‘can’t cook’. But hold down jobs, drive cars and can put together flat pack furniture.

It’s not rocket science, read a recipe and do it. I like cooking and I’m good at it, dh isn’t a great cook but he still cooks a fairly limited repertoire but he does.

Is it just laziness?

It’s always men and they’re always enabled by their wives or mothers

Total sexist nonsense. Stop with the lazy stereotyping.

My mum never did what you all call proper cooking. She just did frozen everything. Wouldn't let me help so I didn't learn at all.

I left home barely being able to boil pasta without wrecking it.
I however did learn by forcing myself to cook healthy meals and reading cookbooks and just kept practising.

But let's not judge people as lazy that can't cook as that's not fair. Everyone has different skills and some are better then others at cooking.

I hate cooking but still do it. If I had lots of money and could eat out every night I probably would. Some people are shocking though. A family member thought you had to soak dried herbs before using them. I've heard people ask if you just wait for mad potato to go mushy

No it isn't but cleaning isn't hard either and I don't do any of that, DP does it all. Even Stevens. I enjoy cooking, he hates it. He enjoys cleaning, I hate it.

Women working outside the home gave rise to more convience foods etc and the manufacturers latched on that people were time poor to cook from scratch everyday / my mum didn’t have a freezer till the 90s so she had to buy fresh every few days and didn’t work.
She preferred baking cakes/ making desserts she was a whizz at all that!
I wished I could like cooking though. I find it a real chore.

My husbands uncle is a chef his aunty doesn't have a clue about cooking.

It’s always men and they’re always enabled by their wives or mothers

That's just sexist bollocks. My mum was the one that couldn't cook, had no interest at all and didn't enjoy it. She actually took pride in being so awful she never felt obliged to produce a meal. My dad is a decent cook, and he taught me the basics.

• mash potato

My dh is pretty good at cooking but shit at cleaning up after

My DH can't cook, thinks he can, essentially has a terrible palette. He puts honey (quite a bit) in spaghetti bolognese and pronounces it delicious. He's happy to eat it, it makes me queasy. I'd rather cook.

My dad does most of the cooking as does FIL, although MILis a brilliant baker/dessert maker

I would rather clean / iron/ tidy or do any chore than cook. Having my own chef would be great.

I don't particularly give a shit what people eat, it's their body and their choice what they put into it, but it really annoys me when people say they can't cok

I'm with you OP. I hate the way people seem to excuse their laziness in the kitchen by proclaiming they can't cook and "ooh I'd burn water me". My mum didn't teach me how to cook per se but I was brought up in a household where she cooked from scratch most days so I guess it rubbed off. I agree with the poster up thread that if you can read you can cook; there is nothing difficult about following a set of instructions.

Motheroffourdragons, some ready meals may be cheaper than cooking from scratch but they are nowhere near as nice as home made. Decent ready meals are definitely more expensive.

If you cook a lot you will have most, if not all, of the herbs, spices etc. If I buy something for a particular recipe and have to buy more of it than the recipe calls for I make sure I cook other things to use it up.

There are many things you can do with beetroot - put it in a salad, grate it and put it in coleslaw, beetroot curry, beetroot risotto, cheese and beetroot tarts are just some.

The poster who quoted prices to make cauliflower cheese made me laugh. £1 for flour! I bought a bag of plain flour yesterday, it cost 46p! You use nowhere near a whole bag to make cauliflower cheese

I love cooking and fortunately I'm a very good cook but I'm not so blinkered to expect that just because I love cooking and find cooking easy that anyone else should be the same.

For some people it's a real lack of confidence within themselves which is really sad,for other people cooking can dredge up bad memories,not all of us grew up within a normal household,some of us would have grown up where meal times and cooking could be used as a reason to throw things around(meals and plates against the wall)a reason to force feed a child with anorexia,I know that's more on the extreme side of things but I always try to look at things big or small and think how it may have had a lifetime effect on that person/those people.

Total sexist nonsense. Stop with the lazy stereotyping.

Well said. My mother had two cooking "modes".

One was just heating things up out of tins, i.e. baked beans, soups, tinned peas/carrots, tinned new potatoes, rice puddings. Deserts were usually cold things straight from tins such as tinned fruit with carnation milk.

Her other "mode" was a stew pan that she threw things in, i.e. pieces of meat, random veg, etc., which she'd boil for hours, then as each day passed, she'd throw something else in, usually more veg, to "top it up" and boil it again for an hour or so. Usually lasted a few days. I remember feeling sick at the sight of it some mornings as she scraped off the layer of dried fat from the top.

Not being able to cook properly is nothing new (this was in the 60s) and certainly isn't confined to men!

I'll tell you what pisses me off though- the "experts" on telly and in government lecturing poor people about healthy cheap cooking-exhorting them to live on lentils and cheap cuts of meat which are "delicious if you cook them properly" but when that cooking properly involves using your entire electricity budget and all your free time to produce something your children probably won't eat.

@Pacer142. Do we have the same mum?

It's not difficult but a few techniques are useful. Also knowing how to throw a meal together from what's in the fridge, how to improvise and not slavishly follow a recipe.

StormcloakNord with practise you can learn how to substitute ingredients that aren't crucial so you don't buy a pot of mustard for one dish.

I'm not sure what schools teach now but when my DC were at school a few years ago the cookery lessons were a joke.

MrsDilber That's exactly how I feel. I've always cooked and DH does all the clearing up. I've been cooking for 40 years now and I seldom get any pleasure from it. Until recently I always cooked from scratch and was sniffy about using jars and ready meals. Now I don't care, it's mostly just two of us as DC at uni or working away and it's convenience food several times a week now.
I did teach both DC to cook and they went off to uni with a book of my recipes. The novelty hasn't worn off for them and they both enjoy experimenting and cooking for friends.

I got taught a fair bit of cookery in school (I'm old ) but I have four children ranging from nursery age to adult and none of them have learned anything useful.

The only things they've made are
Sponge cake onion and tomato salad
Spring roll*
Yule log*
Beans on toast
Pizza (in the microwave, using a wrap as a base)
Condensed milk to make a fruit salad.

Anything marked * they didn't actually make themselves and the teacher did it while telling them how they were doing it. You can imagine with 30 people trying to watch what one person is doing in the space of an hour they did not take much of it in.
Maybe it varies by area but I don't think cookery lessons in school could do much more than keep you alive these days!

I don't know if this is the problem or how it contributes over all I just don't think it's fair to say cookery lessons actually cover all bases.

Of course cooking is hard. It's a skill like any other, and not just one skill but dozens and dozens of different techniques and processes that you need to learn, practice and recall.

Like everything else, some people are naturally good at it, some people will have had excellent teachers (at home) who pass on their knowledge, some people are motivated to learn because it interests them, and others have no idea where to start.

Who taught you to chop onions very finely for a sauce, but in chunks for a stir-fry? When did you learn how to prepare potatoes for roasting? How do you know which cut of meat to use for a stir fry? How long does it take to cook a pork chop? What herb goes best with lamb? Should you salt the meat before cooking? What temperature is best for cooking steak? If you taste your pasta sauce and its not quite right, how do you know what to add? There are literally hundreds of things you need to know.

Understanding timings is one of the biggest challenges. Pasta only takes 10 minutes to cook, but you need to take into account 10 minutes to boil the water. So, what do you start first? Cooking onions and bacon for a carbonara sauce or getting the water going for the pasta?

You also need to understand how to keep cooked food good until its time to serve. For example, when did you learn that if you tip cooked pasta back in the pot but don't mix your sauce in quickly you'll end up with a lump of pasta basically glued together?

I think cooking is actually quite complicated, and it takes a long time to build your confidence in all these little skills.

Some people need lots of extra help, encouragement and practice before that get good results even after following the recipe to a T.

Have some empathy. Think about how disappointing it is to put loads of time and effort into something only for it to turn out terrible - no wonder you'd be more likely to but pre prepared food that you know will turn out edible, at least. Why would you bother wasting your time and money again unless you knew how to improve?

I didn't mean to press post haha I'll try again...
It really annoys me when people say they can't cook. They can they just choose not too, which is fine but don't tell me you can't, tell me you don't like it. Those people who say "I burn water" type thing, or try to toast chicken or whatever, just read a recipe! I don't mean like Michelin star cooking but basic stuff like pasta sauce, curry, grilled meat and veg etc.

I do think there's an element of what your used to, my bf grew up on frozen food, ready meals and jarred sauces whilst I grew up on my mum's absolutely fantastic cooking. A jarred sauce tastes very different to a homemade one, I hate the taste of processed sauces but it was what he thought a sauce should taste like. So my BF always thought he couldn't cook because what he made had no resemblance of what he was used to, whilst mine, although it didn't touch my mum's had the same basic taste so I thought I could.

Now my bf with some practice is a very good cook, and agrees his food tastes good I think he just needed some desensitising from processed food.

Having said that my housemate is an absolute mess at cooking, she thinks that to make e.g. a curry you can't cook the veg and the sauce and the meat together so she will have about 10 pans on the go one with each different veg and one with the sauce, takes her hours because obviously she can only cook 4 ingredients at once. It's really bizarre. I can't watch her cook because it makes me cringe and I just want to shove a recipe book in her face

1. Most people can feed themselves - heat up a pizza, microwave some veg.

1. Most people can (or could, if they bothered) read a recipe, buy ingredients and make something passable.

1. Not many people (in my experience) can look in a fridge/cupboard and make something up out of ingredients or leftovers. Only I (and MIL) can do that in my family, my parents can't do it and neither can DH.