Bobcat-Ag said:ATM9000 said:
There are 2 reasons people want to learn how to cook better: eating healthier and eating cheaper. Healthier is absolutely a given vs eating out all the time.
For the second one though, don't learn recipes, learn techniques. Learn how to stir fry or how to make your own dressings and marinades and how to build salads, how to grill, etc. The more techniques you get good at, the more on autopilot you will go in sort of making your own recipes on the fly. Doing this will get you to start stocking a refrigerator with foods you both actually like and will use and therefore will cut down on your use of UberEats.
This sounds counterintuitive but start measuring how good you are cooking by how little waste you have weekly rather than how many online and Youtube recipes you are able to follow. There's a ton of online stuff that tastes great and is easy, but very little of it focuses on techniques but rather the focus is on just combining stuff.
I don't think my wife and I got really really good at cooking for the family until maybe 2 years ago. At this point, we don't even buy things like jarred sauces or salad dressings or marinades because we both started focusing so much on technique that we know how to make all that stuff with very little waste and more importantly, we know how to improvise and be creative with substitutions when we run out of things.
I like your thoughts about focusing on technique, but how would you suggest doing that? Pulling a number of recipes that require a specific technique and then cooking them till you are extremely comfortable with it? Them moving on?
Any resources to share?
I think my wife is a good cook, but we are inconsistent on the outcome, so would love to get better and learn along side her.
Yes… pull and choose recipes with similar ingredients and similar techniques until you get good at them or decide that set isn't something you like much. Then move on. My point is focus on that instead of just cherry-picking recipes that seem easy that you think you'll like because your consumption and waste will end up all over the pram, you'll never find cooking that fun and just end up reverting back to never doing it.
This goes for equipment too. Last winter, we started doing stir fry's a lot. Something we never messed with but then we figure out how to do them right, started utilizing it 1-2 times a week. So we bought a really nice wok and use it about once a week. So many people find recipes online then go buy all the ingredients and top line equipment like they are Bobby Flay and never use it again. I'm just saying… be practical about it all rather than go scan Youtube for videos and try to mimic them indiscriminately.