To ask how you learned to cook and

[ResponsibleMushroomForager]

Do you enjoy it or not?
If you have a DP do they cook?
If you have DC are you teaching them to cook?

The BBC good food website is a great place to start. Also learn the basics such as white sauce, cheese sauce and batter. Things like cottage pie, spaghetti bolognase, chilli, curry, fish pie are great to learn. Then you’ll start adapting them to your taste.

I love cooking, it calms and relaxes me when life is stressful, it's also purposeful and is absolutely an essential life skill.

I couldn't boil an egg when I left home but my partner at the time was an ex army chef who patiently taught me the basics and gave me the confidence to believe I could cook.

I also would second pp re Delia Smith, I still have a very battered copy of her Complete Cookery Course, she explains everything so clearly.

I've taught my dd to cook and now she's at university she mostly cooks from scratch for herself and occasionally rustles up a roast dinner on a Sunday for her housemates.

My mum or dad never taught me to cook and Home economics was a bit of a joke, making things like hot chocolate and angel delight! 😂

When I left home at 19 with a baby in tow I couldn’t cook at all. Neither could DH! I remember we would buy a lot of meals from Asda that came in a silver tray, like chicken with cheese and bacon, hunters chicken, etc and I would just make a side.

I learned to actually cook through cook books, watching cooking shows on tv and eventually YouTube. I’m proud that now I can make anything. Within two years of moving out I could make most standard meals common in Britain as well as baking.

My DH still can’t cook mind you. He can make a steak (but no sides!!), spag bol, a frozen pizza but he makes a really good toastie!

I am teaching the kids how to cook as I would hate for them to go through what I went through. Eldest has just turned 10 and can make toast, toast and beans, scrambled eggs, etc, spag bol, chorizo risotto, prepare a cold lunch, a smoothie, and so on. DS is 6 and he can make toast in a toaster and prepare a cold lunch.

If I were you, I would just get yourself a simple cook book or two from the library and pick some recipes and give it a go. Watch some cooking shows and watch videos on YouTube, how to cut an onion properly, how to carve a roast chicken, etc.

My mum couldn't cook at all. She could do chips in the chip pan and grill stuff. That was it. She had no idea what to do with even pasta or rice. I remember her ringing my sister to ask her whether she needed to peel new potatoes. I learned a bit from my dad then just self taught. I'm a decent cook and enjoy it if my family leave me to get on with it and I'm not sorting out bickering at the same time.

My mum, School home Economics, recipes

I enjoy it very much.

DH can cook but he is very messy.

My DCs can all cook well. In fact, we have a cooking rota at home, so everyone chips in.

Lucky enough to have had home economics at school. The recipes were pretty vile but it meant I know what nutrients are in each food, food pyramid and the basics of chopping/peeling/how to follow a recipe. I didn't use it until I went to live with my dad at 16 who survived on ready meals. With the basic skills from school I've managed to piece it together pretty well. I think home economics should be taught for at least a term in schools along side science.

My mum taught me basic cooking skills - I could make a Victoria sponge, crumble and Yorkshire pudding from an early age as they were always my jobs on a Sunday morning.
My mum wasn’t a very ambitious cook though so I also learnt from cookery books and friends at uni - we had a very multi-cultural kitchen in halls.
DH loves cooking and does most of the cooking at home, which sets a good example to ds1 and ds2, who both like being in the kitchen (in fact ds1 13 is destroying the kitchen making himself eggy bread for breakfast right now.

I taught myself to cook when I left home, my mum never enjoyed cooking so we ate a lot of freezer/jar/tinned food as kids! I started by following recipes I had in a book that was aimed at students living away from home for the first time and have just gone from there. I'm pretty good at it now and we eat really well.

My husband does cook but he has to do it like a TV chef and do all the chopping first and into little bowls and then follow the recipe EXACTLY. So he rarely cooks an evening meal unless it's a special occasion but he does cook breakfast every weekend.

One of my friends is 30 and can’t cook. Her diet consists of Nutella and apples. She’s underweight and very pale. Oddly, she’s the most academically intelligent person I know , but has zero life skills. Can’t cook, drive, swim, etc. But if you speak to her, she blows you away with intelligence. Her mum was and still is very smothering and I think that is partly to blame. But I just wish she would think a little broader in terms of life achievements and do something simple like a basic cooking course ! I’ve offeted to go with her but despite saying she’s embarrassed she can’t coo, she won’t change.

op

If you want to learn how to cook you really cannot go wrong with Delia Smith. Her recipes are absolutely fool proof and work every time.

I like Jamie Oliver too, but he can be slapdash. Leon books are good for variety and I am in love with my Naturally Nutricious book! It’s given me lots of great vege ideas and her dressings are insane.

I would start with learning some basics like-

a good spaghetti bolognaise sauce
Roasting a chicken
Making a risotto.

If you can make these things you will have potable of variations to make from them. Risotto is simple and can be anything!
Roast a chicken with so many different flavours. A spaghetti sauce can be changed to make a chilli or a lasagne. And it’s the same cooking principles that makes a cottage pie and shepherds pie.

Think of 5 meals you want to master.

I hate cooking with an absolute passion! I learned when I left home (my mum never taught me any further than jacket spuds or shopbought pizza and stuff like that). For years I lived on pie, mash (Smash!) and veg with gravy. I was afraid of a lot of food because I'd never tried it and had grown up being told they were horrible. I didn't like onions so wouldn't try anything with obvious onions in and it was the same with peppers, chillies, garlic etc. I didn't like anything soggy or too cheesy so things like cauliflower cheese, lasagna, pasta bake etc were out. I didn't like anything spicey so anything that mentioned heat was out, such as fajitas, curry, stir-fry, chilli and the like.

It wasn't until I met dh, who had a completely different upbringing to me and knew how to cook and liked a wide range of foods as well as happy to try anything new. We went to food festivals and places where tasters were on offer so I could try things without having to pay money or put effort into making it which would then go to waste if I didn't like it.

Dh showed me how to cook and made new flavours seem less scary. Apart from most meats, I'll eat most things now and fussy people do my head in. I still have cooking though, especially when I go to the effort of making a meal and the dc say they don't like it.

Learnt from watching mum and nan cook
I enjoy baking more than cooking but I do love cooking
When I met DH he couldn't even butter bread, not his fault, he was never taught anything by his useless mother. He can now use an oven and a pan so he can throw together something pre packaged from the freezer and cupboards.
DS is 2yo and cooks with me daily - he will not turn out like his dad

I agree with following a beginners recipe book/collection like the Delia ones or Jamie Oliver.

I also think it's useful to have a reference cookbook of classic recipes/techniques, and I have always had the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book as mine:

Good Housekeeping Cookery Book: The Cook's Classic Companion https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1909397857/ref=cmswwrcppapi_DK6aCbH54CXA7

It's useful for very basic things like how long to boil an egg for, through to much more complicated recipes if you like.

DH is a good cook. I agree it's a life skill - any tips on starting from scratch? I'm not a multi-tasker.

Buy a slow cooker, cheap as you want. You bung stuff in, turn on and TA da, a meal a few hours later.
BBC good food website,
A book for 3 or 4 ingredients recipes.
This site has loads of recipes. I am doing the Vietnamese chicken curry, slow cooker today. Easy and tasty.
Facebook has a multitude of groups with cooking in mind. Just think of the food you want and look for group.
I learnt late in life, my mother died young and I was in boarding school after. No chances to learn. Then I didn't care, then I had kids and had to learn or feed them microwave meals.

@MsTSwift I really don’t understand this - cooking is not a difficult mystery my 10 year old can follow a simple recipe. Baffles me when adults claim they can’t cook

Oh God you sound like my MIL She's an excellent cook and when I was young and newly married I could have enjoyed learning a lot from her but she was sneery and condescending and baffled by people who struggled with cooking.

I appreciate posters offering advice and encouragement. I'm only going to be working mornings only from the New Year so my Great Plan is to spend some afternoons experimenting and learning to enjoy cooking in a - hopefully! - relaxed environment. It'll be nice to get teenaged DD involved after school sometimes - well, that's The Plan anyway

This thread is reminding me of my australian housemate when i was 18 who (cooking for the very first time) chopped up chicken to fry and squealed 'omg it's turning white!!'

Ahhh innocence

I don't know I learned tbh, it was just something I always seemed to be able to do even from a young age. I used to watch my Mum cook basic meals/use the grill etc. Apply heat = watch food while food cooks, I think it really was that simple to me when younger.

At 15 I realised my Mum was a pretty bad cook and I started cooking my own meals, experimenting with flavours and practicing knife skills.

At 32 I can and do cook pretty much everything and anything. To the point where I've gone back to basics (salads, jacket potatos, cottage pie etc) as I was a little fed up of every meal being a 'dinner event' and DH being a lazy pratt and never cooking.

A bit from my gran, a bit from my mum, a bit from school, and mostly by doing it. From the age of 11 or 12 I quite often cooked family meals. Following recipes and learning to tell when things were done - we had an Aga, so you couldn't ever just set a timer and leave it. Mostly motivated by being an enthusiastic but slightly fussy eater - if I cooked, I could choose what we ate, to some extent.

I don’t remember my mum ever ‘teaching’ me to cook but she’d always get me involved whenever she was cooking. Asking me to keep an eye on a sauce and give it an occasional stir, getting me to chop veg for her, and just generally talking me through whatever she was doing. My mum did 99% of the cooking in our house as my dad was never usually home in time for dinner, but it was a running joke that if my mum was out my dad would always cook something with fish, as my mum had a shellfish allergy. So I suppose he could cook, but just didn’t do it much.

I was really surprised when I moved into a flat at uni and found my flatmates marvelling at my ability to cook ‘from scratch’. I wasn’t even a very good cook at that point, but I blew their minds just by being able to make a simple tomato sauce instead of buying a jar of Dolmio, for example. My friends had basically been kept out of the kitchen their whole lives and therefore thought of cooking as some kind of mysterious alchemy that they literally didn’t have the first clue about.

My partner is a good cook too and we probably split the cooking about 60/40 with me doing more as he works later and I genuinely find it relaxing after a day at work (most of the time!) When I first met him he was living in a houseshare with an absolutely useless housemate who would burn absolutely everything and set the smoke alarm off every single time. One time my partner was cooking something and the housemate asked ‘how come you never set the fire alarm off when you do that?’ and he had to explain that the hob has multiple settings, and that you aren’t supposed to just turn it up high, stick your food on and then walk away for 10 mins!

Sorry OP I didn’t mean to sound snooty, just mean that if you’ve been picking things up along the way from an early age then it doesn’t really feel like ‘learning’ to cook. Like learning a language as a child vs learning as an adult, I guess! I totally get that it’s overwhelming when you feel like you have to start at the beginning.

Someone bought me a Jamie Oliver cookbook where all the recipes have 5 ingredients or less and are supposed to take under 30 mins (I think) Might have been Jamie’s Ministry of Food? That seemed like it would be a really good place to start if you haven’t done much cooking before!

My mum is a terrible cook, I mean she could burn water.
My dad and older sister did a lot of the cooking. Then my dad started working away and my sister moved out so I ended up doing it from about the age of 13. It was that or eat terrible food.
The best way is to follow recipes but start with simple things.
I like Italian and French recipes. Try a slow cooker, they are brilliant.

OP, that sounds like a great plan for the new year!

My top tip would be that, as well as following a good basic recipe book, you try to learn some of the observation skills: how do you tell whether food is fresh or a bit past it, how do you know when things are cooked (different signs for different kinds of food), how do you know when the temperature is a bit too low or too high etc? A lot of successful cooking is about being able to notice and make minor adjustments to those sorts of things as you go along but you can't really learn them from a book. Just pay attention to what you're doing and what it looks and feels like, and how it tastes at the end, and think about what you'd do differently next time. It's all a learning process, but it's so worth it.

My mum was very poorly when I was young and I cooked for everyone, mainly self taught following recipes. Tbh I resented cooking at home as I'd be told what to cook and I guess at age 12 I wanted to be doing other things but these days I love love cooking and love experimenting. My daughter loves baking with me. My husband cannot cook at all, the week after I gave birth to my now 6m old he tried to cook fajitas, you know the old El paso ones from a easy box with instructions and somehow totally burned it all, he does a great bacon sandwich though

Some great advice on here re recipe books. I would also suggest watching cookery shoes (not Masterchef ), but shows with Jamie Oliver, Mary Berry, Nigella etc. YouTube videos are excellent, and if you are on Facebook follow pages by Tasty, Bosh etc.

Recipes, tv shows and YouTube videos.

My mum doesn’t cook and I grew up on ready meals. I have 2 recipes I learned from my gran (she only had a few different meals in rotation)

I really enjoy cooking. I am happy to experiment, substitute ingredients and most of the time it works out.