You can start by putting together a list of ingredients you like. Many of these will be common ingredients for multiple recipes and go together in different ways. Nearly every time I go grocery shopping I get these things because my SO and I like them.

EG: chicken, beef, tomato, onion, peppers, mushroom, cheese, rice, quinoa, pasta, potato, carrot, broccoli, spinach, asparagus, corn, sauce, etc.

Make sure you have a good stock of different spices, salt, and pepper.

Start with something simple like just chicken pasta and each meal add in something from above suited towards your taste. As you run out of ingredients you'll realize you can still make good dishes. If you run out of pasta you can skip it completely or sub it out with quiona.

I often play the "lets see what I can make with what is still in the fridge" game :D

That's the way I started when I first moved out of home - very simply. I still remember wondering how I should cook a steak; how would I know when it was cooked? How do I know what to heat the pan to? Etc....

To go a bit philosophical, you have to lose the fear of engaging with your food and the cooking process. Don't be scared to play with your food while it's cooking. Smell it often, listen to the noises it makes, don't be worried about moving it around the pan and even take notice of how it moves - is it sticking to the pan? Does it seem a little dry? Does it smell good? Start doing this with the simplest of things - some oil in a pan and a steak or sausages, for example.

Don't worry about following recipes to the exact letter all the time, unless you're doing something like baking where the chemistry is more important to get accurate. If your time isn't exact or the temperature is a little off or you use more than a tablespoon of oil, see what happens. See what happens if you add salt, or if you don't. Observe it while it's happening. Don't be scared to taste something off the pan. If it doesn't taste good, ask yourself why? Then ask yourself how you might fix it.

Once you're not afraid to do that, cooking becomes a lot more fun and intuitive. Then you can follow recipes while engaging with them and the food.

I feel like this is something that many people who hate cooking or who are scared of cooking miss. Cooking shouldn't be a "follow the instructions to the letter otherwise one wrong step and boom!" process. Instead it's a highly interactive, very sensory thing.

Thanks for the tip. Yeah, the game of "lets see what I can make with what is still in the fridge" sounds totally fun! :D.

Yeah, you were right in the above comment that that ability does come from having some experience. But the "let's see what's in the fridge" game is a great way to get that experience! You'll undoubtedly mess a few things up, but that's just the process of learning.

It's weird... the more I think about it, the more I ask myself - "it's just like programming, another cool skill to master - why I'm so afraid of experimenting?"...

If I could upvote this a thousand times, I would. The problem, however, is that making a mistake in programming is not so painful. Making a mistake in cooking costs money and is often pretty embarrassing. I can easily see why you'd be more afraid of experimenting here.

Agree strongly RE embarrassing part - for now I just gave up on experimenting while cooking for friends; I tried it once, and they laugh at me ever since. Costs is also a factor, but I notice I'm afraid of experimenting even with small dishes and cheap ingredients the fridge is stocked full of.

I'm starting to realize now that it's just a stupid fear I need to overcome. I'm glad this thread forced me to think more about my attitude towards cooking.

Feel free to write to me privately anytime. I'd love for you to try some of the lessons on CookAcademy and let me know if it helps, too. One thing we're trying to reduce that fear of embarrassment is have a sort of automated helper when you're done. You answer questions about what went wrong and we provide feedback for how to improve it the next time. We also track your progress so you can get a good gauge of where you stand. Are either of those things helpful to you?

As a bachelor I do it like every day, two times per day ;)

(Yes, sometimes is a really hard game.)

I learnt by starting to cook Indian food when I moved here. A lot of Indian food has the same set of spices and similar procedures. Soon I realized that I can experiment with the ingredients and vary the spices to change flavor and it did not have an adverse impact on the final outcome. That caused me to loose the trepidation of experimenting in the kitchen and I do it with all cuisines now. And it has worked out well, cause I generally can manage to put a meal together with whatever is left in the fridge.

Years ago I bought a vegan cookbook, which had week-long recipe plans in it. I'm not vegan, but without the "meat + sauce" or "meat + veg" options the recipes had to be so much more inventive. It gave me some good ideas, a taste for chickpeas, and a willingness to add beans to anything that looks boring.

A flatmate has a book called simply "Saucen" (German for "Sauces") which provides a good basis for many meals.