It's a bit bewildering how many people (mostly men) there are around that cannot cook properly. They have lived their entire life depending on others to eat something decent. Learning to cook is often cited as a way to impress and woo others, but the primary beneficiary is oneself. Being able to cook well is freeing.

It's easy to practice because you have to eat anyway. When you end up with leftover ingredients, come up with a way to use that in a different meal. Repeat every day, and soon you will be a master.

I can almost always improvise a good meal for a group with no recipes, using only ingredients at hand.

I disagree. Some people cut their own hair or build their own furniture and would say everyone needs to know how to do that stuff instead of depending on and paying someone else. There's a reason cooking is also a profession, and there's nothing wrong with depending on them.

People who like to cook don't seem to understand that others (like me) just hate cooking and have zero interest in learning since it wouldn't bring me any benefits. I can order healthy food, I'm not overspending, and I can eat stuff that would be a pain in the ass to cook at home. On the other hand, I also hate exercising, but it brings health and mental benefits that are undeniable.

In summary, just like I don't want to cut my own hair or building my own furniture, I have no problem paying a professional to prepare my food.

People don't _require_ furniture or a haircut (i.e. you can survive without them). Everyone _needs_ to eat. Opting out of knowing how to take care of your own basic needs just because you can currently pay someone else to do it seems very shortsighted.

Fair enough. So assuming you need a house to survive, do you need to know how to build one? If your toilet breaks, do you know how to fix it? Again, some people would argue that calling "the guy" is always shortsighted and wasteful because you can do it by yourself. Cooking is no different. Maybe a couple of decades ago, but not today.

The difference here, that parent was pointing at, is that you eat every single day. You might need to fix your toilet one day, or get a house a few times in your life, but eating is something that you can't get around.

Just like you shouldn't depend on someone to dress your, bathe you and wipe your ass for you (even though that's a whole profession too), depending on someone else to cook for you because you can't, puts you in a vulnerable spot.

I don’t think that those are good analogies. Cooking for yourself is more akin to bathing yourself or wiping your own butt. It’s super easy if you grow up assuming that you should be doing those things yourself and unbelievably expensive if you pay others to do it for you.

Do you have advice for someone that did not grow up assuming they should be cooking for them self?

I've been making an effort to improve myself and it has been rewarding but honestly cooking for myself has been one of the steepest learning curves in my life. It is starting to pay off after months of effort motivated by a once-a-century global disaster.

This is not an approachable skill, at all.

Speaking for myself; one of the most meaningful pieces to me was understanding the "why". For example, if you read a cookbook, it will tell you precisely "what" to do. A good cookbook or a recipe-like youtube video will tell you "how" to do it. If all you ever do is make that one recipe, the "what" and the "how" can get you there if that is how your brain works (mine doesn't).

Understanding "why" this step is before that step, or "why" the temperature needs to be as it suggests, or "why" the ingredients are in that ratio... that unlocks an entirely new level of cooking. Now you can go off-recipe or make ingredient replacements to accommodate what's in the fridge or try something you've never even seen before with reasonably high confidence that it will come out well.

It is like the difference between memorizing your multiplication table and really understanding multiplication. Or the difference between being able to follow directions from point A to point B and knowing the area well enough to chart a path to the destination regardless of roadblocks.

In any case, I am a science nerd (as I assume many of you are). For me, the show Good Eats (or honestly, most of what Alton Brown does) was a refreshing and educational angle that developed and supported a lot of my understanding about "why" as it relates to food.

Unfortunately a lot of online recipes and cookbooks are for people looking to make something different and special, not looking for an everyday meal.

Being a home cook (as opposed to being a chef) is actually a lot like programming. Learn a few simple patterns and you can recombine them in different ways. Look for patterns in any recipes that you follow and then you can reuse them in other situations. I can give some examples.

Basic cream sauce from fat (butter or pan grease), liquid (normally milk or stock), flour and seasoning.

The many ways of cooking eggs.

Basic grilled cheese

Seasoning with salt and pepper

tasting and adjusting as you go

Pancake variations

Biscuit variations

Quick-breads

Temperatures of doneness for meats (there are charts, get a good meat thermometer).

Chopping (you really need at least one good knife).

For example, I can make a very nice sandwich by combining white sauce, a fried egg, and a grilled cheese. (Put a fried egg and cheese and inside the sandwich, lightly coat with white sauce, fry as with grilled cheese. Season with salt and pepper.

I make biscuits, boil pasta or veggies and cover them with a very similar white sauce.

Boil macaroni and some broccoli, add cheese to the white sauce heating until it melts, combine both in a baking pan with some breadcrumbs on top, bake until it looks set (25-35 minutes at 350(f) is a good bet).

Basically the idea is to learn a few basic recipes (each a different ‘sub process’ or function) and use or them combine them with other ingredients that you have.

Taste every so often to ensure that you don’t make something inedible. Give it your full attention.

Sometimes you’ll make something truly weird and other times you’ll make something amazing and different that no one’s ever had before.

Just don’t burn your house down and don’t deep fry anything until you’ve got plenty of experience and know the dangers.

Obviously the recipes I’m giving are very vague, thats kind of the point as it is all up to your taste, which is different from mine. The key is paying attention to what you think is good.

I'd recommend starting out with recipes, or books aimed toward beginners. I was in this spot, and Bittman's "The Basics" book was amazingly useful.

It certainly takes a lot of time to learn, especially as an adult without another person to teach them, and the wasted time and money from a failed dish can be greatly discouraging.

The approach I took in college was to ease in to it, not by slowly dialing down the amount of times I ate out, but by buying boxed meals and adding to them:

Buy a cheap food that you can stand that is boxed (mac and cheese, canned soup, ramen) and add some vegetables or pre-cooked meat you like to fill it out. Cook the vegetables with the meal and follow the directions on the box. Even after eight years, I still do this several times a week to have easy cooking days.

Next, try cooking something a little more involved but use a prepared base. Buy pasta or a pizza crust and add your own toppings plus store-bought tomato sauce, for example. Again, the directions should be on the packaging.

Next, choose some foods that you like but don't know how to make yourself. Find a simple recipe and pair it down to the bare minimum. For example, I like lasagna so I found a simple recipe that only had a half-dozen ingredients and bought noodles that don't need to be pre-cooked.

Mix it up with a fully prepared meal (either order take-out or a frozen pizza or something) once or twice a week. When you get started cooking, it can be easy to miss a key nutrient that you need and having a cheat-day where you eat something you're more used to and can't mess up makes things much easier.

When you're starting up, stick to 1-2 cuisine types. Each cuisine has its own staples and commonly used spices, that they combine in different ways. Figure out what makes good staples for your chosen cuisine and how to prepare them (not necessarily from scratch). Find the commonly-used spices and add them to everything, experimenting to see how much you want to add.

For example, Italian food uses a lot of pasta or pizza crusts. Fresh pasta tastes much better than boxed pasta, but isn't shelf-stable. Pasta cooking times are short but generally somewhat precise. To cook Italian pasta, you'd want to learn how to tell that pasta is fully cooked.

Mexican food uses rice and tortillas instead of pasta and pizza crusts. Pre-cooking your tortillas makes a huge difference. Cooking rice in a rice-cooker is easy, and it's do-able in a pot. The trick to cooking rice in a pot is that, since it's steam-cooked, checking the rice early can really slow down and mess-up the process. The first several times will be slow and messy, but once you figure out how long to wait it's actually quite low effort.

First and foremost get a thermometer, until you can trust you experience, cook meat with a thermometer. You will get better results. I am color blind so I use a thermometer to this day.

Then start with the basics, as they translate between meat and most non-starch vegetables:

Learn to fry. Learn to grill. Learn to broil. learn to roast. learn to stew.

breading and frying a mushroom is no different than breading and frying a chicken strip other than some temp adjustments and length of time. Frying is not the healthiest but it can be offset some with better healthier oil. That being said, it covers up a multitude of food sins. As log as you let fried food drain and dry it's hard to mess it up.

Second learn the 5 basic tastes salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami and how they blend. Sweet and salty blend, sweet and sour blend to tart, sweet and bitter cancel each other to brine. Sweet will dominate umami, salty will enhance umami, bitter and sour will compound each other. Once you know these it is really easy to taste ingredients and know if they will go together. It also gives you the knowledge of how to undue over flavoring. If it's too sour you can usually offset with sweet to get it to tart. If it is too bitter you can usually balance it with salty and sweet to mute it.

Learn to make a starch, take your pick noodles, rice, potatoes etc. Then learn to enhance them with your 5 basic tastes.

Learn to make 3-4 vegetables, green beans, broccoli, squash are all really safe and hard to get wrong. They can be bland without enough salt but are pretty safe, they still don't really taste bad if you overcook them.

So basically learn to cook meat, a starch and some vegetables and flavor it, you would be surprised how far you can get with a steak, salt and pepper (salty, bitter, umami). Same with a piece of chicken, a lemon, salt and pepper (sour, salty, bitter). Stick to your basic ingredients for flavor, salt, pepper, sugar, lemon, msg or soy sauce (but remember soy sauce brings salty and umami in one package), should cover the basic flavors. Once you have this you can taste other ingreedients and know how they will blend into a flavor profile. Take the chicken example what if we reduce the lemon and pepper and add mustard. Mustard brings both sour and bitter. I honestly never tried it, but I know I could make it into a dish that taste good.

Most vegetables can be treated like meat when seasoning, starches not so much stick to salty and umami for now with starches.

Once you are comfortable with that, learn to use butter creams, eggs and cheeses in dishes particularly your starches.

Once you are comfortable with that expand on spices and learn how to make a mirepoix and the Cajun variant. You would be surprised how much this mix enhances even the most simple dish. This is where you level up, people will talk about how good you cook when you get to this basic level of cooking. At this point you will have the knowledge to decide if you want to keep going or if you are comfortable with your skills. You will be able to create a decent meal no matter the ingredients you have on hand at this point. From here it is really if you want to get into more nuanced disciplines of cooking e.g bread baking, BBQ, sous vide, etc.

If you get your meat to temp without overcooking, have a good handle on the basic tastes, can make a handful of vegetables and a starch, you will have a good foundation. This can be achieved in 2-3 months of cooking at least 2 times a week.

That would be true if by cooking you mean boiling some pasta for 10 minutes or eating some scrabble eggs. That's hardly cooking.

Even if you don’t “cook”, you can learn to be a food assembler.

Meal prep IIFYM style can be super easy. I cook a lot of things in my pressure cooker for 4 servings at a time (oats, chickpeas). I often just get veggie soup and add chickpeas for lunch. It’s way more satisfying than most of the quick things you can get near an office.

A lot of the staples that are disappointing when bought are amazing when you cook from scratch (aforementioned steel cut oats and chickpeas). Don’t get instant anything... it’s just too sad.

> learning to cook and prepare your own food.

> learn to budget money and manage expenses.

if you've never done this before, i very, very strongly suggest you look at how much eating out is costing you.

my wife and i are saving literally thousands of dollars a month.

My experience is the same. Also when two people cook it is far easier and quicker. Learning to cook also gives you freedom. You can vary the taste for the same dish. One thing to note - its safer to cook veggies than meat if you are still learning. But one tends to get better in this art.

Looking at my monthly eat-out cost is a real wake up for me.

If I don’t have prepared food or a snack it’s very easy to be tempted to grab something quick and overeat.

Quarantining made me realize just how much I spend on food and alcohol. And while don't get me wrong, I love a good meal and a night out with friends, we will definitely be reeling that in a bit even after all restrictions are lifted. And a night in cooking a great meal and opening up a nice bottle of wine (that is much cheaper than anything we could buy at a restaurant) can be very satisfying too.

One thing that is a bit hard to get around is that we live in a city, and some friends are single, and that going "out" to a public place like a bar or restaurant gives them the feeling that they haven't "given up" on meeting someone for the night, but going to someone's house means its orders of magnitude less likely that someone will just pop up. Even amongst married friends, the spontaneity of having someone just happen to be at the same place you are is a big thrill that just isn't going to happen if they are sitting in my living room. I live in a neighborhood where there is a main drag where most bars/restaurants are, so this happens fairly often.

But taking a step back, my discretionary spending has dropped by 95% and my bank account has swelled at a rate that I could have never imagined without much drop in my overall happiness at all and this is likely to lead to changes in spending patterns for years to come.

> my discretionary spending has dropped by 95% and my bank account has swelled at a rate that I could have never imagined without much drop in my overall happiness at all and this is likely to lead to changes in spending patterns for years to come.

this is somewhat inherent in the system. they message you that you need to be out and about to be happy. it's the capitalistic way. Also a bit of why a lot of jobs work you so hard so you are too tired to form any thoughts on the system at large.

I think a more sustainable economy is what america (and the world) needs. the growth at all costs has been very, very bad for our world. for instance, one unintended consequence of mass manufacturing of food is that to get reliable, consistent bread they stripped everything that made it good (including time spent fermenting) and then added in a few choice macro nutrients and now, I suspect, those types of products are causing problems health wise on a macro scale. if people went down to their local baker and bought naturally leavened breads with more wholesome flours instead of wonder bread et al we might as a country be less sick. there are other examples of long term costs associated with short term thinking. (rise in allergies and planting male only trees because of a 1940s department of agriculture recommendation come to mind but there are others) not to say it's all been bad but there have been many bad outcomes.

I hear you- I think an alternate way to view this is that I had acclimated myself to preferring the short-term dopamine hit of going out to a nice meal or having drinks with friends over the long term happiness of being more financially secure. I do truly feel a lot of this stems from my single days when you had a zero percent chance of meeting someone unless you were out someplace. Now its just a very antiquated habit.

I do a lot of cooking, and agree there as well. We have a lot of processes that sped up our food preparation and maintained say 90% of the original quality of the product, but those losses add up and while there is much we can measure in terms of what makes our food good in terms of taste and nutrition, there seems to be much we can not. There may only be a subtle difference between chicken soup made with canned stock or bullion when you are sitting at the table, but I make my own stock, and often find a bowl of soup made from it for lunch will fill me until dinner easily, a can of Campbell's, not so much.

Especially since quarantine started, I have done tons more cooking, often of rich "slow" food. My friends have asked how much weight I have gained, and I have actually lost a few pounds despite getting much less activity in. I find myself much more content with smaller portion sizes, perhaps the net calories are actually fewer.

Living in Europe, I remember the staple of every neighborhood was a bakery and with every meal there was bread on the table. The day started and ended with that loaf. The best I can say for the part of the US i live in now is artisan bakeries that make desserts.

> those types of products are causing problems health wise on a macro scale

I suspect the same thing with most of the food supply in the US. Markets are very good at driving the price of good down while maintaining the quality just "good enough" to satisfy the consumer. Ex. you can get a hamburger for $1 at McD's or 6 nuggets for $1 at BurgerKing. I don't think large scale agriculture can provide high quality food to the masses.

How do you managed budget and food?

Not who you are replying to but I recently (2.5 months ago) started using YNAB again and have fallen in love with it. The last time I tried it was when it was desktop software but their newer web-based version with transaction import/sync is a game changer for me.

As for food I can't really help there. I ended up writing my own app to manage/track expiration dates for what I have but that's barely the tip of the ice-burg. I hope to integrate with my recipe app (Paprika) to work on meal-planning and picking recipes I like while trying to use up the stuff that will go bad first.

Used YNAB a lot to develop discipline, then switched to Lunch Money [0]. It's being worked on by a solopreneur; she's awesome.

The app is, I think, a natural evolution for the YNABer who got the discipline and now doesn't need to track every single dollar all the time.

[0] https://lunchmoney.app

Thank you for the shoutout, and that's wonderful to hear! :D

this is a very un-HN answer, and i wish i had something sexier for you, but: Excel.

we look at statements from our various accounts, enter into a data tab, then group expenses into categories: house (elec, water, cable, etc), food, vehicles (gas, tolls, oil, loan, etc) fun (spotify, netflix, etc).

as the saying goes, you cant manage what you dont measure.

Mint from Intuit. The free level works quite well for me.

Definitely a good, broad list that can apply to everyone. I feel like the last two are especially relevant today in a world where the internet dominates my generation and we're in a culture that replaces instead of repairs.

I am definitely guilty of failing on your second to last bullet, and I should work on that.

Re: replace instead of repair, one issue is that replacement parts for e.g. electronics can end up being more expensive than a new and updated replacement (with factory warranty).

I've tried to fix a deep fryer I got for free, the switch was broken but it was a pretty generic flip switch with a light in it, the local electronics shop had a replacement for like €2 or so. That didn't fix it though, I suspect there's a temperature safety somewhere inside that isn't working right anymore. So far I've had it filled, warmed up, tried out, turned off, cleaned, opened up, etc four or five times already without having fixed it.

It'll be €40 to buy a new one. It's probably fixable, or I could probably replace only the heating unit, but just the heating unit (that is compatible with this one) is likely impossible to get and no cheaper than a new one.

But that's just one example. I for one am interested in seeing products that cost more but that are of provable higher quality and repairability.

There's some youtube channels that disassemble electric tools and point out at all the small or big things that make it good or bad / cheap, things like the kind of plastic used, bushings vs bearings, open vs closed bearings, etc.

I used to have a similar list of things to do daily on my whiteboard. These are items that I can easily stray from and have to remind myself to come back to and reinforce.

In my personal experience, these things have a much great impact on my well-being and quality of life and they are within my control. In contrast with ideal of how I think society/world should be.

If you become accountable to the things that are within your control (ie. thoughts and actions) you will quickly notice that trying to control things beyond that is futile and a source of frustration.

++ pick up a social hobby that you enjoy doing with others

++ Learn to meditate

++ Creativity is fostered by learning deep and wide. Learn something outside of computers... etc

These seem obvious and fundamental yet devalued by school in terms of preparing kids for the “real world”. This disconnect only seems to be getting worse from my perspective.

My mom was very involved in our education and used to say “education starts at home”.

I feel like this mindset is not shared in today’s society to our detriment.

Ha, paramount, this is important above all for a healthy mind and soul to be productive

Amazing points. Thanks!