Explain why you're such an autistic fuck when it comes to cooking. Why do you always cook the same 3 things and never cook anything even slightly complex?
Me
>because I hate doing dishes
>because my brain just falls apart when trying to think of complimentary ingredients
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The autism board is this way
because i am totally devoid of creativity and i cannot do things outside of my comfort zone
hehe
this Veeky Forums cooking board is THE BOMB!!
I'm the opposite. I hate eating the same thing over and over again. I cook a massive variety of foods.
I also challenge myself to cook new foods every week. I have a buttload of cookbooks and use a random number generator on my phone to pick a book and page number.
you don't deserve the right to hankpost
I used to be a top notch cook. Did it professionally and at was incredibly creative, always cooking for family and friends. Then depression got a hold on me a few years ago, and I couldn't give a fuck anymore. I cook basic shit and barely eat it. For example, I told my family 4 days ago I would make some gazpacho for summer's end. Bought the ingredients, and they're still sitting there, untouched. Bah.......
Are you me?
...
>my brain just falls apart when trying to think of complimentary ingredients
You don't have to reinvent the wheel, you know. Generations of home cooks before you already did. Yeah, you have a different set of ingredients available to you than they did, and you probably want to spend less time cooking than they did. But if you want to know what flavors go together just look at the traditional home cooking dishes of any culture. Maybe even learn how to make a few of them.
I try but I suck
>You don't have to reinvent the wheel, you know. Generations of home cooks before you already did.
I think this is the biggest mistake of many amateur chefs.
They keep putting pressure on themselves like they're going to invent some amazing recipe that's never been tried before and will wow everybody.
This is how pros burn out also.
Any books you would recommend? I've tried most of the recipes in my small collection and I need some new shit.
is that some sweet sundae ramen
What are your same 3 things, OP?
It is a thing - if you spend any amount of time in the kitchen the idea of having a signature dish develops an allure. But that's silly, because it's really something real chefs work on for years, not home cooks. If you're a home cook you ought to be doing home cooking. If you're American your country's home cooking went to shit over the last century, which is probably why you're confused about what home cooking actually is. Most of us are. My advice is to look at other cultures whose food you like and learn a bunch of their home cooking dishes. Italy, France, Greece and the Middle East all have great home cooking dishes that are easy to make. Look there.
There's a few caveats to it, though. For one, our "traditional" recipes usually aren't; most of the history of documented cooking is just cramming the newest memegredient or kitchen tool into everything, because seriously look at the history of the world over the past 500 years.
Then, after that, they're often not that good or acquired tastes, developed more to make every calorie bare-minimum swallowable than to provide enjoyment in a world where a 2-liter Coke is never more than a short drive away.
Blindly trusting tradition, which will hand you both genuinely unhealthy and disgusting garbage like scrapple or the midwest's mayo-jello salads and "we liked it because it's what we had" like chicory coffee and whole sanma. Your best bet while you learn the ropes is probably to find reformist, popularizing midcentury sources who focused on translating a cuisine into modern ingredient availability.
Or if you know Japanese, you can learn to cook yoshoku. That would be an amazing crash course in both what things actually taste like outside of the preparations you know and what can go unexpectedly well together. But English-language writing about it is sparse.
>Roast chicken and veg
>scrambled eggs with whatever I got put in them
>pasta
>the midwest's mayo-jello salads
That's not tradition, though. That's 20th Century bullshit. Midwest farmhouse cooking was great before the 20th Century fucked it up.
>Why do you always cook the same 3 things and never cook anything even slightly complex?
I do quite a bit more than the same 3 things, but cooking something new carries a risk that you'll fuck up and lose out on both the food you cooked and the time it took you to make it.
I also for some reason hate following recipes. I always feel like I'm gonna fuck em up
im a cook irl and im too tired to make fancy stuff when i get home
When your land was still being settled in the 20th century, it's even harder to argue that "20th century bullshit" isn't true to it than for other cuisines. And it's very hard even for those, because it was only a couple decades before the XXth that Japan's ban on the consumption of pork and beef ended for example.
Of course this isn't specifically a midwest issue, and there's plenty the midwest does right.
My point stands, though. Focusing on "how do I make these known-good dishes with the shit I have" has a high success rate, especially when you try to have an "I can get this all" option on the table to eat when an experiment goes wrong. "What do I do with this entire crop of (x)" fails more often than not.
There are a lot of bad recipes out there. Fuck, anyone can post a recipe online. And even if they're a good cook it doesn't mean the recipes they write out will be good. Also some simple dishes are dependent on great ingredient quality. For example, my wife's Midwest farmer grandma made a killer summer dish of peas and potatoes boiled together and dressed with a simple white sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper. Make that with garden fresh peas and potatoes just dug and it's pretty good. Make it with frozen peas and supermarket potatoes and it sucks.Same goes for a French classic like ratatouille. The dish is simple - a vegetable stew of what you'd find in a summer garden in Provence. Make it with fresh summer vegetables from your garden or a good local farm and it will be great. Make it with supermarket vegetables and it will also suck. Not because the recipes are bad, but because they assume access to better quality ingredients than what you find in a supermarket. This is true for a lot of Italian home cooking dishes as well.
If you're unsure of a recipe and are at the mercy of the supermarket I'd recommend looking at what the folks behind Cook's Illustrated (America's Test Kitchen) have to say. Their recipes are bullet proof, and they kind of assume you're doing your shopping at the supermarket.
Let's face it though, 20th Century convenience products may have made home cooking easier, but they also made it shittier.
I used to like making chineese food I would find out of my cookbooks. But I always ended up buying a lot of ingredients and I would run out of money fast so I'd have to spend the rest of the month eating instant noodles or pasta or canned food.
The autism boards are this way
Veeky Forums.org
My secret is not documenting what I cook and having no idea how to recreate the random mess I make for dinner, zero planning zero consistency.
I have no dishes or recipes, I just improvise, with mixed results.
Because I can't think of anything else to cook.