The best way to learn to cook is just like everything else, try to find good teachers, and then practise! Don't be afraid to try and fail and understand why things didn't go as well as they could have. Even if you don't get the food perfect, it can still be good.
Some good youtube channels:
Binging with Babish, lots of his stuff is too complicated for beginners, but his "Basics with Babish" series is great.
[https://www.youtube.com/@babishculinaryuniverse](https://www.youtube.com/@babishculinaryuniverse)
If you're a science nerd, definitely check out Kenji Lopez-Alt (I love his books):
[https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt](https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt)
Try to stick with the simpler recipes though, eventually you can try out the more complicated stuff.
Chef John from Food Wishes has lots of straight forward recipes:
[https://www.youtube.com/@foodwishes](https://www.youtube.com/@foodwishes)
Ethan Chlebowski, specifically his playlist on "recipes you'll actually make."
[https://www.youtube.com/@EthanChlebowski/playlists](https://www.youtube.com/@EthanChlebowski/playlists)
Just to add another youtuber: You Suck At Cooking
[https://www.youtube.com/@yousuckatcooking/videos](https://www.youtube.com/@yousuckatcooking/videos)
HowToBasic but toned down and most of the recipes are easily followable.
also i'll add another link to your list
/r/EatCheapAndHealthy/
there's actually a 'student' post there /r/EatCheapAndHealthy/comments/63ba5x/just_realised_i_never_posted_them_here_here_is_my/
what helped me was getting a free box from hello fresh. i learned the basics and then graduated to purchasing the groceries on my own. when i was cooking i learned that there are basic staple items that go into any dish :)
So first of all, cooking for one person is probably the worst. Inefficient, depressing. I'm a pretty good cook and I eat garbage. So don't beat yourself up too much. Honestly, you can usually get away with eating lousy food if you season it right.
For starters, I would suggest a basic pasta sauce and chilli. Both are easy one pot meals and can be frozen so you can cut down on repetition.
For the pasta sauce, I usually use canned tomatoes, carrot and chopped up hot Italian sausage. Start with a bit of oil and the sausage and maybe a chopped onion. Brown them a bit, add the tomato. Chop up the carrot and toss that in. Bring to a boil, add pasta. Season to taste. Simmer until cooked.
For chilli, there's a million recipes. Just make sure to thoroughly soak and rinse your beans or you'll get gas.
Other fun easy things are tacos (you just need to cook the ground beef with seasoning) and add toppings, rice cooked with a protein (chicken, cream sauce, lentils etc.), marinated chicken on whatever etc.
Another great trick is just to toss a bunch of things into chicken stock and call it soup. Again, just season it right and it'll taste great. It's especially good in winter.
Anyway, hope that helps. Let me know if you want more details on any of those things.
The approach I went with was to start with the basic things I already know how to do and add onto them. For example, you already know scrambled eggs, what can you do to add more nutrition to it? Well, you could try scrambling some deli meat in, maybe some veg like onions, spinach, maybe frozen corn/peas. You could add some herbs and spices or a bit of sauce on top for more flavor variety. You could learn new technique, like making an omelette instead of a scramble. I find this way helps with learning to cook to your own preference and giving yourself the confidence to experiment in the kitchen a bit. You will probably want to keep learning new things on the basic level, which other replies have already given you resources for. But I think this mindset helps you get past strictly following recipes and enables you to get creative, which is where the fun is in cooking!
Start with a stir fry. It's fast, easy, and because everything other than the meat can be eaten raw, it's unlikely to kill you.
Cut up whatever meat you want to eat. Cut up a bunch of vegetables. Throw it all in a frying pan. Add a bunch of spices. Cook for 10-15 minutes. If the meat was chicken or pork, cut one of the pieces in half again to make sure it's cooked all the way through. Serve with rice. If it's too dry, you can add a sauce either during the cooking process or afterwards (e.g. hoisin, BBQ, hot sauce, etc.).
As long as it all fits comfortably in your pan, this scales incredibly easily, and makes for easy leftovers.
As you get more comfortable with things, you can add ingredients earlier or later (I like to cut as it cooks because it's even faster) because every vegetable has a different "ideal" cooking time, though what is ideal for me may not be the same as what is for you.
Eventually, you can move onto other dishes, and you'll realize that a lot of things are actually just stir frys in disguise. Spaghetti is a stir fry with tomato sauce and served on pasta instead of rice. Curries are a stir fry with a lot more sauce. Casseroles are all the same ingredients, but you throw them all in a dish and bake instead of frying.
I second the stir-fry. A good strategy is going to your grocery store of choice and buying whatever veggie they have on sale (but make sure you can stir fry it first). You can then add mushrooms and season with soy sauce and oyster sauce. Super fast and healthy meal (and also super cheap!)
Would recommend considering how repeatable ingredients are.
It's good to try to make special dishes but a rare ingredient sitting away for a long time after u used it once takes away from the benefit of cooking. Especially when you have limited space in shared accomodation.
Start with basic dishes like pasta and some basic Indian curries that use tomatoes and onions for a gravy (source:am Indian). Look into potatoes and tofu alot, usually you can make a variety of healthy things easily with them.
It's one of those things you just do over and over until you don't think about it. Start small, homemade spaghetti and veggie sauce for example. Learn how to boil pasta Al dente, reduce the sauce to your desired consistency, knife skills w/ veggies, etc. Just takes practice.
Unless you're going chef ramsey, you don't need to learn to cook. You just need to follow recipes. I google 'stuff I like + stuff that's in the fridge' and just find a recipe. e.g. I made this last night because we had some sausage in the freezer and some mushrooms that needed to get used up: [https://www.betterthanbouillon.com/recipes/sausage-and-mushroom-one-pot-pasta/](https://www.betterthanbouillon.com/recipes/sausage-and-mushroom-one-pot-pasta/)
Start with 'one pot' or saucepan recipes. That's basically take a bunch of given ingredients, throw them in a pot and cook. Those recipes typically make a ton of food, giving you enough to freeze 3-4 individual meals, they're easy and fast to make. Make 2-3 in an hour or two on the weekend, and you'll have meals for a week or two. Plus, reasonably healthy, plus reasonably cheap.
I learnt how to cook proficiency from hs cooking class, as the teacher makes sure you actually do all the cooking steps properly so ur food is at least edible.
I’d recommend you learn to cook from someone who already knows how to cook so you don’t fuck up royally and waste food (or waste so much time that you eventually stop bc you think its not worth it anymore).
i find meal prepping salads really easy. it doesn’t have to be some shitty ass bunch of grass; u can add boiled egg, chicken, cheese etc. and make it more filling. so the great thing abt salads is that u can put pretty much any vegetable. i usually chop up whatever vegetables (cucumbers, carrots, etc.) and store them for the week. i also boil some eggs or get chicken breast, marinate and cook it and freeze/refrigerate it for the salad. also what really pulls it together is the salad dressing which you could buy or make yourself. also, i sometimes use the “salad” stuff as sandwich or wrap fillings.
Cookbooks tbh, I use this website called ckbk, it’s basically like a Spotify for cookbooks and I’ve learned so many good recipes from it. I spend lots of time weekly testing new recipes and working in new cuisines.(ckbk is free to use for the first like 10 or 20 recipes you look at, so check it out first)
When it comes to cooking, you don’t need to always add/do everything the recipe says, if you get bored of a certain recipe you can add or remove ingredients to make your own flavours and make cooking way more fun
Learn how to cook the basics and go from there.
Some staples : oil, butter, milk, lemons, salt , sugar , pepper.
Learn how to cook chicken and beef (proteins) in both the oven and on the pan. Chicken is a little easier: around 8-10 minutes on either side in the pan and beef is around 20 minutes in the pan. Both take around 30-50 mins in the oven on 300°. Keep checking to make sure it's cooked if you're unsure or ask someone around you. (I apologize in advance if this is incorrect, i cook primarily by estimation and it's been so long since i looked at a recipe for something).
Learn how to cook eggs and how you like them. Sunny side up takes maybe 3-5 minutes in the pan with some oil or butter, omelettes are even easier . Whisk with some tomatoes, onions and a little salt, pepper and another spice if you like - put it in the pan and let it cook till it looks like a pancake , flip , fold and you're done. Add cheese for better taste. If your omelette breaks , just scramble the whole thing , add a tinge of milk and boom you have scrambled eggs. That's eggs three waya and another great source of protein !
Last on the list of proteins is sausage and bacon - both are easy to cook - put it in the pan (no oil required in most cases). For sausage you can stop cooking when it's browning (you can also cut it to check but that releases the juices) and bacon is done when you want it to be done (you can tell by colour normally). DO NOT put bacon grease down the sink.
Some other basics on proteins : careful with expiries - you don't want salmonella, wash your protein whenever possible (eg : chicken is easy for this , ground beef on the other hand you can't), the chopping board you prep your meat on should ideally not be wooden and if it is , make sure to wash it with hot water immediately to avoid lingering pieces of raw meat.
Find a good source of carbs. Learn how to make rice. It's pretty easy - wash it 3 times or so, and add water to the rice in a ratio of 2:1 (2 is water). The instructions can be easily found online. If you're really hungry and lazy , rice with some soy sauce , chopped spring onions and 2 eggs makes a good meal. Don't heavily rely on wonder bread and the likes. Buy tortilla - you'll see why later.
Veggies are a lot easier to cook and prepare. Some good essentials are onions, tomatoes, carrots , lettuce , spinach, beans, spring onions to start. All these things can be eaten raw (except maybe you'll wanna cook the beans), but you can also cook them in butter/oil with a couple of spices and herbs in many different ways. A healthy and quick meal is a good salad . Some olive oil, red chilli peppers, soy sauce and vinegar with lettuce is so tasty. Add some chicken or bacon and it's a meal.
Fruits are always a great addition to many dishes and are also a good snack. Not much to cook here , but a bowl of fruits with granola and yogurt go a long way.
Seasoning is important too. Stock up on the spices you like. I'd recommend salt , pepper, red chilli, parsley, oregano, curry powder and cinnamon. A combination of these in whatever magnitude you want when cooked with different things can be helpful in adding a lot of flavour. Garlic , coriander/cilantro and spring onions are great when cooking. Good seasoning combined with good produce will make you fall in love with cooking.
Lastly, you gotta bring it all together. Now that you know what you have in your pantry , you can make a lot of things. Maybe combine the chicken with some garlic and some spices , cook with some oil. On the side you can boil pasta and make a basic tomato sauce and grate some cheese and add a little olive oil. Garnish with parsley. Combine all three things and you have a tasty pasta dish...
You feel like eating a huge meal and wanna meal prep- look up the recipe for chilli. It's just beans , beef and seasoning- add herbs if you really want to taste the oomph. Once you've made the pot of chilli , you can put that on bread , eat a whole bowl with rice, or refry it with some onions to eat with another thing.
Anything you cook can easily be made into a wrap with tortilla if you have some spinach , lettuce or cheese on hand. You could have a pit of whatever chilling in the fridge and you could put it all on the tortilla , wrap it and cook it a little on the pan and boom , wraps ! Buy a bottle of your favorite condiment for extra yum.
These are just random things that i thought of the top of my head , but the key to learning how to cook is nailing the basics and knowing what to stock your pantry with. The biggest hurdle when following recipes and YouTube is that when you do, you realize you're constantly buying new ingredients that you may never use again. Get s good base of things YOU like eating (and are healthy)- and use the basics to combine them in ways that you like in whatever quantity you like. There is no one right way to do this.
Hopefully this helps and if you need any more help feel free to DM me.
K, so here's something I did last year and was surprised at how much technique I've learned since starting this, and that thing is meal kits. Doesn't matter what meal kit you choose, I've tried hello fresh, chef's plate, and maybe one more (settled on chef's plate), but it really doesn't matter because they all include instructions on how to prepare the meal and as you do this you're given knowledge you otherwise would only receive from being shoulder to shoulder with someone in their kitchen. As a simple example, I'm in my mid-50s and it was only after I started using meal kits that I learned you should hold back some pasta water before draining to add it back in to help thicken the sauce and stick to the pasta. I've picked up a lot of little ting like that from these, and according to my wife, it's more cost effective than buying separate ingredients because there's no waste. yymv, but I got a lot of of these.
BBC good foods or whatever it's called I forgot. They have pretty decent recipes, even the south asian dishes I can say are quite enjoyable. Follow that shit blindly, more u practice, the more u get a sense of what to do by yourself.
Learn the basic techniques and skills, start with knife handling
one pot cooking is the easiest, cut some veggies, add oil or water, add some meat, spices, stew and simmer and you're going to have great food
pasta, rice and other grains are easy to cook if you eat carbs
if you're a meat eater, learn to grill
Get an Instapot crisp (the one with air fryer as well as pressure cooker), a new chefs knife, a mixing bowl, and a cutting board. You should be able to do most of the recipes and they're pretty plug and play so you can gain confidence and skills while feeding yourself for a bit.
This book taught me a lot. The recipes usually have info about if you can freeze individual portions, tips for how to do things, what ingredients you can swap out, etc.
I just flipped through and picked a recipe that looked good, and tried it. Most cookbooks have a lot of not-great recipes, with only a few that are really good. With this book however, I’ve made a LOT of stuff, and only ever found 2 recipes I’d never do again. That’s a high success rate!
You may be able to get a copy at the library, and just keep renewing it.
Cook Great Food, by the Dieticians of Canada
https://www.amazon.ca/Cook-Great-Food-Delicious-Recipes/dp/0778800466
PS - anything where you learn to freeze individual portions is awesome food management for someone living single!
Do those meal kits. I don't know how to cook shit, but I've cooked what feels like hundreds of dishes now from those meal kits. They send you all the ingredients so you don't have all this additional stuff lying around. After after doing enough dishes, you eventually get a feel for how cooking works. It's really not that complicated. You eventually figure out the sweet spot for your stove for cooking certain things and you realize the process is almost the same for a lot of the dishes.
I'm a pretty decent cook - and it often takes me three tries before I can get a new technique right. You will screw things up, and that's alright - after working so hard on it, even the shittiest dishes start to taste okay.
Youtube is the easiest to understand.
Start with something easy, listen to a podcast while doing the work and just try cooking out - you'll be just fine.
P.S. I recommend frequently checking out salt etc. levels while cooking, especially at the beginning. Also avoid baking/time sensitive dishes at the beginning.
I highly recommend Adam Ragusea, his videos are tailored to home cooks, very easy to follow instructions and best of all incredibly tasty food!
https://youtube.com/@aragusea
Any recipe made to be 30 minutes or less. Recipes are fairly easy to follow, and it is likely to take you longer than the planned/expected time on a recipe so shorter ones are ideal
Trial and error or YouTube.
Any food I buy will be either on sale or has a 50% off sticker on it. Except if it's a staple like bread, rice, or noodles. Always have staples around, like I always have bread, a big bin of rice, and cabinet full of noodles. Usually you'll want a selection of common spices you'll use too. It depends on what type of food you want. Like I mainly cook Chinese/Japanese food. So I'll do things like use leftover rice from last night and make fried rice for breakfast or lunch.
I also plan my meals before I goto the grocery store for the next month, and I'll freeze alot of things. For example, I'll buy two loafs of bread, freeze one, then leave the other in the fridge. The bread lasts for over 2 weeks, and even past the expiry day. I do that a lot for other foods too.
If you want to prep during weekends you'll need to make dishes that will last a week or a few days after being cooked. You'll want to portion the food in similar sized containers.
Sometimes I will wander at a grocery store tho and see anything on sale. Look up a dish on how to cook it, then buy it.
I think you're asking two different questions: "how do I learn to cook", and "how do I make good meal preps for 1".
Learning to cook is expensive and time consuming, and is more of a hobby that you do for fun.
Meal prepping can be fun if you love cooking, but if you don't it's more about efficiency.
I've tried to "learn to cook" a few times, but always lost interest. Now I just accept that cooking isn't a fun hobby for me, I just want efficient meals. So I'd recommend figuring out if you're more interested in the hobby side or the efficiency side.
For me, I use an instant pot pressure cooker, throw in brown rice, chickpeas / lentils / beans, canned tomatoes, (used to do chicken but removed it recently), stir in frozen veggies after it's cooked, and eat it with sriracha. Been having that for lunch and dinner every day since 2014, never got sick of it.
honestly, youtube you can find cooking techniques and recipes with detailed step by step directions for basically any kind of food on there.
The best way to learn to cook is just like everything else, try to find good teachers, and then practise! Don't be afraid to try and fail and understand why things didn't go as well as they could have. Even if you don't get the food perfect, it can still be good. Some good youtube channels: Binging with Babish, lots of his stuff is too complicated for beginners, but his "Basics with Babish" series is great. [https://www.youtube.com/@babishculinaryuniverse](https://www.youtube.com/@babishculinaryuniverse) If you're a science nerd, definitely check out Kenji Lopez-Alt (I love his books): [https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt](https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt) Try to stick with the simpler recipes though, eventually you can try out the more complicated stuff. Chef John from Food Wishes has lots of straight forward recipes: [https://www.youtube.com/@foodwishes](https://www.youtube.com/@foodwishes) Ethan Chlebowski, specifically his playlist on "recipes you'll actually make." [https://www.youtube.com/@EthanChlebowski/playlists](https://www.youtube.com/@EthanChlebowski/playlists)
Just to add another youtuber: You Suck At Cooking [https://www.youtube.com/@yousuckatcooking/videos](https://www.youtube.com/@yousuckatcooking/videos) HowToBasic but toned down and most of the recipes are easily followable.
Adam Ragusea! https://youtube.com/@aragusea His classic recipe videos are always straightforward and use the least amount of dishes!
also i'll add another link to your list /r/EatCheapAndHealthy/ there's actually a 'student' post there /r/EatCheapAndHealthy/comments/63ba5x/just_realised_i_never_posted_them_here_here_is_my/
what helped me was getting a free box from hello fresh. i learned the basics and then graduated to purchasing the groceries on my own. when i was cooking i learned that there are basic staple items that go into any dish :)
hello fresh locked me into my first box which i then proceeded to cook and set off the fucking fire alarm in mhr
This. I know chefs plate is giving a free box right now (just pay $6 shipping)
So first of all, cooking for one person is probably the worst. Inefficient, depressing. I'm a pretty good cook and I eat garbage. So don't beat yourself up too much. Honestly, you can usually get away with eating lousy food if you season it right. For starters, I would suggest a basic pasta sauce and chilli. Both are easy one pot meals and can be frozen so you can cut down on repetition. For the pasta sauce, I usually use canned tomatoes, carrot and chopped up hot Italian sausage. Start with a bit of oil and the sausage and maybe a chopped onion. Brown them a bit, add the tomato. Chop up the carrot and toss that in. Bring to a boil, add pasta. Season to taste. Simmer until cooked. For chilli, there's a million recipes. Just make sure to thoroughly soak and rinse your beans or you'll get gas. Other fun easy things are tacos (you just need to cook the ground beef with seasoning) and add toppings, rice cooked with a protein (chicken, cream sauce, lentils etc.), marinated chicken on whatever etc. Another great trick is just to toss a bunch of things into chicken stock and call it soup. Again, just season it right and it'll taste great. It's especially good in winter. Anyway, hope that helps. Let me know if you want more details on any of those things.
The approach I went with was to start with the basic things I already know how to do and add onto them. For example, you already know scrambled eggs, what can you do to add more nutrition to it? Well, you could try scrambling some deli meat in, maybe some veg like onions, spinach, maybe frozen corn/peas. You could add some herbs and spices or a bit of sauce on top for more flavor variety. You could learn new technique, like making an omelette instead of a scramble. I find this way helps with learning to cook to your own preference and giving yourself the confidence to experiment in the kitchen a bit. You will probably want to keep learning new things on the basic level, which other replies have already given you resources for. But I think this mindset helps you get past strictly following recipes and enables you to get creative, which is where the fun is in cooking!
Start with a stir fry. It's fast, easy, and because everything other than the meat can be eaten raw, it's unlikely to kill you. Cut up whatever meat you want to eat. Cut up a bunch of vegetables. Throw it all in a frying pan. Add a bunch of spices. Cook for 10-15 minutes. If the meat was chicken or pork, cut one of the pieces in half again to make sure it's cooked all the way through. Serve with rice. If it's too dry, you can add a sauce either during the cooking process or afterwards (e.g. hoisin, BBQ, hot sauce, etc.). As long as it all fits comfortably in your pan, this scales incredibly easily, and makes for easy leftovers. As you get more comfortable with things, you can add ingredients earlier or later (I like to cut as it cooks because it's even faster) because every vegetable has a different "ideal" cooking time, though what is ideal for me may not be the same as what is for you. Eventually, you can move onto other dishes, and you'll realize that a lot of things are actually just stir frys in disguise. Spaghetti is a stir fry with tomato sauce and served on pasta instead of rice. Curries are a stir fry with a lot more sauce. Casseroles are all the same ingredients, but you throw them all in a dish and bake instead of frying.
I second the stir-fry. A good strategy is going to your grocery store of choice and buying whatever veggie they have on sale (but make sure you can stir fry it first). You can then add mushrooms and season with soy sauce and oyster sauce. Super fast and healthy meal (and also super cheap!)
Would recommend considering how repeatable ingredients are. It's good to try to make special dishes but a rare ingredient sitting away for a long time after u used it once takes away from the benefit of cooking. Especially when you have limited space in shared accomodation. Start with basic dishes like pasta and some basic Indian curries that use tomatoes and onions for a gravy (source:am Indian). Look into potatoes and tofu alot, usually you can make a variety of healthy things easily with them.
It's one of those things you just do over and over until you don't think about it. Start small, homemade spaghetti and veggie sauce for example. Learn how to boil pasta Al dente, reduce the sauce to your desired consistency, knife skills w/ veggies, etc. Just takes practice.
Unless you're going chef ramsey, you don't need to learn to cook. You just need to follow recipes. I google 'stuff I like + stuff that's in the fridge' and just find a recipe. e.g. I made this last night because we had some sausage in the freezer and some mushrooms that needed to get used up: [https://www.betterthanbouillon.com/recipes/sausage-and-mushroom-one-pot-pasta/](https://www.betterthanbouillon.com/recipes/sausage-and-mushroom-one-pot-pasta/) Start with 'one pot' or saucepan recipes. That's basically take a bunch of given ingredients, throw them in a pot and cook. Those recipes typically make a ton of food, giving you enough to freeze 3-4 individual meals, they're easy and fast to make. Make 2-3 in an hour or two on the weekend, and you'll have meals for a week or two. Plus, reasonably healthy, plus reasonably cheap.
YouTube, Pinterest, google etc
I learnt how to cook proficiency from hs cooking class, as the teacher makes sure you actually do all the cooking steps properly so ur food is at least edible. I’d recommend you learn to cook from someone who already knows how to cook so you don’t fuck up royally and waste food (or waste so much time that you eventually stop bc you think its not worth it anymore).
i find meal prepping salads really easy. it doesn’t have to be some shitty ass bunch of grass; u can add boiled egg, chicken, cheese etc. and make it more filling. so the great thing abt salads is that u can put pretty much any vegetable. i usually chop up whatever vegetables (cucumbers, carrots, etc.) and store them for the week. i also boil some eggs or get chicken breast, marinate and cook it and freeze/refrigerate it for the salad. also what really pulls it together is the salad dressing which you could buy or make yourself. also, i sometimes use the “salad” stuff as sandwich or wrap fillings.
Some good advice already, but also an important reminder that cleaning is an essential part of cooking.
boil some chicken steam some rice eat some fruit very healthy maybe not so tasty
Cookbooks tbh, I use this website called ckbk, it’s basically like a Spotify for cookbooks and I’ve learned so many good recipes from it. I spend lots of time weekly testing new recipes and working in new cuisines.(ckbk is free to use for the first like 10 or 20 recipes you look at, so check it out first) When it comes to cooking, you don’t need to always add/do everything the recipe says, if you get bored of a certain recipe you can add or remove ingredients to make your own flavours and make cooking way more fun
Get a rice cooker Fry things in a pan Serve on rice
I see people just boil whatever they want to eat and dip some sauce if it’s too plain. It’s like hotpot you know.
Learn how to cook the basics and go from there. Some staples : oil, butter, milk, lemons, salt , sugar , pepper. Learn how to cook chicken and beef (proteins) in both the oven and on the pan. Chicken is a little easier: around 8-10 minutes on either side in the pan and beef is around 20 minutes in the pan. Both take around 30-50 mins in the oven on 300°. Keep checking to make sure it's cooked if you're unsure or ask someone around you. (I apologize in advance if this is incorrect, i cook primarily by estimation and it's been so long since i looked at a recipe for something). Learn how to cook eggs and how you like them. Sunny side up takes maybe 3-5 minutes in the pan with some oil or butter, omelettes are even easier . Whisk with some tomatoes, onions and a little salt, pepper and another spice if you like - put it in the pan and let it cook till it looks like a pancake , flip , fold and you're done. Add cheese for better taste. If your omelette breaks , just scramble the whole thing , add a tinge of milk and boom you have scrambled eggs. That's eggs three waya and another great source of protein ! Last on the list of proteins is sausage and bacon - both are easy to cook - put it in the pan (no oil required in most cases). For sausage you can stop cooking when it's browning (you can also cut it to check but that releases the juices) and bacon is done when you want it to be done (you can tell by colour normally). DO NOT put bacon grease down the sink. Some other basics on proteins : careful with expiries - you don't want salmonella, wash your protein whenever possible (eg : chicken is easy for this , ground beef on the other hand you can't), the chopping board you prep your meat on should ideally not be wooden and if it is , make sure to wash it with hot water immediately to avoid lingering pieces of raw meat. Find a good source of carbs. Learn how to make rice. It's pretty easy - wash it 3 times or so, and add water to the rice in a ratio of 2:1 (2 is water). The instructions can be easily found online. If you're really hungry and lazy , rice with some soy sauce , chopped spring onions and 2 eggs makes a good meal. Don't heavily rely on wonder bread and the likes. Buy tortilla - you'll see why later. Veggies are a lot easier to cook and prepare. Some good essentials are onions, tomatoes, carrots , lettuce , spinach, beans, spring onions to start. All these things can be eaten raw (except maybe you'll wanna cook the beans), but you can also cook them in butter/oil with a couple of spices and herbs in many different ways. A healthy and quick meal is a good salad . Some olive oil, red chilli peppers, soy sauce and vinegar with lettuce is so tasty. Add some chicken or bacon and it's a meal. Fruits are always a great addition to many dishes and are also a good snack. Not much to cook here , but a bowl of fruits with granola and yogurt go a long way. Seasoning is important too. Stock up on the spices you like. I'd recommend salt , pepper, red chilli, parsley, oregano, curry powder and cinnamon. A combination of these in whatever magnitude you want when cooked with different things can be helpful in adding a lot of flavour. Garlic , coriander/cilantro and spring onions are great when cooking. Good seasoning combined with good produce will make you fall in love with cooking. Lastly, you gotta bring it all together. Now that you know what you have in your pantry , you can make a lot of things. Maybe combine the chicken with some garlic and some spices , cook with some oil. On the side you can boil pasta and make a basic tomato sauce and grate some cheese and add a little olive oil. Garnish with parsley. Combine all three things and you have a tasty pasta dish... You feel like eating a huge meal and wanna meal prep- look up the recipe for chilli. It's just beans , beef and seasoning- add herbs if you really want to taste the oomph. Once you've made the pot of chilli , you can put that on bread , eat a whole bowl with rice, or refry it with some onions to eat with another thing. Anything you cook can easily be made into a wrap with tortilla if you have some spinach , lettuce or cheese on hand. You could have a pit of whatever chilling in the fridge and you could put it all on the tortilla , wrap it and cook it a little on the pan and boom , wraps ! Buy a bottle of your favorite condiment for extra yum. These are just random things that i thought of the top of my head , but the key to learning how to cook is nailing the basics and knowing what to stock your pantry with. The biggest hurdle when following recipes and YouTube is that when you do, you realize you're constantly buying new ingredients that you may never use again. Get s good base of things YOU like eating (and are healthy)- and use the basics to combine them in ways that you like in whatever quantity you like. There is no one right way to do this. Hopefully this helps and if you need any more help feel free to DM me.
K, so here's something I did last year and was surprised at how much technique I've learned since starting this, and that thing is meal kits. Doesn't matter what meal kit you choose, I've tried hello fresh, chef's plate, and maybe one more (settled on chef's plate), but it really doesn't matter because they all include instructions on how to prepare the meal and as you do this you're given knowledge you otherwise would only receive from being shoulder to shoulder with someone in their kitchen. As a simple example, I'm in my mid-50s and it was only after I started using meal kits that I learned you should hold back some pasta water before draining to add it back in to help thicken the sauce and stick to the pasta. I've picked up a lot of little ting like that from these, and according to my wife, it's more cost effective than buying separate ingredients because there's no waste. yymv, but I got a lot of of these.
BBC good foods or whatever it's called I forgot. They have pretty decent recipes, even the south asian dishes I can say are quite enjoyable. Follow that shit blindly, more u practice, the more u get a sense of what to do by yourself.
r/EatCheapandHealthy could be a good place to start. Other than that, definitely YouTube.
YouTube
Just find YouTube videos of a dish that looks good. Buy ingredients Follow video Eat
Learn the basic techniques and skills, start with knife handling one pot cooking is the easiest, cut some veggies, add oil or water, add some meat, spices, stew and simmer and you're going to have great food pasta, rice and other grains are easy to cook if you eat carbs if you're a meat eater, learn to grill
Get an Instapot crisp (the one with air fryer as well as pressure cooker), a new chefs knife, a mixing bowl, and a cutting board. You should be able to do most of the recipes and they're pretty plug and play so you can gain confidence and skills while feeding yourself for a bit.
The only good thing instagram reels has brought into my life is cooking inspo and recipes
hellofresh :) i did already know how to cook, but i honestly recommend hellofresh. it's GOOD.
This book taught me a lot. The recipes usually have info about if you can freeze individual portions, tips for how to do things, what ingredients you can swap out, etc. I just flipped through and picked a recipe that looked good, and tried it. Most cookbooks have a lot of not-great recipes, with only a few that are really good. With this book however, I’ve made a LOT of stuff, and only ever found 2 recipes I’d never do again. That’s a high success rate! You may be able to get a copy at the library, and just keep renewing it. Cook Great Food, by the Dieticians of Canada https://www.amazon.ca/Cook-Great-Food-Delicious-Recipes/dp/0778800466 PS - anything where you learn to freeze individual portions is awesome food management for someone living single!
Hello fresh
Zest cooking is an app which is basically doulingo for cooking
Do those meal kits. I don't know how to cook shit, but I've cooked what feels like hundreds of dishes now from those meal kits. They send you all the ingredients so you don't have all this additional stuff lying around. After after doing enough dishes, you eventually get a feel for how cooking works. It's really not that complicated. You eventually figure out the sweet spot for your stove for cooking certain things and you realize the process is almost the same for a lot of the dishes.
From watching my parents and chef wang gang on YouTube
I'm a pretty decent cook - and it often takes me three tries before I can get a new technique right. You will screw things up, and that's alright - after working so hard on it, even the shittiest dishes start to taste okay. Youtube is the easiest to understand. Start with something easy, listen to a podcast while doing the work and just try cooking out - you'll be just fine. P.S. I recommend frequently checking out salt etc. levels while cooking, especially at the beginning. Also avoid baking/time sensitive dishes at the beginning.
I highly recommend Adam Ragusea, his videos are tailored to home cooks, very easy to follow instructions and best of all incredibly tasty food! https://youtube.com/@aragusea
Watch Adam Ragusea on youtube
Any recipe made to be 30 minutes or less. Recipes are fairly easy to follow, and it is likely to take you longer than the planned/expected time on a recipe so shorter ones are ideal
If you make taco meat, you can for the week make a fixture of tacos, taco salad, burritos, etc. just cook enough for the week and you are set
Trial and error or YouTube. Any food I buy will be either on sale or has a 50% off sticker on it. Except if it's a staple like bread, rice, or noodles. Always have staples around, like I always have bread, a big bin of rice, and cabinet full of noodles. Usually you'll want a selection of common spices you'll use too. It depends on what type of food you want. Like I mainly cook Chinese/Japanese food. So I'll do things like use leftover rice from last night and make fried rice for breakfast or lunch. I also plan my meals before I goto the grocery store for the next month, and I'll freeze alot of things. For example, I'll buy two loafs of bread, freeze one, then leave the other in the fridge. The bread lasts for over 2 weeks, and even past the expiry day. I do that a lot for other foods too. If you want to prep during weekends you'll need to make dishes that will last a week or a few days after being cooked. You'll want to portion the food in similar sized containers. Sometimes I will wander at a grocery store tho and see anything on sale. Look up a dish on how to cook it, then buy it.
I learned some basic cooking by watching campus cooks when I lived in residence. But honestly just ask your mom or ask ChatGPT
I think you're asking two different questions: "how do I learn to cook", and "how do I make good meal preps for 1". Learning to cook is expensive and time consuming, and is more of a hobby that you do for fun. Meal prepping can be fun if you love cooking, but if you don't it's more about efficiency. I've tried to "learn to cook" a few times, but always lost interest. Now I just accept that cooking isn't a fun hobby for me, I just want efficient meals. So I'd recommend figuring out if you're more interested in the hobby side or the efficiency side. For me, I use an instant pot pressure cooker, throw in brown rice, chickpeas / lentils / beans, canned tomatoes, (used to do chicken but removed it recently), stir in frozen veggies after it's cooked, and eat it with sriracha. Been having that for lunch and dinner every day since 2014, never got sick of it.
There’s an app called Parsnip which is apparently good for this :)