I've decided that I eat too much freezer-to-oven and fast food shit, and I want to cook more. Part of the problem is I'm not very experienced, and the few things I 'can' cook aren't very interesting, and I'd rapidly get bored of.
Can anyone suggest a few easy recipes or tips for someone who's really just dipping their toes into this? I want to have a few things so I'm not just alternating between the same 2 or 3 dishes every night. If it helps, I tend to prefer chicken over other proteins.
Brotherman, if I wanted to buy a cookbook I would have. I was hoping for a little more guidance than just a recipe on paper.
Samuel White
I actually have one, but I've only used it a few times. Most of the recipes I find when I go LOOKING are just soups that don't look very good.
Jayden Brooks
Find cuisine you enjoy (italian, mexican, african), look up simple recipes and cook them. Learn basic cutting techniques, and how to grip a knife. Watch shit loads of youtube tutorials. Cooking is not hard. Dont over think it.
Julian Rivera
I've got the cutting stuff down- I can already cook a few things, it's just that most of the things I make tend to be "cut up some chicken, then add it to the shit from this box". I want to be able to cook different things, but when I look over recipes everything looks too frustrating or too boring.
I dunno. I should just give up, it's stupid.
Tyler James
He has all the recipes for free on the website you lazy ass
If you need something more specific than a general resource for lazy ass bachelors, which is exactly what Bittman's schtick is aimed at, you should specify. You need help boiling water? You need to know what "preheat the oven" means? What do you mean by "guidance"?
Sebastian Phillips
Sorry, I saw 'buy' and assumed you were just being a dick.
I know some basics, I just don't really know what to -do-. I know how to make a roux, but I don't know what that's good for beyond that point. Shit like that. I can do some basics, but I'm not sure how to combine those basic techniques and shit to make a meal that's not just "hot meat".
Evan Hall
Of course it says "buy", he's trying to make a living as a food authority for neckbeards with pretensions of respectability, and he's been quite successful at it
The way to figure out what a roux is good for is you make a bunch of recipes involving rouxes. If you do this enough you start to recognize patterns on your own, and you can "develop" "new" recipes based on personal taste. Just like any other kind of learning.
If you don't know what you want to cook, you could either (a) think of a meal you really enjoyed, and try to make it perfectly, practicing multiple times if needed, until you get bored, succeed, or fail and decide it's not possible, then move on to something else. Or, (b) scroll through a list of recipes until you find one that sounds good on paper, follow all the instructions, and if it didn't come out right, google "why is my steak dry" or whatever it was that came out wrong. Read about what makes steak dry or not (or whatever the problem was), make inferences based on what you think you did based on this new knowledge, and compensate on the next round until you did it right.
