I spent too much of my life learning to do things by following rules, up to and including a PhD and an MBA. I've since learned to love learning by doing and diving in.
Food is probably the best success in that area, combined with the observation that constraints breed creativity. My cooking gets high reviews (from friends, not critics http://joshuaspodek.com/food-world-reviews) and has inspired my passion and podcast on leadership and the environment http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast.
Two constraints revolutionized my cooking:
- to avoid food packaging
- to avoid food where fiber has been removed
Joining a CSA/farm share helped a lot too, by forcing a deluge of new produce on me that I had to figure out what to do with. I guess a third constraint was not to allow any food to go to waste.
The three constraints force me to cook almost entirely from fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and bulk legumes, nuts, grains, and seeds (filling bags I bring with me to the bulk food store).
My diet became bland when I stopped packaged food since I didn't know what to do and mostly steamed vegetables or fried them with garlic and onions -- not bad once in a while but not exclusively. I don't like bland and do like delicious (I'm funny that way), so I experimented and learned how to combine flavors and textures to my tastes.
Now my food is more delicious than ever. It's also cheaper, more convenient, and more social (I've met the farmers and visit their farm annually, and I invite people to dinner more than ever, plus I get invited to cook for friends' dinner parties). I love finding new local produce and the change of seasons bringing foods I haven't had for a year. I also pollute less -- I last threw out my landfill garbage in June.
If you've read this far and care for advice, I advise just forcing yourself to cook from scratch for six months, no exceptions. Your diet will be boring and bland for a few months, but by a year, you'll find your diet more delicious than ever. At least that worked for me. My blog posts a lot about avoiding food packaging http://joshuaspodek.com/js_blogseries/avoiding-food-packagin... and such if you click around.
You make a lot of grand statements there without backing anything up. If it was so convenient and cheap to cook this way, then everyone would be doing it.
I have tried and tried and tried to cook like you suggest. I end up wasting food as it goes bad before I can use it. I have a small apartment and ended up going to the grocery store every 2 days to restock. Some ingredients aren't sold in quantities appropriate for 1-2 people, so things go stale or expire before they get fully used. I wasted way more food attempting to change my food practices than I did maintaining the way I was raised.
I'm skeptical about farm shares, I don't think it scales. If it became more popular, you'd had everyone hopping in their cars every weekend and driving out to a farm. Much more efficient to load everything on 1 transport truck than to have a thousand cars on the road just for picking up produce. And in winter climates, you aren't growing anything in the ground, so this produce is being shipped in to the farm anyways, just ship it to the grocery stores. Or it's being grown indoors, which requires increased energy usage (might be less energy intensive to ship veggies in on a truck than to grow them indoors?).
Our modern food system, for all of its faults, is the only thing that works for everybody. Poor people? Disabled people? Car-less people? Dietary restrictions? All covered. Your diet and way of living works for wealthy, healthy people with time on their hands. It's not realistic at all.
I have to say that your first statement seems totally ridiculous...do you really think that homo sapiens is homo economicus?? People are not rational optimizers, they're mammals. I'm sure I'm being a bit uncharitable to your claim here but your comment makes you sound like you actually are the 'older, wiser' economist in that old joke: "Two economists, one young and one old, are walking to lunch. The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, 'Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!' Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, 'Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now.'"
As to your second paragraph...have you considered the possibility that you, specifically, didn't do a good job of cooking for yourself and that the fact that you failed to cook this way could be, well, your failure (to plan or execute or whatever), rather than a global failure of the idea "cook for yourself and use fresh produce"?
As for farm shares, many/most CSAs deliver, either to the home or to a central location in town (often a local co-op). So it is, in fact just one delivery truck driving down the highway.
And to your final paragraph, I simply say that that is an utter failure of imagination. At the moment, it's absolutely true that participating in this kind of eating & cooking demands some flexibility of schedule. Mostly, wealthier people are the ones who eat this way. Now, why is that the case? Well, our entire food production and distribution system is built around a different model. Deviating from that model, given the current state of the system, is expensive. That doesn't mean that people with the power and resources to do so shouldn't actively work towards changing the system into somethign more sustainable and accessible for all. In fact, in NYC there is an incredible farmer's market (called "greenmarket"), which runs in several poor neighborhoods and accepts food stamps, and it's life-changing for many people. I think that if you spoke to a few of the people who shop there, you'd never be as offhandedly dismissive of "eat fresh produce & cook for yourself" as you are here.
> People are not rational optimizers, they're mammals
True, but people DO spend a lot of time optimizing their food; dieting is a huge trend.
> have you considered the possibility that you, specifically, didn't do a good job of cooking for yourself
Yes, I admitted as much. My point was that it's really hard to "cook for yourself and use fresh produce". There's nothing wrong with the idea, it's simple and noble, but the practical application of it is very challenging.
> As for farm shares, many/most CSAs deliver, either to the home or to a central location in town (often a local co-op). So it is, in fact just one delivery truck driving down the highway.
So how is that any different than what grocery stores do?
Proper shopping and meal prep would eliminate most waste when cooking for two. A lot of perishables are sold by weight so even if, say, the scallions are bundled by the dozen, you only have to buy two not the whole dozen. Also, pick recipes that have perishables in common so that you can be sure to use them all up. Finally, use your freezer. You can, for example, blanch extra veggies that you get on sale and freeze them.
Actually, our modern food system isn't working for the hundreds of millions of us who are dying from obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. Nor is it working for those of us (all of us) who are presently going bankrupt trying to pay for each other's healthcare.
>I spent too much of my life learning to do things by following rules, up to and including a PhD and an MBA. I've since learned to love learning by doing and diving in.
I'm really interested to know how you transitioned. I'm a recent graduate and I'm planning to pursue a graduate degree, and I'm overly concerned with rules, which provide structure but also seem to constrict my learning and work.
My grad school advice, as a PhD who is not good with rules:
- Understand what the rules are, why they are in place, and to whom they matter. Some are there to keep you from hurting yourself, some to keep you from hurting those on your level or below, some to keep your advisor from abusing you, and a lot to make sure you act in the best interest of the University via minimizing its liability, etc. You don't need to follow all of them all the time, but have some real justification when you do go off course, don't call attention to it, and don't screw anyone else over.
- For your research, you need a dual-prong strategy of making sure you check off the boxes for others, i.e. actually doing what your advisor got funded to do (she is on the hook for this for most grants), on time and under budget as well; then, pour all the rest of your efforts into researching what you are interested in, with an eye towards building your skill sets for the future and learning how to learn alone. Read widely enough to know the range of options for a solution space and deeply enough to know what has actually been tried in your field, and not just what has succeeded. Teach yourself stuff that your advisors don't know. The payoff from a broad familiarity with programming, statistics and discrete mathematics is large, especially if they're under-utilized in your field, and these skills are widely transferable. Furthermore experimenting/exploration through computing is often super cheap and the cost of failure is low, unlike destructive analysis of your physical samples.
- Keep your datasets small enough that you can master them. In the natural sciences, many scientists just want more and more data but getting and maintaining data is labor-intensive and has a huge opportunity cost. You don't always learn a lot of transferable skills that way unless you want to be a lab tech forever. The major exception is when obtaining data is primarily observation and measurement, which are really important to building intuition and just noticing subtleties.
Seconded, including a winter CSA, which gave me new appreciation for several root veggies I'd neglected (e.g. parsnip, rutabega, turnip). It can be an engaging challenge to use it all - in an Iron Chef sort of way.
The fact is that not all "why"s are known in cooking yet, and the combination of ingredients is so varied that it's not always easy to go from a myth to a reasonable explanation.
Although, lots of research has greatly improved, and I warmly recommend you to read “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” (2011).
Then, for techniques, I strongly recommend following a book designed for chefs when they learn. For example, in French, I recommend “La Cuisine de Référence” (2015) by Michel Maincent that teaches you how to select ingredients, cut them, to various traditional techniques and how to correct them if you fail, and why you failed.
One of my favourite aha moments: Back when I was much younger virtually every cookbook said you should add olive oil to pasta cooking water. I could never figure out why. Later people pretty much poo-pooed the practice saying that it was some old wives tale about stopping the pot from boiling over or some such thing.
Fast forward many years and I was trying to work on a bolognese sauce. My wife likes meat/tomato sauces on spaghetti. I think it's weird because long pasta like that should be with an oil/cream based sauce. Anyway, I figured it would make the dish much better if I somehow coated the spaghetti with olive oil and then spooned the meat sauce on top. But how to easily coat the spaghetti with olive oil? I figured it would be easiest to float a tablespoon of olive oil on the pasta water and then draw the spaghetti through it as I took it out of the water. And then I realised what I was doing :-) Still not sure if that's why people suggested it oh so many years ago, but it works a treat!
> I could never figure out why. [...] long pasta like that should be with an oil/cream based sauce.
You're doing the same thing you are complaining about: Postulating something as an axiom but not even trying to explain why you think it may be the case.
Anyway, as another commenter said, the commonly stated reason for oil in the cooking water is to stop the pasta sticking together. The commonly stated reason against oil in the cooking water is that it coats the pasta and makes it harder for the sauce to stick to it.
Oil in pasta water is a weird thing. It generally helps the pasta not stick, especially after cooking and waiting for sauce. This can be mostly ignored if you stir the pasta often and leave a wooden spoon across the top of the pan (to stop boil-overs). It does add flavor at times.
The main drawback to putting oil in the pasta water or tossing the pasta with oil/butter afterwards is that some pasta sauces won't stick too well to oiled pasta. This may not be such an issue with fattier sauces: cream sauces or something with ground meat, since they already have oils in the sauce. Vegetarian tomato sauces (regardless of fake meat) seem to fare worse.
The solution I came up with (watching many many cooking videos) is different: cook the spaghetti in the sauce for the last minutes.
You get the same effect, but less of the oily mouth feel which I did not like.
It also helps thicken your tomato sauce.
Also, +1 on `Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking`.
A better way is to cook pasta in a pan, adding water bit by bit as you would in a risotto (look up "pasta risottata").
In Italy no professional chef I know would allow oil in the boiling pan ("that's what Frenchies do, because they don't know how to cook pasta without making it stick" being the common answer)
Your use of the word "fuss", together with that of a timer instead of being an active participant in the cooking experience, clearly explains what's the difference between the method i proposed and your way of dealing with what you ingest.
Feel free to continue your way, if it' the same to you.
Don't understand at all. Why is it a problem that I'm preparing the sauce (which actually requires my attention) while the pasta is cooking? Anything other than arrogance?
Don't even try to make me believe that you get 'better pasta' by fussing over it. Its not the star of the dish - its just a vehicle, and 'cooking' is just making it softer. Not adding anything magical.
(I'm on your side; I want the absolute least of my personal time and attention devoted to food preparation.)
IMO, tomcooks' comments aren't arrogance; they're an expression that some people genuinely enjoy the process of cooking and are perfectly happy (in fact, happiest) if they remain thoroughly engaged in the preparation steps.
To me, it's a bunch of wasted time; to them, it's enjoyable. Replace "cooking dinner" with "computer programming on an unpaid side project" and many HN readers will understand that we/they enjoy it immensely while others would see it as a tedious waste of time.
In my experience, olive oil helps spaghetti not to stick together, by coating them in oil, while putting them into the water. Also it adds taste after.
“While cooking is for many a hobby, it is also a thing that nearly everyone has to do, usually when time is short.“ If only this wasn’t the case. This is always unpopular whenever I say it, but we no longer expect everyone to sew their own clothes or bake their own bread - why do we still demand that everyone cook for themselves (and, often, that they enjoy it too)? As this article demonstrates, the barrier for even understanding what you’re doing, rather than rote instruction following, is pretty high. I wish we could move away from every individual cooking for themselves and towards socially acceptable communal kitchens or something.
I mean, sure, this is mainly motivated by the fact that I hate cooking. But it also just makes logical sense to me as a way to organise the universal human need for food, like we’ve done for other universal human needs.
100% agree. South East Asia was heaven for me, in Bangkok you never have to cook, you never have to think about cooking. Even in smaller villages in Thailand you could find tons of places serving cheap, good food any time of the day (and numerous at night as well).
Now that I'm back in the UK I mostly just prepare a bunch of sandwhiches twice a week.
You can cook a meal of almost any kind in 30 minutes or less. Your comparison to sewing clothes is wrong cause it usually takes days, or many hours, to do such a thing. Baking bread? I do it almost every day...from scratch...no bread maker.
>this is mainly motivated by the fact that I hate cooking
And there you go. I would add that you lack cooking knowledge and ability. If you knew how, you wouldn't say such things. I make breakfast every morning and dinner every night. I make lunch when I'm home. It isn't hard.
When you cook at home, you decide what you want to cook and find a recipe. From there on out, you have the recipe. Just like restaurants don't magically appear when you decide you want a hamburger. You must choose one.
In the time it takes you to go to a restaurant, or order online, I can cook a meal for four at half the price you paid.
I hate when people downplay the time and cost involved in eating out as if there is none.
Last night, I made a two prime, strip steaks with red potato chips and a side salad. It took me less than 30 minutes. Admittedly, the salad came from a bag my wife bought on the way home cause I forgot to buy vegetables.
Most of that time was waiting for things to heat up. A few minutes for the pan. Longer for the oven for the potatoes.
This morning we had eggs with melted cheddar, english muffin and bacon. I bought the muffins cause it's harder to make than regular sourdough bread I bake. It took me 10 minutes not including opening up the packages and getting things out of the fridge.
The time-saving alternative to cooking is not eating out (that's insanely expensive if it becomes the norm). The alternative is foods that scale well. I can buy a pack of bread, a pack of cheese and a pack of sausage in 3-4 minutes, and then use that for a week or so to make sandwiches. Preparation time will be 2 minutes per sandwich.
Eating sandwiches may be boring, but it is very time-efficient.
You seem do think in a waterfall model of cooking: a big plan first and starting from and ending in an empty kitchen.
Speaking for my experience: I go to the supermarket once a week, replenishing staples and looking for interesting (and cheap..) stuff. Then later in the week I know what's fresh in my fridge and what's stored the pantry and when I get hungry late afternoon my subconsciousness is thinking about possible meals while I do other stuff. Leftover ingredients go back in the fridge and the cycle of "What's available today?" continues. And I ignore the dishes for every other day or two, because I'm lazy.
There is most of the time just one or two steps, because there is a rhythm and practice and a cycle. One-time event cooking in a tabula rasa environment, yes, that's more complicated. But that's not daily life.
But it is daily life for me. The only meal I ever cook myself is dinner (lunch is at work), but I'm not at home many days of the week. If at all, I would be cooking twice a week. Given this situation, it doesn't make sense to buy large quantities of ingredients in advance. Most would just perish.
> And I ignore the dishes for every other day or two, because I'm lazy.
That's cute. I do the dishes every Sunday. That's how away-from-home I am.
You might want to consider services such as HelloFresh. They're more expensive than buying the individual items at the supermarket, but cheaper than eating out. But the best thing is there's no food waste, and they sell you items meant for just one person - so your grocery bill would remain roughly the same (just with less food waste).
> I would add that you lack cooking knowledge and ability. If you knew how, you wouldn't say such things.
There are a lot of things in life that people know how to do but still hate...
I might know how to drive to work for 45 minutes everyday, I can do it, I can do it well, I can still hate it because it's a waste of time that I'd rather be using for something else.
Hell, people do jobs to earn a living that they're entirely competent at but still hate.
So no, knowing how to do something doesn't automatically mean you don't hate it, does it?
I know how to cook, on the whole I really enjoy it and I'm even pretty good at it. But the fact that I know I'm required to start doing it every single day as soon as I get home from work, mainly to satisfy other people, no matter if I feel like it or not can really suck joy straight out of it for me. If it was purely upp to me I'd eat out 3-5 days a week and save the cooking for when I wanted to.
I'm a good cook now, but when I was first learning I spent a lot of time and effort trying to find good recipes that didn't seem to difficult, too expensive, too unhealthy, etc. There was a lot to learn! I think a lot of things seem easy in hindsight like that. A lot of recipes didn't go into enough detail for a total newbie. "Brown the meat". Easy now a days, but when I started that meant I had to go down this rabbit hole of figuring out how to do that correctly. In the past few years I had to teach my SO to cook and just properly browning ground beef and chopping it into small bits took a few rounds to get right on his own. What does it really look like when it's "done"? What size should each piece be?
Yes, overall it's definitely going to pay off(even just after a month or two), but I think it's easy to forget there's still a decent barrier to starting. I ate a lot of burnt chicken when I first moved out. :P It took a while to afford the pots, the pans, and eventually the thermometer to fix that vs just eating the cheap banquet meals / boxed food.
I can cook a few meals, and I know a fair amount about cooking because my family are all foodies. I’m just not very motivated to add more to my repertoire, or to actually do it often, because I find the whole thing unenjoyable. I agree it’s not hard, but it’s like washing up - a chore. If I can avoid spending even half an hour doing something I hate, well, that sounds good to me!
After hearing several friends say that they cooked for fun, to unwind after a long day, I decided it is ingrained in personality, possibly genetic --- so vast was our difference in attitude, like how some people marvel that I like programming.
I wonder if your dream of communal kitchens are somewhat hampered by urban layouts, at least here in the U.S. If every time you want to eat you have to hop in the car and drive a mile, it adds a strong point to the side of just finding something at home.
> we no longer expect everyone to sew their own clothes or bake their own bread - why do we still demand that everyone cook for themselves
And yet a lot of cultures do expect you to know basic sewing (eg reattaching a button is expected from every recruit in the military) and I assume everyone who was a scout has made his own bread.
> I wish we could move away from every individual cooking for themselves and towards socially acceptable communal kitchens or something.
You have that everywhere where life and work is mixed: Small, cheap breakfast joints and inexpensive roadside kitchens that have a very limited menu and serve traditional, local food.
As someone who loves cooking, the idea of real communal kitchens does not sound good - been there, done that and the countless hours spent cleaning before I dared to handle food did not fill my pension fund... (You don't need "cyber"-laws to shut down a hackerspace, just send hygiene inspectors.)
My troop had a Heavy Cream Patrol which prided itself on making gourmet food in the backcountry. This usually meant carrying extra equipment, learning to cook well with both backpacking stoves and live fire (more than just boiling water), and spending extra time cooking at night. After hiking all day you are going to sit around the campfire anyway, why not make it a productive period? Plus there is nothing better than a stellar meal and dessert while sitting in a beautiful spot.
Cooking is still a way I relax and one way I show affection to friends and family. There is a certain satisfaction from having a meal where you raised and/or made every item on the table from raw materials. For instance this morning I made my wife and I egg sandwiches with sourdough bread we baked yesterday morning, red pepper jelly we put up last year, onions we grew and stored over winter, bacon we smoked from a hog we helped raise, eggs from some chickens we help take care of, and microgreens we grew in the basement. We (clearly) live in a rural-ish setting so I realize what is possible for us is not possible for those living in a major metro area (except maaaaybe Portland), but aspects of this are possible almost anywhere if you want to try.
Then there is the nerd factor where you can get into the science of cooking a la modernist cuisine and that takes it to a whole other level in engaging with my engineering side....
_Nice_. I tried a cheesecake once and the cooking time in the dutch oven was about 8 hours longer than expected (gave up waiting at 10p and left it in the coals overnight to finish). At least it was a nice breakfast.
I have an idea on how I would do it but do you care to share your method?
Food delivery (not the fast food one) is changing the need for cooking, I haven't cooked in ages.
In principle, the price of food preparation should be smaller when done on a large scale, but for some reason it's not the case, except for the Southeast Asia.
nobody demands that you cook your own food. but if you aren't willing to put in the (considerable) work yourself, you are expected to pay for the labor, ingredients, and kitchen space.
what exactly makes your idea of a communal kitchen different from a restaurant? is it free?
I’d say - you turn up, there’s a big pot of whatever is available that day, and a cheap/flat fee. No choice, inexpensive building, not a social event (fine to go alone), cheap and simple bulk cooking. Almost more like a soup kitchen than a restaurant. More expensive/complex food could be optional or once a week, and yeah, if you want nicer food, go to a restaurant.
> Any one of these recipes offers a fix under specific conditions, but after cooking through enough of them, those isolated recommendations can congeal into a realization
> The downside of learning to cook primarily through recipes, then, is that these small eurekas—which, once hit upon, are instantly applicable to nearly any other dish one prepares—are most often arrived at via triangulation. It’s like trying to learn a language only by copying down others’ sentences, instead of learning the grammar and vocabulary needed to put to paper lines of one’s own.
Is that necessarily bad?
I can totally buy individual differences in how people take to new information, but I've always had best results with applied learning, and later reading or realizing the rules. It's how we all learned to speak, and it's how I later learned this language.
I'm sure that it's most efficient for a machine to learn the game of football by just parsing all the rules, but for a human I imagine it's much harder to retain those rules without having played some touch football in the park or watched games as a kid to build a model on which to apply those rules.
> The downside of learning to cook primarily through recipes, then, is that these small eurekas—which, once hit upon, are instantly applicable to nearly any other dish one prepares—are most often arrived at via triangulation. It’s like trying to learn a language only by copying down others’ sentences, instead of learning the grammar and vocabulary needed to put to paper lines of one’s own.
So, exactly like how people learn the language they speak best -- their native one...
> But recipes, for all their precision and completeness, are poor teachers. They tell you what to do, but they rarely tell you why to do it.
This drives me crazy about recipes e.g. adding vinegar to poaching water is recommended in lots of perfect poached eggs guides but few explain why (makes the whites firm even faster to prevent them from dispersing in the water). It's really 'teach a man to fish' kind of stuff, knowing the why gives more flexibility.
That's why I loved cookings shows like Good Eats by Alton Brown or ones with Heston Blumenthal. They approach cooking from a more scientific approach in that they explain the why (and with Good Eats often a funny demonstration).
And with the knowing why things are done, you can use that to experiment a bit more yourself.
I loved Good Eats and was devastated when they canceled it. Brown actually teaches the why to his recipes, not just the how and what. I probably built my cooking kits up from things he recommended and used during each show.
From my experience, the amount of vinegar required to see an actual difference is enough to change the flavor of the eggs. Try creating a vortex in your water and placing the egg inside [1] (although they still use a "drop of vinegar')
An even better technique (I tried lots) is to put the eggs in boiling water for 20-30s before breaking and poaching them. It will start the coagulation process of the egg whites, making it much more viscous when you actually do break them. This causes the egg whites to keep together and not spread in the water too quickly. Result is a nicer, rounder poached egg.
Fresh eggs, yeah, that does help. But if your eggs are slightly older you can still try the trick of putting them a few seconds in hot water. And if your eggs are fresh the results in my experience are also improved with this method, without the need for a strainer.
I tried that recently after reading it on here, and the result was a thin layer of cooked white stuck to the inside of the shell, while the remainder of the white was no firmer. This tallies with my expectations based on thermal gradients. Am I doing it wrong?
Are the eggs room temperature to begin with? That seems important to me... Otherwise perhaps vary the duration. I've had great success with this method but YMMV.
I don't see how any modulation of the timing can produce anything other than a thicker or thinner layer of white stuck to the inside of the shell. What exactly happens when you do it - does all the white come out? Do you use older eggs perhaps? The older the egg, the less the shell sticks - but the more it disintegrates in water, so I always try and use fresh ones or poaching...
Please pardon my mentioning my hobby web app http://cookingspace.com but I do something useful: using 100K public domain recipes, I calculated the associations between ingredients in recipes and use this to suggest additional ingredients for a recipe.
Same here. I'm from England. But I'm also 62, I suspect that people closer to the average age of HN commenters and in the US probably have a different experience.
"I tried to read it [On Food and Cooking] straight through, and stopped dejectedly in the middle of a history of dairy—I think around where McGee describes the first time humans turned water-buffalo milk into mozzarella."
It's holding my teenage son's interest. McGee wrote a good textbook, not a novel. You have to want to understand the topic and be willing to put in some work, to stick with it.
This suggests that the search for alternative/substitute/new ingredients/recipes isn't a brute force search. Not sure how much I believe that.
The idea of applying principles to cooking didn't work for me, even though it seemed like a reasonable approach to my 10 year old mind. I presume this happens to everyone to some extent, and that's why we have this recipe culture, we have it because it works.
Hmm. Sushi is an odd choice for a place to start - it's so dependent on your suppliers, and it's traditionally eaten as a set of tiny varied dishes that are a terrible idea if you're cooking for 1.
(Also if you're looking to get into sushi and £80 is a problem I have some more bad news for you)
The disadvantage of starting alone: picking up the intangibles (seasoning, knowing the basic food prep techniques that are commonly stated without explanation, recognizing what tools/ingredients you need that recipes often omit, etc.), and scaling the ingredients/cooking down. (Better: just cook for 2-4 and have leftovers.)
The advantage of starting alone: you don't have to cater to anybody else's tastes! Pick the most ridiculously delicious thing you can think of that fits your time/skill/price budgets, and cook that.
HN is not precisely known for its culinary excellence, but if you're looking to get started with some particular dish or kind of dish, geeks who cook would probably be happy to give you some more specific pointers!
I might also recommend something like Blue Apron if you want to just have a bunch of food pushed your way with recipes and start just trying stuff out! Not sure what they have in the UK along those lines though.
I was underwhelmed by "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat". Good information, great presentation, but not up there with the very best books, IMO.
I like Ruhlman's "Twenty", maybe followed by "Ratio".
"How to Cook without a Book" by Anderson is great, although you probably needwhole rooms in your house for food storage if you took her "what you should have in your pantry" serious.
My most used cookbook is the one my mother gave me and all my relatives when we were living alone for the first time. It's the book she uses at school. It's for special-needs children, so extremely basic and easy, with many, many quirky illustrations.
But it has everything important. Bechamel? Sure. Choux pastry? Yes. But also how to cook potatoes or eggs.
The only infuriating thing in this book is that the index is worse than useless. I know the important recipes' page numbers by heart.
I might pick up that last one. When looking up something I haven't cooked before, I always check seriouseats (or epicurious and a few others), and especially Kenji, as he's never steered me wrong before. Haven't read the book though.
I have actually lost count of the number of times I've made something new and my wife says "this is good, where did you find it?" and I'll say "Oh, I saw it on serious eats and thought that it looked fun".
In point of fact, this exact thing happened last night after I made chicken piccata for the first time.
I learned to cook from "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" by Julia Child et al. I still think it's the best instructive cook book I've ever seen (with the exception of some bread books, of which there are numerous incredible examples).
Although be 'warned' that On Food and Cooking spends a lot of time on the history and anthropology of food and cooking. So if all you're primarily interested in are the details that you can apply to your day to day cooking then you'll probably consider much of the book 'pointless' filler.
Food is probably the best success in that area, combined with the observation that constraints breed creativity. My cooking gets high reviews (from friends, not critics http://joshuaspodek.com/food-world-reviews) and has inspired my passion and podcast on leadership and the environment http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast.
Two constraints revolutionized my cooking:
- to avoid food packaging
- to avoid food where fiber has been removed
Joining a CSA/farm share helped a lot too, by forcing a deluge of new produce on me that I had to figure out what to do with. I guess a third constraint was not to allow any food to go to waste.
The three constraints force me to cook almost entirely from fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and bulk legumes, nuts, grains, and seeds (filling bags I bring with me to the bulk food store).
My diet became bland when I stopped packaged food since I didn't know what to do and mostly steamed vegetables or fried them with garlic and onions -- not bad once in a while but not exclusively. I don't like bland and do like delicious (I'm funny that way), so I experimented and learned how to combine flavors and textures to my tastes.
Now my food is more delicious than ever. It's also cheaper, more convenient, and more social (I've met the farmers and visit their farm annually, and I invite people to dinner more than ever, plus I get invited to cook for friends' dinner parties). I love finding new local produce and the change of seasons bringing foods I haven't had for a year. I also pollute less -- I last threw out my landfill garbage in June.
If you've read this far and care for advice, I advise just forcing yourself to cook from scratch for six months, no exceptions. Your diet will be boring and bland for a few months, but by a year, you'll find your diet more delicious than ever. At least that worked for me. My blog posts a lot about avoiding food packaging http://joshuaspodek.com/js_blogseries/avoiding-food-packagin... and such if you click around.
Oh, and buy a pressure cooker.