I can cook reasonably well (I like food and have ~40 years of practice).

> If the recipe calls for chopped onions, chop them before you turn on the burner. Later you can work on parallelizing the process

For most meals I start the slowing-cooking item first and then start on the others once it is in the over / pot or similar. E.g. a roast joint. I'll get it in the oven and then prep the roasting veggies (e.g. potatoes and parsnips), get them in the oven and then start peeling the green veg (which only need cooking for a few minutes). Over the years I've learned how long things need and how long I take to prep them, so my timings usually work out.

Chinese cooking (or at least my take on it) is my main exception: given the short cooking times of some things, and the large number of ingredients / dishes, I tend to prep everything first, and then start cooling simultaneously.

The other obvious exception is using my smoker, where a meal might stay in it for more than 5 hours. I say 'meal' rather than 'meat' because I also use the smoker to cook chilli and tagine.

I'm probably overcooking everything.

Overcooking meats to be on the safe side, and overcooking the veggies, because they are in with the meat for the same amount of time, but they should be in for less, etc..

I guess I'm missing out on taste and nutrients aswell due to this?

You are, more or less depends on components and how you process them. The only way to figure it out is trial-and-error, sounds generic but it's true.

While I was unemployed for 9 months I got a brilliant idea to learn cooking outside of sandwiches and very basic meals. One of the main dishes I'd wanted to learn was boiled rice which everyone around me always fail to do properly except SEA expats. I was surprised that for each shape and size of rice I could buy there are 2 or 3 different sources and/or cultivars which behave differently but people tend to cook them the same way.

offtopic: where you got Space Rangers from?

I found that a good quality instant-read thermometer(e.g. Thermapen) was a huge help for building confidence when cooking meat. If you don’t have one, I’d strongly recommend getting one.

For most meals I cook, onions are one of the slowest cooking items. I'm vegetarian so there's no meat, and I avoid items like potatoes and parsnips in most meals specifically because they're slow.

> Remember the initial feeling of navigation by HJKL? And how hindbrain those keystrokes are now?

Totally unrelated, but I have a dvorak keyboard layout, and navigation using HJKL is one of the things I hate most about vi. Sure, I could rebind it locally, but that doesn't help me when I use a remote machine. Perhaps this is what being left handed feels like.

I'm a heavy VIM user, and I pretty much only use J and K, almost never H and L. Pretty much everything else is more efficient anyway (w and b to jump to word boundaries, f / t to go to a specific character on a line, etc.) so by the time I'm resorting to that kind of navigation, I often use the arrows (or even the mouse!).