Veeky Forums origins

Can't recall when I got down and serious with cooking. Lemme think....

>Be a kid
>Often watch my mom cook
>Same with my dad
>Sometimes my mom would have me come over to help (stirring, pouring, etc)
>Wanted to do more (crack eggs, measure, etc)
>Would sometimes watch cooking shows or observe how cooking was done on cartoons and became fascinated
>Start to cook with my mother a bit more
>Never tried cooking a meal for my family until I was in my teens
>Peels potatoes for Christmas, Easter etc
>Even then it was half store bought stuff and the rest was homemade that my mother made
>Kept looking for new recipes and new foods that caught my interest
>Started baking desserts and getting better
>Started prepping whole chickens for roasting
>Cook with my sister to make dinner together
>Hate prepping salad leaves but I still do it to this day

I can cook decent meals, but I cannot make proper pizza dough for the life of me. The dough becomes overworked despite my best efforts. Hell, even my cinnamon buns come out dry and tough

What's the appeal with the whole anarcho punk thing? Asking for a friend

I watched can't cook won't cook on tv, presented by Ainsley Harriot, when I was a student.

You gotta be a retard female to understand

>always watched mom cook when I was a kid
>always wanted to do it
>single mother not home a lot
>got hungry, decided to learn how to cook
>fast forward I now cook decent meals and love cooking

>dad cooking tomato sauce
>"i want to help"
>he lets me stir the pot
>stir diligently and he begins being comfortable with leaving me unattended
>youfuckedup.jpg
>start doing shit like tasting the sauce and spicing it to my tastes
>fuck up some sauces, others are great
>eventually start cooking other shit like breakfast

By the time i was a teenager cooking and making youtube videos were what kept me from going insane in highschool.

Neither of my parents could ever cook for shit. My mom is a dumb, lazy bitch and my dad would just make the same thing every single day until we (the kids) basically rioted over it. Like, complaining in a reasonable tone of voice about eating the same thing for the 50th day in a row was not sufficient. There needed to be actual tears or broken shit.

Anyway so I moved out at 18 and usually ate cheap fast food, but started learning some really basic shit to make at home. I was a really bad cook though, and some of this "cooking" was just learning that I could buy cans and frozen shit at the store and then heat it up.

Over time it became more and more like I was actually cooking than just heating up stuff.

I was raised right.

>always watch my mom cook stuff when i was a kid
>never cook myself because i got no reason to do it
>fast forward until 19
>my mom and dad will be moving out of the town, leaving me and my sis
>my sis is lazy as fuck, and rarely at home
>got no choice but fire up stove and start make something edible
>my first food i made wasn't so bad, i got interested in cooking and start trying something different each time i hit grocery

>inna barracks and lose my chow hall card due to work conditions and are instead are given food allowance
>make foods my mom and dad made because they're easy and I'm not retarded
>eventually get a hot plate and move from microwave-safe meals (microwaveable rice and whatnot) to actually cooking for the most part
>out of military into college and further expand my recipes
>still not great but a better cook than 90% of the people I know who can only make pre-cooked foods

Badum tss.

started to go to afternoon school in my country and didn't see my parents or sister for about 5 years when I was 13.
i started making pasta with tomato sauce and any kind of meat I could buy with spices grown at home.
I made rice and stew
I made omelets
I started inviting bitches home at 14 and realized this shit wasn't normal but it was my way of life.
I made bbq on my front yard and told people to chip in to buy shit
eventually people would just give me money to get food and come to my place.
I wasn't even neglected my senpai just had different lives.
I had a job and school. days seem so much shorter now...

Hdhdhd

It's usually just edgelords who find something that pisses other people off, makes them feel woke, and has a vague but passable ideological framework that confused anyone up to level 5 stupid

>19, live in house with roommates for first time
>Work pays like shit so I can't buy weed
>Oh wait I'm spending a ton on shit food and eating out
>Start only buying whole and natural ingredients (Raw meats, raw veggies, spices, grain, etc.)
>Throw that shit together, learn from mistakes, Google, Veeky Forums, and professional cooking textbooks I torrented

Suddenly I am the best cook out of my friends?

>>still not great but a better cook than 90% of the people I know who can only make pre-cooked foods
This I can't understand. What kind of circle of friends do people roll with that simply can't cook. A whole 90% of the people you know? Is it really that common that you can't cook?

I grew up in Miami, and you can be damn sure if you were hispanic, you knew that food cooked at home was better than what you can buy. Since most of my family and friends of friends and coworkers were from somewhere in latin america or the caribbean, they were making good stuff at home. There is a subset of women who work and feel empowered not to cook at all by stopping by the Blue Sky or some kind of home delivery, whereby they are geting 3-5 meals at a time that would feed an army and is therefore cost effective and convenient to boot. These women, lazyasses but with a little money and want to keep it, get foil catered containers of rice n beans, casseroles like arroz imperial, or chicken fricasse, and it's all the Goya sazon flavored stuff, but they're literally getting their entire home cooking for $30-40/week, and it's already ready. They're slicing an avocado as the salad and buying cuban bread for morning coffee and toast. Done. Anyone who has a grandma that co-habitates in the family home has home cooked beans that simmered or were made in a pressure cooker, and kids learn from her.

My mom had a stay at home mom and learned how to cook from her. My own mom worked after we hit middle school, but most evenings it was 50% chance of eating in, or 50% chance of eating out. I'd say prices in restaurants vs grocery prices were a bargain either way, so it wasn't just a convenience thing. Restaurants in Miami were economical and delicious, no matter your mood, whether a giant 3lb platter of honey chicken at Canton or the Steak, pizza and garlic knots takeout with a homemade salad, or huge quantities of food at LAC or Lilas, etc

My Mom and Nana cooked and baked like champs. Mom told me that I needed to learn how to cook, clean, do laundry, etc. Her reason being that eventually I'd move out, and I needed to know how to do those things when I was on my own. She also told me that if I got a girlfriend or got married, and she didn't know how (because according to my mom, women my age are incompetent fucks with no basic skills), I was fucked. Eventually started to learn as a teenager. Mostly baking, then cooking. I prefer making desserts and breads, but I can rock out pretty much anything in a pan.

>Move to uni at 18 too
>Have some of the eating disorder I had since a kid left
>Can only boil pasta, make rice and scramble eggs
>Decide to google a recipe(chicken with a lemon white sauce)
>Nigga this shit easy, just follow the instructions
>Eat a great meal
>Follow basic recipes with every step pictured and detailed
>Easy stuff with good results, vegetables actually taste good now(realize parents are mediocre cooks), get past eating disorder
>Tried harder stuff, started failing some, learnt techniques, got good
For now i'm one of the best cooks I know, I'm sure i'm nothing compared to industry people but for the average guy I meet I can usually do much more. Plus it gave me a great complicity with my grandpa who's a great cook(grandma hasn't cooked in the past 40 years), I try a lot of more varied stuff than him but he's got a couple of euro cuisines under his belt up to obscure dishes and has great technique.

Wow, you practiced a thing and subsequently got better at it after trying more times. Color me surprised.

Mother was cooking food for every meal barely ever ate outside (maybe 5 times a year). Picked up recipes by watching and helping. I find it sad when people tell me they grew up eating non-home cooked meals.

First learning from my folks, lightweight...how does this come out so goddamn good every time? Well...see first you have to ....being a student back then. Learning the basics about cooking, spices, and combos...

Then later on...first being irritated by chain restaurants, and what I'm paying 15 bucks for. This dry ass thing, with this bland sauce? But extra bread? Sounds Italian, but transpose that to any cuisine that caters large scale...you basically get McDonald's logic stepped up to a world stage.

So fuck that. You deconstruct. This dish would have been great if A, B, and C. Then you reconstruct in your own kitchen; conducting experiments. In the end, cooking for yourself is way cheaper, healthier, and more satisfying than ordering or dining out. Now if you fuck with real restaurants (I don't have that kind of money) then you get the right dishes...but for bullshit money per plate...so that's the trade off...Never more than 25 bucks a full meal solo....why? Unless you enjoy wasting money...

Reminds me of landscaping, in a weird way. The materials themselves aren't that expensive...but you pay for the transport and the labor. And in a sense, the ultimate atmosphere...kind of like a restaurant. 15 c/feet of pond rocks ain't that expensive...but hauling, shipping and placing is....DIY and you save...and you get to customize to your own style and taste...just like cooking. Plus, learning is awesome.

>feeling even remotely sad
>OMG MUH DEPRESSION ;--;
fuck off

I just grew up helping both my parents in the kitchen.
My mom's pretty good at making desserts, and she has a bunch of her mom's (and grandmother's, etc.) recipes- I never met my maternal grandma, but she was apparently a really good cook. I was curious and wanted to help, so when I was like 3 she'd stand me on a chair and have me sift in flour, count tablespoons of ingredients, etc., and things just went from there.

Savory food is my father's area of expertise, so I'd help him whenever he cooked. Started out doing little stuff like peeling garlic and washing vegetables, and then he started teaching me knife skills when I started middle school. (I know, it was probably not too wise to entrust a clumsy 10-year-old with a sharp knife.) (Yes, I still have all my fingers.)

I also grew up watching the Food Network with my father, since he'd get wasted on weekend afternoons, put that on the TV, and pass out. Alton Brown, Ming Tsai, and Emeril Lagasse were like rock stars to me. I had kind of a strange relationship with my father, like he'd be abusive one minute and bragging about my grades or whatever the next, but I knew for sure that if I was cooking with him, he'd be cool since he was doing something he enjoyed, so that was nice.

Grew up helping a lot in the house on own innitiative, did lotsa cleaning and laundry.
Started watching my dad cook and helping out a bit with prep.
Got in social service and out of house on my 15th and had to do weekly cooking for 6 to 12 people.
Remembered a bunch of recipies that my dad did and with some help I figuered things out and got better and better.

To cut a long story short

>Growing up, hate cooking, eat ready meals and takeaway and whatever dinner my family was having, otherwise crisps and shit
>Hit 19, final year in college, get sick, real sick
>Get diagnosed with pancolitis, kinda ends up sucking because my favourite foods were mostly based around very spicy food, and shit like flapjacks
>Fail my final year after completing all the exams half conscious because some twit threw out my practical work because he "Thought I was dropping out"
>Get a job with the apparent understanding that I'd both work the job and redo my final year. Turns out 9 hour shifts then several hours of college at night wasn't great for my health, lose the job because apparently I'm too sickly
>Get low while searching for another job, too many of them are too far away for me to safely travel
>Start spending my days on Veeky Forums a hell of a lot more than I used to, start using boards like Veeky Forums to keep myself pre-occupied
>Learn a bit, don't put it into practice, still too sick to have a major desire for food
>Get a job at an airport restaurant, work there for ages, health gets worse and worse, airport restaurant closes and I get transferred to a branch of it further away from my home
>Eventually, get too sick from the medication I'm taking (Chemo, biologicals) and have to get surgery. End up taking damn near a year off work
>During this time, now I know I'm having surgery, take more interest in cooking, since I miss actually being able to eat what I want and need something to do
>Learn about thai food and all that good stuff
>After surgery (Twice because my surgeon sucked), spend my time reading about cool food recipes and shitposting
>My first actual contribution was this egg recipe

Not so much they *can't* cook, but they're just lazy. It's mostly family bit I got friends/roommates who eat shit too.

I moved out of home when I was 14, spent about a year in a hostel and was renting my own place by 15.

I had a cursory interest in cooking before I left, but it was when I went into the hostel and started cooking for others that I really started to enjoy and take pride in cooking for other people. I remember coming up with basic honey, barbeque, soy chicken recipes and some light curries and stuff, and how fun it was.

When I had my place I got a little deeper into experimenting and cooking, especially with curries. Lots of tweaking and changing and adjusting. Also picked up some pasta dishes, roasts, etc as time went on.

A few years later I had a diploma in audio engineering but no job. It was pretty dire. I called in on a Gumtree (Australian equivalent of Craig's List I guess) about a kitchen job. Got told I'd be working hard and not paid much, said that would be fine. Worked a Friday lunch trial and had a job by the following Monday.

Been cooking ever since.

That's a cute story, user. My Dad also helped me get into food, through oysters and the curries I mentioned in my post.

What's your favourite dessert recipe of your Mother/Grandmother's?

>grew up watching good eats
>find it fun and decide to copy recipes
>start looking up recipes and getting hyped about cooking
>genuinely love it and want to become a chef
>parents (mostly mom) discourage me from it (they're not flat out telling me no, but passively they are)
>over time I become discouraged and start cooking less
>now I don't think of trying new shit

I don't really like cooking that much anymore

I never cooked anything until I was out of college. Why would I, my mom always cooked meals at home and I ate at the dining hall (didn't even have a kitchen) in college.

I mean, I could follow directions and make Easy Mac and brownies and shit like that, but I literally never cooked an egg until I was at least 22.