To feel that sad that basic cooking skills are dying out

[SingleDoubleWhippedClotted]

Me and my brother were taught to cook by my gran and mum. Dad used to cook too but worked away a lot so wasn't around as much.

So many people now seem to be incapable of basic food prep and spend a fortune on food. Cooking seems to be an undervalued life skill, I think its so important to have the skills to be able to prepare simple cheap healthy meals.

I have taught my teen to cook and she could fend for herself if she left home tomorrow. She can cook healthy cheap meals.

I see so many threads on here where people can't boil rice, boil an egg etc

Clearly not a reflection of modern cooking skills then. I’m sure you knew how to make a sandwich back then too :)

I actually quite astonished at Sausage & Mash being thought of as a faff!!!!!

Potatoes take 1 minutes to peel with a speed peeler, then boil, drain, season, large knob of butter and a hand mixer to mash. Otherwise, spin a knife around the equator of a couple of large potatoes, pop in a roasting dish and drizzle with oil, season and stick in oven. When done, scoop out the filling.

Sausages, in roasting dish, drizzle of oil, oven for 30 mins. Job done.

Add onion gravy is easy, peel and alice one onion, saute a couple of mins, spoonful of gravy granules and some water.

Its literally about 5 mins prep, tops.

Were they being taught how to make a sandwich... or how to follow a recipe, use a knife, kitchen hygiene etc?

I remember a similar lesson when I was in Yr7. (Cheese on toast actually). The teacher actually said it wasn't about making cheese on toast... it was making sure we all had the basic skills before moving onto the actual cooking.

I've been very impressed with my DDs Food Tech lessons. Some of the recipes have been incorporated into our family meals. They teach them to adapt the recipes to personal taste as well.

@Ilovemyshed for me it's the washing up too! So that gives me a peeler, a knife, a hand mixer, the mash pan, the sausage tray, and gravy pan to wash up plus any extra veg on the side

I tend to make mash if it's integral like cottage pie but for sausage and mash I usually do (live alone) sausage and mash pie (like cottage pie but with onion gravy) and make a big batch and freeze. Or frozen mash

I think it depends what you have grown up with and are used to making. I like rice so im able to make it easily. I recently had to look up how long to boil an egg for as DD asked for one after having them with her grandmother. I don’t like boiled eggs, so I had no idea how long to cook it and you can’t exactly check how it’s going coz it looks the same outside!

I can whip up lots of savoury meals without a recipe and only use a recipe if it’s a new one or sometimes to double check I have the right ingredients before I start. But I couldn’t make any type of cake/cookie/muffin/dessert type thing without having a recipe to follow as my mum didnt bake and I rarely do either.

I agree, but it is not a recent thing.

My parents can't/couldn't cook other than grilling things/heating things up and neither could their parents.

I taught myself because I found I loved eating out or eating at friends' houses where their parents could cook from scratch and wanted to make lovely food myself.

I guess it could have gone the other way and I could have grown up not cooking and just heating food up, so my parents must have done something right in encouraging me. Partly my mum is the same about food as me and my dad just liked such a plain range of food that she got put off bothering to cook. He quite often worked shifts and made our dinners as my mum worked until about 6pm. He could certainly put something on a plate, we didn't go without. He would also do the food shopping - she got fed up with him moaning about the things she bought so said do it yourself. He was quite good at shopping, looking back, and would get lots of nice fresh meat, cheese and fruit and veg from the indoor market then anything else tinned and so on from the supermarket.

In my teens I was allowed to go and buy my own things to make different meals if I wanted to- and given money to. I used to buy things like frozen Chinese stir fries- but then try and work out how to make them from scratch myself.

By the time I went to university I could definitely feed myself with things like spag bol, chilli con carne and a basic curry (probably with stir fried veg and chicken then sauce from a jar to start with). I expanded my repertoire a bit at university- mainly vegetarian cooking shared with my housemate. And trying to eat healthily, most of the time.

It wasn't until I move in with DH that I ever cooked a roast dinner or lots of things really. Then I learned more again when I had kids, and then kids getting older and enjoying more food, trying to not do the same boring stuff all the time and so on.

DDs are pretty good I think. I haven't stood over them teaching them to cook but they picked things up from helping me and from having a go themselves.

DD1 is off to university soon and she can make similar meals to the kind of things I could make at her age. Also she has worked part time in a restaurant, as I did and has learned a bit there.

DD2 (15) is probably better than I was at her age with things like omelettes and stir fries. And she boiled some eggs perfectly for our breakfast the other day. If you can make an omelette you can always feed yourself cheaply and healthily.

If you have an egd in water boiling away if you get a tablespoon and lift the egg out, if it starts to dry off as soon as you lift it out then it is soft boiled.

The thing is meals like lasagna, Mac cheese, sausages and mash aren’t the healthiest of meals. Also tastes have moved on and people like a bigger variety of foods from different cuisines. There is masses on the internet to learn how to make new and healthier meals.

I actually quite astonished at Sausage & Mash being thought of as a faff!!!!!

For me, it's a faff because of all the washing up. We don't have a dishwasher and don't have room for one (not even a tabletop one) so meals like that take (imo) way too long for what they are.

I don't want to spend more time cooking and washing up than I do actually eating my meal.

Sausage and mash is a faff if you are making the mash from scratch. I also think it's quite bland, fattening and therefore not really worth the effort although I don't mind it occasionally.

My DH could heat stuff up in the oven but not cook. He had 3 kids so when we met he had to learn fairly quickly to cook once in made it clear I wasn’t being chief cook.

15 years on he’s a brilliant BBQ-er, all homemade burgers and marinated prawns and chicken and roast veg.

great stir fry, great roast dinner. But he would never open a recipe book and think let’s have that. It frustrates me.

I also find it quite old fashioned - I don't know why!

I made sausage and mash last night and it was great, not a faff at all. Potatoes in pressure cooker, sausages in the airfryer, veg in a saucepan. It's a meal which takes very little prep time and the airfryer and pressure cooker are 'set it and forget it' appliances, so you just stick it all on and sit down for 10 minutes.
An old fashioned meal made using modern tools.

I made sausage and mash last night. About 15mins for prep (peeling and chopping potatoes and vegetables, then mashing at end), extra 15 mins of cooking time. Its a quick evening meal for us!
But, I've got two growing children, 11&12, who ate active... their dietary requirements are different to older women. I have very little mash.

That depends on the sausages you use and the gravy you make.

Some people are just shit at cooking. My mum is in her 50s and she was an awful cook when we were young. Wouldn’t make mash, would use Smash. Tinned pies. Beige oven food. Ready meals. Jars of sauce. My dad was better but due to his work he wouldn’t always be around to cook for us. They’re both amazing at it now but I grew up learning how to cook from TV shows (Ready Steady Cook was my favourite). My mum learned from me as when I was old enough I would cook meals for us all.

So I think for some people they just weren’t taught even years ago, my mum grew up not eating much at all and wasn’t shown how to cook. It’s not a recent thing that some people don’t have cookery skills.

Sausage and mash is a quick evening meal for us (DP does the cooking and does his own mash, which is delicious). It's also useful for when you haven't had time to go to the shops because there are usually potatoes, onions and milk around, and we tend to keep back-up sausages in the freezer.

I know it isn't the point but onions take 10-15 minutes to sauté.

I've also been impressed with DS food tech GCSE lessons. He has autism and although very strong academically, struggles to cope with coordination and dexterity. Things like doing up buttons, tying a lace or, in the food case, using cutlery and a knife for chopping, grating, peeling etc. It was really important to me that he practiced and learned these life skills so we began cooking at home from an early age. Food tech has really backed this up and he is much more confident and can now make meals and cakes on his own. His recent GCSE practical was a great success and he was thrilled and proud of himself.

YOu are obviously much quicker at peeling potatoes than me. To make enough potatoes for four of us, is not a 1 minute job here.

Roasting sausages in the oven takes longer than 30 minutes I'd say to make them nice and evenly browned. And I often don't have time for this either. I need things that from start to finish are just 30 minutes.

Onion gravy - to make it properly nice with the onions soft and slightly caramelised, means a lot more sauteeing than a couple of minutes.

The night before last I did salmon, noodles and a stir fry. The thing that took the longest was slicing the veg, but even with that, the whole thing took about 20 minutes. The trickiest bit was that I had to cook the noodles, salmon and stir fry simultaneously.

Sausages and mash probably takes me 45 minutes. Sometimes I do it on a Sunday though and make a sausage casserole so there is lots of thick onion gravy which is more like 1.5 hours.

It's not an unhealthy food - something you can enjoy as part of a balanced diet, and we have two portions of veg with it.

It's not great to have lots of processed meat so we have sausages about once a month.

It is. If I'm making sausages, I am more likely to do them in a tray bake with sweet potato, Mediterranean veg etc. It's much quicker prep time than doing mash from scratch

I don't have a pressure cooker or an air fryer (nor do I have the space to run or store them). I also don't have a dishwasher.

So yes, it's a lot of faff for us for one meal.

I am confused, surely not hard to boil an egg, or pasta or rice. How/why is it dying out. There are countless YouTube videos on it surely?!

Just as with the other thread that was specifically about mash, I'm amused at how many people are going "I can't believe anyone thinks mash is a faff, all you have to do is..." and then proceed to list a load of steps that are, frankly, a faff (and miss out the cleaning up part, which is the biggest faff of all). Peel, boil, check to see if they're boiled, add stuff, mash, add more stuff, mash some more.