How did you learn to cook?

I haven't. so far I can just cook rice, and I guess eggs. I'm lazy as fuck yet I thought about cooking Bison or other exotic meats.

Home Ec class. Do they even still have that in schools anymore?

where did you learn to fly

i didn't

i don't cook, i come here for the memes

my HS had one

Tried shit and failed till I got it right

good idea

my parents got a divorce and my dad was relearning how to cook for himself, so he'd bring me around the kitchen to teach me something easy, like boiling water or measuring ingredients or scrambling eggs, and eventually when he saw I was getting comfortable with the baby steps he taught me, he'd move me to things like basic knife skills and more intensive cooking methods.

Ainsley Harriot

YouTube. Just look up what you want to make and follow along. Its not that fucking hard.

I watched my mother when I was young and generally piece things through feel. Works perfectly for me, but Im lightyears away from cooking to impress.

Snagged a French girlfriend.

that seems like an excellent way to reheat pizza desu. crisp the bottom and melt the cheese.

trial and error

Mom taught me when I was young, always had an interest in it from a young age and she was happy to teach me.

I'm really glad that I learned, too.

Step one, realize all I was eating was prepared or frozen or fast food.

Step two, cook protein plus mixed veggies for every meal.

Step three, start sprinkling in recipes I want to try or foods I have had that I want to replicate the taste of.

There is no step 4, this is where I am stuck until I can afford more ingredients. Wine and cooking oil alone are the biggest barriers to "advanced" cooking.

Same. I was interested in cooking as a child and my mother encouraged it. In my early 20s, I would cook most nights since my mother was working full-time and wouldn't be home until later in the evening. Naturally it gave me plenty of opportunities to improve, and combined with learning from the internet, I'm now an excellent cook.

You are like little baby
Watch this
>Step one: realize that you will die of malnutrition if you don't learn to cook for yourself
>Step two: do it

When you live a no-compromise life where you are constantly either succeeding or dying, you tend to succeed a lot.

>mom leaves when 11 years old
>dad works 70 hrs/week
>he leaves at 4am and gets home at 6pm
>household with 3 younger cousins and 3 younger siblings
>am oldest and responsible for siblings and cousins
I just sorta figured it out over time.
Started with ramen noodles and kept trying more ambitious things over time.

I'm a normal fucking person who feeds myself, that's how.

parents and occasional going to my grandma where she baked 24/7

>Poverty

Was surviving on $250/week for about a year. Living on my own, paying rent, bills etc, and needing to buy food.

Once I learned how simple and tasty rice and beans were to make, the real way, it just spiraled out of control from there. Started learning techniques to cook at home. Mainly just simple and cheap things, spanish foods, stir fry, soups, indian stuff. I made sure to pay attention to technique not recipes. Now I'm fairly confident in the kitchen and I'm doing much better financially. I can afford to cook expensive shit, but the cheap shit tastes great still. Roast chicken and rice and beans is still my favorite meal.

mum used get us to help is she make are cake or home made meat pies. Then later she taught us how to budget for a weeks worth of food. Made us start cooking dinner once a week. We could cook whatever we wanted out of what she had in the fridge or cupboard

parents and the occasional book
the problem is that i don't really read the instructions well when it comes to books
>reading how to make spaghetti carbonara
>it needs cream
>only have sour cream so use that instead

>carbonara
>cream
That book is shit.
You just need egg and parmesane.

this is how i was taught, no divorce tho

Started as a dishwasher and worked my way to line cook. I also do chefs duties when he goes on vacation or when a year or so goes by so inevitably they leave and I have to train the new guy AGAIN on what and how to order

Pic related

Grandma told me from a young age that if I want to do something well, better do it myself. This includes eating, so I learned to cook since I was young

Out of interest.

Born into an Italian family, you just have to pick up some stuff. We'd take turns cooking in the house growing up.

A lot of what I've learned since I left home has been through Good Eats. I also had a job at a pizza place on the weekend for some extra money for a while, and while I didn't learn jack shit about cooking per say, we had an unusually large selection of toppings and I learned a lot about what flavors pair with what through experimentation.

>get autism
>leave family
>forced into life of inebriated solitude
>oh shit I'm kind of hungry
>decide on meal, must be pan fried
>buy ingredients

Just go get a frying pan and buy vegetables, ham, pepperoni, hamburger or steak and find what else is in the cabinet. I just make tons of fried sandwiches.

How do I make roast chicken and rice and beans user

this board

>Shart in mart detected

Fuck things up. Be broke and and starving so add hot sauce and eat anyway. Eventually start getting things right.

My mother and several cooking shoes and books. Good Eats is a stand out.

Dumb obsessed subhuman

Endless repetition of bullshit recipes until one day they ended up tasting pretty great.
Also trial and error and ever enduring patience

>grew up poor as fuck w/ mom who didn't know how to cook
>thought spice racks were just decorations until I was 20
>Get a degree/skill and by 23 am making very good money
>Start going to "fancy restaurants" (e.g. 100-150/plate usd)
>Google names of items on the menus I had eaten before searching for recipes
>Follow recipes

wala

>Get constipated
>Form the papers for network technician since it was my subject
>They assign me as a chef instead
>mfw

>be me at 18 yrs
>no job, no degree
>apply for a job at a food place (wasn't really a traditional restaurant)
>think I'll be a cashier or janitor
>end up working with food
>learn basic skills, eventually get better at it
>start to enjoy cooking
>routinely steal expensive food and cook it at home

These people:
youtube.com/watch?v=OvW2xeSn4As

Oh yeah, my dad is a head chef at a restaurant.

>this mfw
>Raised by a single father as well. Started cooking at 9-10. You learn real quick when the oldman only knows dishes that start with 'institutional'....chicken, noodles and stuff, soup and shit on the shingle.

Taught myself after I decided to lose weight. Before that I was eating fast food 3x a day, and pizza on weekends.

Looked up recipes online.
Watched a few YouTube vids.
Made a ton of mistakes.
Learned to ad-lib.
Burned myself a few times.
Now I'm fairly decent with a pan.

...

Moved out and didn't want to kill myself on fast food and ramen literally every meal. Searched YouTube and learned a lot of the basics I didn't know like searing meats and whatnot and just experimented with recipes. I'm not great but I enjoy all my food so I guess I can say I can cook now.

Put stuff on the eggs while preparing scrambled eggs. Wanted a different flavor

Got a job as a line cook at a shitty homestyle cooking restaurant. Nothing fancy but I learned how to grill, fry, sautée and make pasta dishes, potato dishes and stuffing.

Oh...

Reading the instructions off the back of the box

Working in restaurants.

I started at 8 coz I wanted moar fried eggs and my mum was like "iw you want more go ahead and make it"

I burned enough eggs to make Gordon Ramsay terminal, but thats the way of the cook senpai.

Then one day at 10 or so my mom made banana dough balls (buñuelos) and when I carried to school I lied and told that I made them, and the hideous kids that made my school life a shitcum hell loved them, and I probably felt appreciated for first time in my life (my parents are not bad but are totally inexistent in my self perception... and welp yes they are toxic ill people fuck them) so I was like "Holy shit if I bake people will like me" so I started baking 101 and holy shit that amount of burnt its responsible of todays weather. I just kept doing it but just for me and my family.

Then in my teens I saw Jamie Oliver and he really hit on me, his cooking looked cool and he just grabbed things and made it into sonething nice with such flow that, idk, my teen me wanted to copy that style. I started to do that kind of shit, and because I already burnt my toll, things came out nicely and my fear of fucking up just went away.

Then It hit me that when I was little I would devour cookbooks from my Galician grandma and a ton of others of classical poor castillian and spanish food.

In the end all that shit came into place and since I was a teen I have also did a lot of moroccan, japanese, chinese and yoj know, anything that isnt classical spanish cuisine so now Im an interestin international mess.

My friends never realised how I cook until 19 when I did a cake and a "putanesca" stew of mine with moroccan spices'n shiet and since then they see me as god in the kitchen and wont shit up about me working as a cook.

28 now and spent these 3 last years cooking everyday diferent random shit and making my gfs (different people in different times im not ahmed) taste it. Both of them stopped going out to eat since they were with me because they like more my random shit.

I started making my own sandwiches, scrambled eggs, omelettes and waffles when I was like 7, I got a cooking book from my grandma when I was 9 and started doing stuff from it
Reading people here saying they didn't know how to cook until they were in their 20s baffles me

I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my Grandma. She taught me to make my own eggs once I could see over the stove. I also watched a lot of cooking shows. Iron Chef, Good Eats, Ming's Quest and Emeril Live were my favorites.

HOW COME NO ONE REMEMBERS MING'S QUEST

Watching and helping my mom. I fucking loved food as a kid so I was always around when she was cooking. She taught me a bunch of other household skills too. Dad was a mechanic and construction worker; he taught me a bunch of stuff too. It was pretty fun too. Thanks mom and dad.

Years later other kids sounded like total retards to me because they couldn't do any kind of basic task.
>what do you mean you can't cook?
>what doy ou mean you can't unclog your sink?
>what do you mean you can't sew?
>what do you mean you can't paint?
>what do you mean you can't change your oil?
>what do you mean you can't chop logs?
>what do you mean you can't pound nails or drive screws?

I wish I was lucky enough to have a family

Took a cooking class in highschool. When I knew enough to not give myself food poisoning I started tossing shit in a pan and went from there.

You suck at cooking is actually good though.

kys

>buy grill
>learn to make gnarly meats
>learn how to use side burner for shit like vegis and rice
>realize oven is basically like a grill but with more burners

I think im ready for a crock pot

I fucked around a bit on boy scout camping trips, I remember cooking a ton of bacon one time, and burning spaghetti another time, and we made french toast and some pretty cool stuff like we would bury chicken with veggies wrapped in foil in the fire coals and we cooked with a dutch oven a lot

got very good with a microwave as a kid, which is probably one of the best skills to have imho

years ago I asked Veeky Forums for a recipe a noob like me could cook, and you guys had me make goulash which came out fucking fantastic

my first food job was at subway and before me nobody would bother preheating the meats in our store, to me it was just fucking obvious

then I started working in a podunk pizza parlor with an overly complicated menu and very limited cooking ware.. started as a driver, paid attention to the cooks, took over the dish room and weaseled my way into the kitchen

now I'm the top dog there as the pizza chef and it's cool but I feel somewhat capped out

I went to a seafood place for a day expecting it to be different but apart from actually having a flat top and multiple, large fryers, it was pretty much the same shit so I just stayed where I'm at rather than taking the paycut to start over somewhere else

not sure what the next step is really except to ride this job out till the place finally burns down like it needs to

I regularly challenge myself to cook things I haven't cooked before or to improve our methods. It's fun. I kinda miss being the short order cook though. Back then there was a real finesse to it all, now on the pizza table it's just like "can I really make 5 pizzas before the 7 in the oven burn? phone's still ringing off the hook, guess I'm gonna try"

since I started there I've improved upon a lot of the methods, and my next goal is to make the marinara better by adding anchovies for umami

>Learn to make ~5 different main economic dinners
>Make nothing else
>Looking at recipes with new steps makes me groan
>Recently learned my stove has a sensor which reduces heat unless I'm standing in front of it, effectively stopping everything from boiling unless I'm literally looking at it

What are your 5 main economic dinners

my old man taught me the basics and I taught myself the rest

Parents divorced, lived with my mother, she was gone pretty often on business trips back when I was in high school. I decided that I'd have to figure it out if I didn't want to eat frozen pizzas and hamburger helper most nights.

Now I love to cook, and I actually even get cheaper rent because I cook once a week for my landlord, who is a girl my age that can't really cook at all.

i taught myself over time with experimentation until I finally learned "instincts" of what makes a good dish and what doesn't

i started "cooking" young, my first dishes before i was old enough to use knives and the oven were baby carrots and raw onions cut up with my teeth (most of the time preparing this dish was spent wiping onion tears away) seasoned with a fist full of salt, and raw macaroni and cheese (uncooked shell noodles with shredded cheese "mixed in" with my hands until it got warm and stuck to the macaroni)

Spaghetti with meatsauce
Fried chicken with pasta
Oatmeal pancakes
Meatloaf with mashed potato
Tacos
+6.Hamburgers/Beanburgers

Add vegetables on the side for everything. Not strictly "economic" as you can go MUCH cheaper but I always get a lot of servings to eat at work/home, basic nutrition and good taste out of all of this. The worst one is probably hamburgers as I don't make them from scratch but buying in bulk is decently cheap. The buns are probably the most expensive and worst nutritional part.

I need to learn how to make more food without meat as main ingredient to lower costs more but I strongly dislike heated and spiced vegetables like wok. The best I can do is pasta with vegetables and cheese.