Do you NOT know how to cook?

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I enjoy cooking. I live by myself so I don't cook that much. When I do make something it can usually last me a few days. I never buy frozen meals, and I'm not a big fan of kraft macaroni & cheese as I was when I was a kid, however tonight I decided to get some to have with chicken thighs and drumsticks I baked a couple days ago. Tomorrow my plan is to make a pot roast.

I'm a good cook.

Its a learning curve. When I started all I could cook was bacon, eggs and microwave food.

I literally would burn soup @ 22yrs.

Started by learning what I loved to eat the most.. sushi. Very easy recipe to follow.

The little by little tried out cooking fish, meat and other things sticking to the simplest recipes.. the results were not very tasty (simple recipe=simple taste) so for a while I lost interest in it since the results weren't encouraging enough.

then...

I discovered the slow cooker (crock-pot).



To anyone wanting to learn how to cook I recomend one of these!

You literally can't screw up. You can get a big piece of beef, put it in the pot, pour water or beer or even cheap wine on it, random spices to your taste, boillon cubes and just turn the thing on and go enjoy your day. 8 hours later you come back and it will have made you the best, most flavorful beef stew you'll ever have.

no mess either, easy to clean since its just the one pot.

cooks everything from veggies to fish to chicken to soups and even eggs (yes.. one boring day i cracked a whole carton of eggs in there without beating them or anything.. poured some salt over 'em and turned it on for a 4hr run. Came back and had a piece and it was glorious..better than pan-fried eggs).

After a couple of years of enjoying the crock pot and experimenting with it and learning you can easily move back to pots and pans and go ahead from there. In my case I did so to make the side-dishes for the main meal being cooked in the slow cooker.

Like to use a onion soup has base for my stew taste taste nice with about all meat. Slow cooker it also awesome to make pasta sauce.

Also other thing I could suggest is for grounded beef, brown the meat in a frying pan, then drop it into a soup base in the slow cooker with some finely cut vegetable, some soy sauce, ketchup and powdered mustard. Just make sure not to put too much soup base for you will have to pour some out (mix need to be juicy once cooked no more). Once it cooked for the night put the mix in vertically cut salad bread (or whatever small bread that you think could fit going into oven), wrap in each of these in aluminum foil, put in oven at 250F for like 20-30min. Taste awesome. Can easily freeze them if you make more then you will eat before cooking them. Just cook them for 30-40min if they are frozen. Frozen one can also be heated in microwave (but wrap those in plastic wrap in place of aluminum foil if you plan to do so) but I still highly suggest the oven if your not in haste taste so much better in oven. Those that you don't freeze can easily be kept for 2-3 day.


What did you slow cook the egg with or was it simply breaking the egg in there with no base ?

I can cook and I enjoy it, but I'm not a recipe follower. I'll look at a picture of what I want to cook, see what's in it, and cook it.
Recipes have too many steps and unnecessary ingredients, plus instructions like "oven times may vary" tick me off.

The biggest hurdle with cooking is time management, or more specifically in my case, trying not to forget that you are actually cooking something.

We eat a lot of overcooked pasta and dried out chicken on the nights my attention span is sucking.

I love to cook!

Well, muffins can be hard, but those are baking. Baking is a pain. Baking is like math, but cooking is like art. Do you do any kind of art type stuff? Grilled cheese is exactly like that. You have to know what you want it to be like (buttery, crispy, golden brown..) and use the tools you have to try and get close to that goal. Once you learn how the tools work, (through a little trial and error, but it shouldn't take very much) you will be a lot better at judging what you need to do to turn the bread and cheese into a good sandwich.

I can cook and I like trying new things, but due to heavy workloads at school and work, Ive resigned myself to eating out or microwave food.I can cook, I just don't have the time or energy as of now.

I cook a few things well but other than that. left to my own devices I don't cook.

Oddly enough, my husband's passion is cooking, so over the years I've picked up a lot of theoretical knowledge about cooking. Alas, my hands don't follow my mind when I cook, so I lack confidence at cooking and leave it to him.

I also have a phobia about eating food that's gone bad in any way. Doesn't sound unusual, but in my case, that means that unless I eat fresh vegetables and fruit on the same day I buy them, I often end up throwing them out.

I really don't cook. I swear by the microwave. I might be able to do more if I took time to practice, but I'm lazy. I'm not sure how much headway I'd actually make, though. I have extremely poor dexterity. I can't even operate a can opener, and it's in extremely difficult to flip something in a frying pan without making a huge mess of it. I can do a few things, such as boiling noodles, but I really am quite limited in what I'm able to do. My boyfriend S is quite a good cook. We've tried cooking together a few times. This has generally resulted in him assigning me a few simple tasks while he does most of the work, because he has a good sense of what needs to be done, while I'm beyond lost. It probably would help for me to develop a few culinary skills, especially since I'm a vegetarian. I'm lucky I live in a big city, so it's relatively easy to find options such as Amy's Organic, Taste of India, Thai Pavilion and Simply Asia, all of which include viable vegetarian options. I don't know about the rest of the world, but if I lived in some little town in the Midwestern or Southern areas of the United States, I'd most likely starve.

To be honest with you im useless in the kitchen.

I make simple three step meals and get food assembly kits from the grocery store for a reason.

I'm an okay cook. I can make things taste good, but It's very common for me to mess up the cooking process. I have yet to not burn a cake, or not overcook rice...

I can cook, I usually cook pieces of meat, while I throw some butter in the pan, I think butter is better than oil.

I actually have to cook a lot, even though I find the process kind of overwhelming these days.
In my more-gregarious youth I was really into baking, and would frequently bake cookies and hand them out at school...usually with some sort of occasion attached to them...like my Bill Clinton victory cookies....Usually they were oatmeal and/or peanut butter based, and i did lots of experimenting with the ingredients.

I often have to cook for large groups of people...and I have really bad executive dysfunction...and a tiny tiny kitchen, that is actually more of a hallway...and the only appliances I have are a double burner with only one working burner...a toaster over (brand new as our old one pooped out)...and a crock pot.
There are a few dishes that I know well....but I get pretty stumped when I stray from that path.
I make an award-winning vegan chili....
I have hang-ups regarding other dishes...I had to make back eyed peas and cabbage 2 days in a row...I prepared them differently each time...
I want to learn to make better soups...
My notions of seasoning result in a lot of my food tasting about the same.
In my current phase, my rule seems to be "when in doubt, use curry powder"...another rule is "add extra turmeric to everything"
I have made a few disasters...I have taken instructions literally with absurd results...that defy all common sense...
I was really stressed and Flakey had bought all the ingredients for pasta primavera...I got totally stumped and ended up in tears with the mostly-raw vegetables in the cooked sauce....

My mom's major obsession is cooking...and that is all she will talk about...and she is..howyousay....extremely experimental...and frequently will launch into overwhelming monologues on how she makes stuff.

Sometimes, when I am not cooking in bulk, the best I can do is chuck a pizza into the toaster oven...

I like cooking and I'm pretty decent at following a recipe. My mom and I made smothered pork yesterday and it turned out pretty good, even though it was a little overcooked. But the last time we cooked we made chicken and dumplings (which is one of my favorites) and it was absolutely perfect.