Read cooking blogs or watch cooking shows and you probably get the impression that cooking is way more time consuming and requires way more ingredients than are really required to put food on the table. But there are whole cookbooks of recipes that use just a few ingredients plus a handful of standard pantry staples.

As you cook you also learn a lot of shortcuts you can really get off with most of the time. Using lemon juice from a jar is really fine. You don't need to have that sprig of parsely. You can probably get away with using dried herbs rather than fresh for many purposes.

Absolutely agree with all of this. I think a person trying to dip their toe into cooking could easily get the impression online that it's way more precious and difficult than it really is.