Cooking takes patience, and don’t be afraid of making mistakes
When trying to come up with one skill that everyone should learn, cooking comes to mind. Everyone should take the time to learn how to cook several meals. Once you can make a few meals, you know how to make a lot more than you might think. After that, it’s just following a recipe and not burning down a kitchen.
We live in a time where cooking recipes and tutorials have never been more accessible. There is YouTube, Pinterest and blogs across the internet offering free recipes for cheap, easy meals. A personal favorite, Binging with Babish on YouTube, takes food that we see in movies and TV shows and brings them to life, providing the recipe along the way.
After you have made something once, it can be applied to so many other recipes. Bacon is a perfect example. It is extremely easy to make. Put it in a pan, let it sizzle, flip it. Repeat steps two and three until preferred crispiness. If you can do that, bacon grilled cheese sandwiches made in bacon grease are a few short steps away. Yes, it is just as delicious and awful for you as it sounds.
Also, cooking doesn’t have to be a masterful, three-hour performance, especially for a product that takes 15 minutes to eat. There are delicious breakfasts, lunches and dinners that can be prepared in 10 to 20 minutes but still taste incredible. Meats, pastas and salads can all be made in under 30 minutes. Just learn how to take things out of the freezer in the morning so they can defrost during the day. That, and make sure you have all the ingredients before you start cooking.
Cooking can also be a great way to show people how much you care about them. Offer to make dinner for your parents. They feed you, despite all your whining about how much you don’t like vegetables. Make your friends a meal, just because you want to show them that you appreciate them. Also, you could impress a date with a homemade meal instead of going out to eat.
In the beginning, cooking appears terrifying. There can be several steps in the process of making something that could end up ruining the entire meal. Everyone makes a bad meal. Everyone has overcooked or undercooked something. Everyone has used too much or too little salt.
Being patient and having a willingness to learn from mistakes – and there will be mistakes – can make anyone a half-decent cook. Just don’t yell at yourself like Gordon Ramsay would when a mistake happens. Just put the pot on the “hot” burner next time. Not the one next to it. (Some of us have made that mistake… recently).
