to ask for cooking tips or recipes that will make me want to cook and eat at home?

[SquirrelFan]

Inspired by the 'Do you go out to eat less' thread: Many people on that thread, and a few others, like the 'Things I don't buy even though I could afford to' have stated that they prefer their own cooking to what they can eat in restaurants.

I have almost never felt that way. Yes, beans on toast at home is probably better than at a caff, but any decent Chinese, pizza, Turkish, even roast dinner is always better out than at (my) home. Everything is brought out when it's hot, there is charring and crispiness that I doubt I'd be able to replicate, and spices and cuts of meat that I can't ever find at the supermarket. Even when I used Gousto to liven things up, it was a juggling act using lots of pans and the result was always--fine. Plus there is all the washing up!
The only thing I like better at home is pasta, not sure why.

Can anyone give me examples of meals/techniques/recipes that taste so good on any given Tuesday that I'd rather eat it than the schnitzel at the pub down the road or the pizza at the little Italian place or the stand where they add pickled veg and roasted aubergine to your fluffy felafel flatbread? Or are people exaggerating?

YABU: It's you! Cooking better than restaurant food is accessible, and here are my tips:
YANBU: It's them. They're exaggerating, or have no tastebuds and are happy to eat bland boring food.

It's really easy to cook really tasty food at home.

Some top tips:

• think about what gives dishes flavour - it varies by cuisine, but think about onions, garlic, celery, salt and pepper and spices
• BBC good food website has some fab easy recipes
• if you're cooking Chinese food - high temperatures and sesame oil are key to flavour and texture
• if you're cooking tomato-based Italian dishes, low, slow cooking and soffrito (finally chopped onions, carrot and celery, gently fried) are called for
• most Mexican dishes are vastly improved by the addition of smoked paprika
• Indian dishes - don't use curry powder! Dry fry your lightly crushed whole spices until they start releasing their smell (cumin and coriander seeds are a good starting point), then add oil and onion. Add powdered spices - turmeric, gram masala etc at the point you add your chunky ingredients (protein, veg etc) and stir it all round to coat it.
• mustard adds lots of flavour to stews, sauces etc
• homemade soup is better than anything in a restaurant

The secret is to pick a few simple things, perfect them, evolve from there.

What's your favourite type of food? Start there.

You'll need to repeat repeat repeat until you perfect it.

The secret to restaurant food is A TON of butter. We clocked that ages ago. We simply wouldn't dream of adding quite so much fat to our meals at home.
Having said that, I can make a much nicer curry than my local Indian. I buy spices in bulk from an Asian shop and whizz them in a coffee grinder to make my own masala. Add protein of choice, plenty of veg and bung it in the oven to tendorise the meat.
And most of my meals are one pot and cooked in bulk so washing up is minimal and I don't have to cook every day.

I make a few things I can’t buy in restaurants locally.

My home made schnitzel is a hundred times nicer than the one in the pub! I mix panko and home-made breadcrumbs with garlic powder and paprika. Bash the chicken flat. Dip in egg wash, dip in breadcrumbs and repeat. Fry in a mix of butter and vegetable oil. Serve with a crusty bread and salad or home made coleslaw and new potatoes.

Some recipes I simply can’t buy as good in the local restaurants. A slow-cooked lamb, cherry tomato and bean casserole. Stuffed peppers. Organic Chicken breast grilled with leek and feta cheese. Butternut Squash and sage risotto. Amazing roast pork in the air fryer. Chilli con carne made with high quality organic mince. Toad in the hole. Cauliflower cheese with crispy jacket potatoes. Chicken soup. Jambalaya.

I do think it’s a question of practicing recipes over and over

BBC good food is a good shout per pp.
I think the cookbook has to match the effort or time of the person. I go back to Leon again and again, but I also have a number of quite specific cookbooks for Chinese, Levantine etc cuisines…

I think it’s perfectly possible to cook as good food and occasionally better at home, but it’s hard to get the full shebang especially for some cuisines…

ETA - I quite frequently go to specialty supermarkets - there a a lot in the ingredients for Asian/middle eastern in particular

We use a meal kit here in Nz it is great to experience new tastes and ideas.
Helped tp find other dishes spices I would never of tried
Last night was a pene pasta with tomato pesto spinach white sauce it was very substantial and lovely with garlic bread..family all enjoyed it as well.

I would say find a chef you like and notice what spices, herbs or condiments pop up repeatedly in their recipes.

I also think for me, when I think “home cooking” I’m always trying to balance a plate to ensure good nutrition. However, for those nights you want out to feel like a treat or restaurant quality, I have had to let that go and really lean into more fat, salt etc. It frequently gets news coverage that celebrity chef recipes are often not well balanced and I think that’s fine if you are looking for a one off treat. If you feel bad about it, slap a salad or some roasted/steamed greens on the side.

So tonight I made a Greek ish dish.
Roasted a tray of chicken wings I'd marinaded in lemon juice, pepper and garlic. (Wings just cos that's what I had, any cut would work)
Very easy and quite forgiving in cooking time because cooking in the marinade keeps the meat moist.
While cooking I mixed chopped cucumber, tomato, red onion and parsley.
Flatbread on a plate, spread over some houmous, add the salad and tasty chicken on top.
Add yoghurt and spicy sauce as you like.

Generally herbs/spices/seasoning are the key to tasty food. And fat/butter if in a restaurant!

Buy the book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. It gives great explanations of how each impacts cooking and flavour and has some really lovely recipes.

For me the secret is making the same recipe repeatedly but tweaking things - eg adding grated Parmesan to breadcrumbs for schnitzel, or balancing a tomato sauce with a touch of sweetness. There’s no one universal trick, but lots of different techniques that make a difference to your cooking.

Theres very little every day food that tastes better from a pub/restaurant than when I cook it myself. I save eating out for things I can’t cook as well which for me is Asian/Chinese food.

A lot will depend on what you like and what restaurants you go too.

I can cook dishes that are better than something I would get in some restaurants but what I can’t do is replicate all the little plates I get in a Tapas restaurant or Japanese restaurant. I can do a curry but not the 3 side orders. A lot of it is the effort and getting all the ingredients. I also wouldn’t bother trying to replicate a 3 course meal from a fancy French restaurant.

Love And Lemons is a great resource for simple, tasty recipes. And Smitten Kitchen as well.

I think this might be part of the problem; I really enjoy meals with lots of textures/toppings/components, like tacos. That all takes time.

And @Hollowvoice that sounds lovely, but where do you find a hummus that you think is really amazing, and flatbreads that are authentic-tasting? I can't usually get everything in one shop--by the time I've ordered/gone to specialty shops for each part of a meal, it costs more and is more trouble than an at-home meal should be. Like @AbzMoz says, it's hard to get the full shebang.

@WhatsHerNameThingummy I will try to make schnitzel at home. I am discouraged by our non-nonstick pan. How do you make good coleslaw that doesn't take forever? Do you slice the cabbage by hand? My food processor doesn't somehow cut the cabbage into the right size/shape pieces (not longer fine strips, but makes short hard grated bits). I've looked for 'slaw mix' that I've heard about but haven't seen in the shops.

Thanks for all the replies--my takeaway (no pun intended) is that it takes time, practice, effort, and sometimes money to make really good food at home. Now I need to figure out if it is worth it!

Get yourself a good quality mandolin. Makes an easy job of veg prep for your toppings. I have Joseph Joseph from Dunelm and it takes 5 minutes to whip up coleslaw including clean up.
If you are using your processor, you need to use slicing attachment, not a grater. And use the fine side. You can even get a julienne attachment for most processors for other "fancy salad" veg.
Hummus can be whipped up in a similar time in food processor using tinned chickpeas. A jar of tahini will last you ages and you can adjust the olive oil/lemon juice ratio depending on your taste.
And once you have your home-made hummus, you can use it to make falafel... Airfryer is great for that if you are calorie-conscious or use a thick bottom pan to deep fry it.
It all sounds very intimidating and slow but once you get a hang of it, it is really a quick job.

To be fair, a lot of restaurant sides are just frozen and you can buy the exact same thing.

Gyoza, tempura prawns, paratha, kebabs, samosas you can buy in the supermarket frozen section.

Learning how to cook rice properly helps a lot too, then all you need is a main and you’re sorted.

I just take recipes from Smitten Kitchen and from Recipe Tin Eats

https://www.recipetineats.com/

https://smittenkitchen.com/

We quite often do rollover cooking to make the number of components less onerous, particularly during bbq season.

for example last Saturday we had a fairly conventional bbq - burgers on baps, corn on cobs and a slaw salad (we do the Leon cookbook one often)
but at the same time we threw whole aubergines on the coals for babaganoush, did a batch of chicken skewers (oil, salt, pepper), mushrooms in a miso sesame oil, and bacon wrapped spring onions.
the babaganoush went with some more of the salad and flatbreads, with homemade hummus and feta-whip (one block of feta, one pack of cooked beetroot, pinch of salt and a squeeze of lemon). Some of it also went over some pasta for a lunch with a few tomatoes.
The chicken went over couscous with a simple guac (which was also used for breakfast toast) The mushrooms pimped up ramen (normal packet noodles, add some freezer veg, a fried egg). The bacon and spring onions went into a carbonara-type pasta.

re your cabbage chopping - I use a knife but we also have a mandolin (DH uses, I’m too scared to) and our processor (kenwood) has a coleslaw blade thing.

@CraftyNavySeal I’ve tried frozen ones & they haven’t compared and I don’t tend to eat in restaurants that do that.

@SquirrelFanyep and I dislike eating similar flavours and like to mix it up each day. That’s one thing I like about Gousto, it reduced my food waste.

I have made schnitzel which was good but not good as the one I had in Austria 😆

Also they aren’t really the sides I go often go for.

Marry me chicken is a good recipe

I don't think home cooking is about making food that's objectively better than what you can get in a good restaurant. Rather it's about making food more to your taste. For example you might like extra garlic, lots of aubergine, extra smooth hummus, etc. Once you've made a recipe a few times you can customise it to be exactly the way you want it to be.

I also think it depends on what restaurants people are going to. If you're comparing to Tony Carvery or Wetherspoons it's not exactly rocket science. If you're trying to beat a Michelin star place that's quite a bit trickier.

Regardless, my top tip is to start with quality ingredients. If you have a local fishmongers, greengrocers etc then use them if you can. That goes extra for a decent bakery (I don't eat any bread from supermarkets personally but that may be a bit extreme). But in terms of meat, veg, fruit and other basic ingredients you can get decent stuff in Aldi and the like too but you need to know what you're looking for (just not bread).

Roast pork in the air fryer? Sounds amazing - how do you do it?! X

I often feel robbed if I go to a restaurant. I have a meal that I pay a fortune for and its often not as nice as what I could have made myself.

I freeze lots. Ive just made a big batch of chilli.

Flatbread is so easy to make - just use half yogurt to half bread flour. Knead it a bit then leave it on the window sill for an hour before rolling out and cooking on a griddle. I add chia seeds to mine. We often have this with little plates of salad, olives, hummus and chicken breasts with packet spice mix thrown into the airfryer.

I have a cheat hummus, I stuck peanut butter instead of tahini once as I had run out and it tasted great! Now Ive stuck to that recipe.

I work crazy hours so everything I cook has to be done quickly.

I have a few cook books and cook some stuff on repeat but I have recently been asking chatgpt for a recipe with what I have left in fridge. Ive had some great recipes this way.

My top tips are:

• salt...you'll need to add more flaky sea salt than you think to things, to make them taste like they do in a restaurant!
• find a few people you like the look of on e.g. Insta or Substack and pay attention. I like 5 o'Clock Apron, SmittenKitchen (I've been reading her blog for nearly twenty years and have had very few failures from there!), Felicity Cloake, Rukhmini Iyer, and Samin Nosrat.
• try and make your life easier - you'll be much less inclined to cook at home (and will pine for restaurants) if it always feels Ike hard work. Make flavoured herb and garlic butter for the freezer. Always have panko, sherry vinegar and tahini in (or your equivalents). Make a massive batch of concentrated slow-cooked tomato sauce and freeze it in big ice cube trays, then you always have the start of a pasta dish or a sauce for fish.
• more salt (see above) and more butter...
• find what works for you and always have the key ingredients on the freezer: I always have chopped spinach, green beans, fish fillets, grated mozzarella and the aforementioned tomato sauce, also chorizo!!

Nigella’s How To Eat is a good book for basics that roll over to other things, for example if you can make a custard, you can make ice cream, or a white sauce, you can do a cheese sauce for lots of things. I think getting really confident (and competent) at core recipes gives you a good foundation to experiment with emailing things to your own taste, which then tastes better (to you) than eating out.