"I don't cook because I don't decide what to eat until I am so hungry that a Chinese take-out leaflet is appealing, and when I tried to make bison casserole with an empty fridge instead of ordering Chinese, it didn't work out for me". Got it, Oatmeal.

Sorry, did I kill the frog?

That summary looks about right to me. Though there is probably some value in pointing out that a lot of people who try to get into cooking really don't know where to start and end up looking in exactly the wrong place, e.g. a recipe dependent on a large number of specialty items (I'm certainly not going to start my brother on something like that).