To ask how you learned to cook?

[MotivationSuchAnAggrivation]

I really want to learn how to cook. Classes are not a realistic option at this point.

Anyone here taught themselves to be a really good cook? If so, how?

My mum taught me the basics. But then asking friends, watch8ng Jamie and delia. Googling and watching * you tube. Cooking stuff I liked to eat,

I followed recipes to the letter, then tweaked it to our taste. Don't be frightened to scribble on your recipe books. It's how family hand down recipes are made 😀

I grew up in a cooking family. Knowledge was passed on from my gran and my mum. Deliah smith was my go to book, very clear instructions, I used her books as reference once I left home.

I did O level cookery at school. It was so useful as we were taught the basic skills of cooking so I can make so many things without following a recipe now. My teacher was so strict, she was obsessed with smooth, glossy roux sauces. 35 years later I never make a lumpy sauce as I can hear her disapproving voice in my head while I'm beating in the milk and imagine that she's looking over my shoulder while I'm doing it :)

Thanks everyone. Some really good stuff here!

We were a pizza and chips sort of family when I was growing up. My parents didn’t cook much. They worked a lot.

I like the bbc good food website although I do sometimes find that most recipes have at least one ingredient that I can’t get hold of in our local tiny Tesco (live fairly rurally).

I love spag bol but there are so many recipes out there I don’t know where to start!

Practice.
Trial and error.
Following recipes. Watching TV or YouTube.
Watching other people
Cooking with other people
Calling my mum and asking eg how long to boil green beans for and getting pissed off when she would say ‘oh a few mins then test them”

I can’t really remember.

Think both my grabs taught me the basics then I just cooked a lot as a teen and now am in my 40s and have been cooking from scratch all my adult life.

I don’t use a recipe book most of the time now - don’t be scared of going wrong, you learn from mistakes and the internet is fab, BBC Good Food is great.

*Grans!

I learned by helping out at home, so a different experience. Delia Smith's recipes will always work if you follow them - reliable and foolproof. Her Complete Cookery Course is a book I was bought in my early twenties. I use it regularly more than twenty years later. BBC Good Food is a great source of recipes that are tried and tested.

OP there is also an App - I forget what it’s called - where you can put in what ingredients you have and it gives you a recipe.

Helpful thread! I grew up with a mother who found it easier to just do it herself rather than attempt to show me anything and, if she did, she made me nervous with her criticism. The outcome is that I'm now in my late thirties and have no confidence to cook anything, and I now have DC to feed, along with a DH who loves cooking, and is good at it, so I remain scared to try anything.

My grandmother taught me. We were always in the kitchen.

Trial and error
Delia Smith, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver
BBC food recipes online

Think it’s called Supercook

Practise practise practise.

Start by learning basics I.e. tomato based pasta sauce and you can add to it/experiment and use it as a base for many other dinners.

First time I ‘cooked’ was frozen fish fingers, smash, mushy peas and instant parsley sauce and I stressed the whole way through!
Now I can cook two or three meals all at once at not break a sweat - and they’re bloody tasty too!

Get Jamie Oliver’s ministry of food recipe book. It’s great for beginners and I still refer back to it when I do the odd roast.

DM was a fairly basic cook, and anything exotic such as spaghetti bolognese or chilli con carne was made with sauce sachets, but I did learn enough basics from her such as preparing veg and making tomato based sauces which I've always seasoned myself. I had another relative that was more adventurous and learned a bit more from them. Simple cookery books filled in other gaps.

Check cookery books carefully. Some cooks like Delia Smith are great for novices and will start with things like boiling an egg. I do find that too many assume you're living in a vibrant cosmopolitan area and have all kinds of wierd ingredients that simply aren't avaliable in provincial supermarkets.

For savoury food, I'll tend to use a recipe as a starting point then impŕovise on that theme.

I like the bbc good food website although I do sometimes find that most recipes have at least one ingredient that I can’t get hold of in our local tiny Tesco (live fairly rurally)

Get food shopping delivered! Or go onto amazon pantry - they have all sorts on there!

I am a good cook and still struggle with a good spag Bol

P.s. always always double the amount of garlic

1970s at school.. we did O level cookery at school (I actually got a grade 1!! ,Only one I got and i think it was because I made mayonnaise for my exam), Also Mum teaching me and also doing cookery badges for Brownies ..
Our next door neighbour taught me Royal icing for cakes and I won a school prize for it (again the only one I ever got) .. He learnt in the Navy . Then of course there was Delia's complete cookery course (1970's version, which i cooked my way through...

When DS was small and I was a single parent and couldn't affords the stuff I liked (like Indian takeaway) I taught myself from books like Madhur Jaffrey..

I love cooking and am still an enthusiast ( as my waistline attests sadly )

Learnt a few basics from mum for uni (but pretty much just ate pasta) and then slowly added a few new recipes to my repetoire over time, got the bug and got into it. Took off when I left home properly and felt like I had less of an audience/judgement for disasters. Definitely do have a spare portion of something quick and easy in the freezer, just in case!

I have quite a few cook books and flick through them fairly regularly to see what new things catch my eye, including a cuttings book with recipes I have collected from magazines. As my confidence grows, more recipes open up as they seem more doable and I have wider range of ingredients to hand naturally so it's less outlay and I have more confidence to tweak or change recipes. YouTube and Google help with ideas and skills, too. I have a good beginners book which also includes a basic skills section, it's a handy how to!

Also, start with what you're most confident in. I grew up helping to make puddings. As an extention of that, I learnt to bake and reasoned that if I could make things like sachertorte, I'd probably not stuff up simple meals so I got more adventurous than the few meals I could make. Then I figured I could make my own sauces and took it from there, regularly looking at books etc and choosing more recipes. Good luck!

I was passionate about it so read lots of books etc. I would recommend Jamie's Ministry of Food for basic recipes and Delia's How to Cook series for techniques.

Cook books - Delia & Nigel Slater at first & as I gained confidence Raymond Blanc. Read the recipes from start to finish - get everything out you need, prep it and take your time. Work through & visualise in your head what it is you need to do to get from step 1 to step 2 etc.

TV shows - even if they didn't tell you how it showed you what it should look like

You Tube - this is such a wealth of information. Watch a few videos on how to make a single thing and put them all together in your head. I have learnt so much from You Tube

Loads of practice

Spag bol is the easiest thing ever. Fry a diced onion and two carrots. Add in and brown the mince. Add a few sliced mushrooms and fry for a few minutes. Crumble in a stock cube. Add the tinned tomatos and 1tsp of sugar, leave on low to simmer (on a hob away from edge of stove if you have kids!!) for an hour or two, stirring every now and then.

Cook pasta.
Add sauce you just made.
Simple.

Watching Ready Steady Cook every day as a teen and then being allowed to experiment.
A cookery class could be fun though. I did one when I was in college as part of a GNVQ and still use the recipes for sponge cake and Cornish pasties.

Oh and also add garlic and basil to taste