Help me become a cook!!

[Seaair2]

I am the first to admit I’m not very confident in the kitchen and this year I really would like to improve and mix it up a little.
Please tell me where to start?!
What simple dishes can I start with?

Dive chicken breast, mushrooms, tomato, peppers and onions. Put them in a dish with a drizzle of olive oil, salt, pepper and a bit of lemon juice. Give a good mix

Cook in pan, no extra oil needed.

Once cooked through, microwave a pouch of egg fried or basmati rice. Tip into pan, mix and serve.

Quick, simple and healthy, plus it looks quite impressive.

The BBC series Eat Well for Less has two or three easy recipes each episode.
There don't seem to be any episodes on iPlayer - not sure if there's any on YouTube.

*dice

What do you like to eat? That's a good place to start.

The BBC Good Food site is excellent. All recipes are graded by difficulty, so you can start with easy ones and then progress as you get more confident. 90% of successful cooking is choosing the right recipe, IME. Good Food also has lots of tips on techniques and terminology.

Can you afford some of the food boxes eg hello fresh?? I found they were great at learning techniques a d how to create dishes.

Id recommend Jamie Olivers Ministry of Food book. Its really simple to follow, gives a really good, simple introduction to lots of different dishes and doesn't assume you have loads of kit which is important if you are not a cheffy family. It is just simple home cooking with not really expensive ingredients or needing loads of complicated spices etc.

Once you have finished that BBC good food is good, or maybe one of those subscription boxes, you can usually get a good deal as a new user and there are quite a few to work through.

Most dinners aren’t that difficult

It just take time to remember each dish. The more you do them the quicker and easier it becomes

Good quality tagliatelle cooked al dente. Meanwhile, melt a good sized chunk - like a half a packet - of gorgonzola in a splash of cream. Toss pasta in the sauce with a handful of chopped walnuts.Even better with thin slices of a very ripe pear. Takes 10 mins at most. Horribly fattening but delicious.

Oh and top tip: print off recipes that sort of worked and write on them, "too runny" or "need to cook for extra time". It really helps.

Lean in 15 recipes are perfect for beginner level.

have a leaf through some of the foodie type magazines and see what suits your style...get a subscription for six or twelve months and work your way through the recipes

I do this every so often just for inspiration and get some new meal ideas, see what is going on in the world of dinners! And I am a really confident cook...it's really easy to get stuck in a rut, especially if you are trying to meal plan and not waste food, or donate all your wages directly to the checkout cashiers!

I think I’ve just been lazy in learning dishes in the past and have got in a rut with weekday meals so would really like to learn some more! I like to eat chicken , rice, vegetables, pasta, jacket potatoes etc .

Read the recipe before you start

Prep everything first until you n learn how long you take

Things in one pot are great. Mostly it's just chop it up, put it in, add the spices or herbs in the recipe snd it's job done. Hunters chicken (chicken cacciatore), coq au vin, Moroccan tagine, beef stew etc are all easy and once cooking don't require lots of faffing. Plus can be done in a slow cooker.

3 things revolutionised my cooking

• good quality pans / saucepans.
• good cooks knife & keeping it sharp
• reading the recipe from start to finish before starting to cook

I'm the first to admit I'm not a particularly good or confident cook - this is not helped by DH being incredibly proficient in the kitchen!

Some things that have helped me - good cookbooks. I don't see why I should reinvent the wheel, others far better than me have written the recipes, and all I've got to do is follow them!

I've found over here that Hairy Bikers and BBC Good Food are very reliable.

Secondly, it really does help if you have good equipment - good knives (never put them in the dishwasher or cut butter with them, good (and lots of) chopping boards, measuring spoons, cups, jugs and scales.

Thirdly, an awful lot of cooking is just muscle memory, it's a bit like ironing, the more you do, the better you get at it, the more confident and quicker you get. Chopping onions, mincing garlic, peeling, chopping and salting veges, browning meat. . .

Fourthly, and foremostly, if you cock it up, there's always takeout, so don't be afraid to fail.

The Roasting Tin and The Green Roasting Tin by Rukmini Iyer are two great books to start with. Simple, really easy and taste fantastic.

Think about meals that you like to eat, make a list of them.
From your list, pick meals that include something you don't know how to cook, for instance pastry for a pie, dumplings in a stew, Yorkshire pudding batter for Toad in the Hole, white sauce for Chicken Supreme.
.
Get a recipe from BBC website, and off you go. The more basic techniques that you learn, the more varied and interesting your meals will be.

Most of all, have fun and enjoy cooking and eating!

Not recipes but ideas

Soak wooden skewers for 30 mims then thread on chicken pieces and oven cook in a little water and chicken stock cube or bbq sauce or whatever.

You could change this up and use satay sauce or sweet chilli and serve with wedges or rice.

Also gammon is lovely. Slow cooker for 4 hours and then oven roast with a marinade like honey or marmelade.

Marmalade

You won't go far wrong with the Delia Online Cookery School There are videos of techniques, everything is explained clearly, and the recipes are lovely.

Get a good basic cook book that teaches you techniques. Prue Leith's cookery bible is good. Once you've learnt things like sautéing, braising etc you will be surprised how many dishes you can cook.

I think there are some great recipes for novice cooks on some of the supermarket websites. They vary in complexity and some of them cheat too much for my liking (Waitrose for example have form for “take a packet of Waitrose Thai flavoured chicken fillets.” Where as I would prefer to recreate those flavours myself.) That said there are many that do work from scratch.
But they usually use readily available ingredients and tend to be fairly quick and family friendly.

Not sure if this link will work but my friend is running online cooking classes for beginners

emmaskitchenclub.co.uk

She also has a fb group where she posts videos/ recipes/ hacks plus q&a's