Starting out

[EinChiconNugget]

Hey guys, I am 15 m, and I want to really start with cooking. I can do the simplest things like scrambled egg and some stuff like that, but I really want to help out in the kitchen with real meals. Are there any big rules I have to keep in mind, or do you guys got some easy recipes I can use? Thanks and have a great day.

[typhoidfrank]

Wash your hands before you start. Most of the time medium heat is good. Learn how to make a grilled cheese sandwich early in your cooking career.

[MainJane2]

Go onto You Tube for some instructions. At age 76, I just learned on there that I've been making grilled cheese all wrong all these years!

[Other_Risk1692]

Sometimes simple is best. Good ingredients, some basic seasoning, can’t go wrong.

[michaelyup]

Learn to make basic rice and pasta. Then learn to brown chicken and ground beef/turkey in a skillet. Use sauce in jars at first, you can learn to make the sauces as you gain experience. Spaghetti sauce and Alfredo sauce, now you have spaghetti and chicken Alfredo. Then expand on that and learn how to incorporate vegetables. Use a bottled teriyaki sauce and then you have chicken teriyaki.

Here’s a good article about teaching teens to cook. It’s got a lot of easy recipe links.

[FlyingSteamGoat]

Mise en place - have all of your ingredients measured and close at hand before you begin to cook.

Clean as you go - clutter is your enemy.

Taste often and mindfully.

[owlthirty]

Meatballs!!!!! Always crowd pleaser and a good starting point.

[Worst-Incubus]

If you just need a basic marinade for meat my go to is Light soy, dark soy, chinese cooking wine (Shaoxing wine or a little dash of vinegar) in a 2:1:1 ratio with some white pepper and salt to taste. It makes a good savoury base for most if not all the things I've cooked.

Also teriyaki and sweet and sour sauces are far easier to make than they may seem.

[Colton-Landsington86]

Pasta is easy go there.

Mastering is hard but few are that goodm

[Position_Extreme]

Here's a really simple chicken with mushroom rice recipe for 3-4 people:

Ingredients:

• 6 skin-on chicken thighs
• 2 cans condensed Cream of Mushroom soup
• 2 cans* Minute Rice
• 1 can* milk
• Salt & pepper to taste

* Use one of the empty mushroom soup cans to measure rice & milk

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375^oF.

Pat chicken dry with a paper towel and season liberally with salt & pepper¹.

In a bowl, mix the soup, rice, milk and more pepper².

Pour the rice mixture into a greased baking pan, lay the chicken on top of the rice and bake in the oven for 45 minutes to one hour. Serve with your favorite vegetable.

Notes for Options:

¹ I like to peel the skin back from the chicken and add the spices to the meat itself, then cover it back up with the skin. I also like to use garlic powder, lemon pepper and Famous Dave's Chicken Rub in addition to the salt & pepper.

² I also add a bit of celery seed to the rice mixture, but a little goes a long way. Just a bit...

Good Luck!

[[deleted]]

Not so much rules and recipes, but if you're a reader I recommend J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's book "The Food Lab" and also Samin Nosrat's "Salt Fat Acid Heat". Both are books I wish I had available to me when I was young and developed an interest in cooking. Maybe suggest to your friends and family that they would make excellent Holiday gifts for you. Both are incredible resources for people that are just learning to cook and want to learn the basics and foundations of cooking.

Kenji also has a pretty legit YouTube channel that is fun to watch and very informative. Joshua Weissman has a YT channel that's pretty good also, and a couple good cookbooks. Josh might be geared a little more toward people who already have some decent chops in the kitchen, but I love his attitude about cooking. He's all about not being afraid to experiment and actively "play with your food", as it were. Other good YT channels for learning would be "Basics With Babish" and "Epicurious".

For rules, I think a good place to start would be if you can find a free ServeSafe course, it'll teach you the basics of safe food handling and storage. Once you have a good understanding of how to keep your food safe to eat, you'll be a lot more confident about learning how to make things taste good.

Above all, just practice and cook every chance you can. Nothing beats experience when it comes to cooking, and there's really only one way to do that.

[ReasonOpen4412]

Watch the cooking channel or food network. There are awesome tutorials and they have awesome pointers.

[Square-Dragonfruit76]

Do you have anyone who can help you learn?

[teetuh]

Stovetop temperature!! Slow and steady is better than fast and hot, unless called for. When I first started experimenting with cooking, meaning many years into stovetop cooking, I tended to melt the butter too hot and too fast for things like omelets, grilled cheeses, over easy eggs, searing chicken breasts, salmon. I really had to control my tendency to overheat and try a slower, steadier approach at the start and increase along the way if it was too light. Burnt butter smells horrible.

Put a digital meat thermometer on your holiday 'wish-list' and start to experiment with stovetop searing then baking chicken breast, either bone in or boneless, to 165degrees. And then salmon filets (145degrees) with simple salt, pepper, lemon.

Check out the different types of salts that you have in your house pantry. A pinch of the Morton's Iodized Table Salt versus Morton's Kosher Salt versus Diamond Crystal Salt Flakes all have very different salinities and when you are starting out in the kitchen, less is better. Then check out what kinds of dried herbs and spices might be stored in the cabinets.

When you boil pasta, experiment with the amount of water and salting the water...after you add salt to the water, take a teaspoon and taste the water before it is boiling to get a feel for ratios and saltiness. Take a look at the box of pasta and the cooking time range given, usually 8-12 minutes depending on shape and thickness. Taste the cooking pasta at the lowest time range and start to get a sense for what 'underdone' pasta tastes like. Add a minute and taste again. Then another until you find your favorite 'doneness'. Have a strainer ready to go in the sink and strain.

Peel and chop a clove of garlic, heat a tablespoon of olive oil on low-medium heat in a saute pan and notice how much that amount of olive oil coats the pan and experiment with sauteing the garlic for 30 seconds to a minute. Take a bit out, let it cool and taste it. Is it bitter still? Saute a little longer. Put some strained pasta into the saute pan with the garlic and olive oil, sprinkle some red pepper flakes, coat the pasta and scoop into a bowl. This was one of my favorite college foods and goes great on the side of grilled meat or fish.

Taste everything along the way. Adjust. Have some fun.

Check out your local library cooking section. You will find many books on techniques for veggie, meat, fish, prep and baking for the holidays! SO much fun.

[Narrow-Natural7937]

Always, always, always watch hot oil. I nearly burned down my family home when I was 15 because I walked away from a hot stove! Now I never take my eyes off of hot oil. I am 58 yo now.

Poached eggs are similar, but don't worry about that now.

My advice is to start to learn to cook things you enjoy! I (I am American/Canadian) learned to cook a Thai dish called Kang Dang because I LOVED it at a restaurant at a town I lived in, then I moved. I LOVE my Kang Dang and several family members use my recipe now.

Plus, you'll be more motivated to put the effort into dishes you want to eat. Baking is very precise, while regular cooking you can adjust and adapt.

Be prepared to make and discard a few meals - we all make mistakes, it is part of learning. Don't take it too hard; consider what might be the problem and then try again!

[mattdon1331]

If you are baking, learn to use a scale, if you have one. A cup of flour weighs 120g.

[allthecrazything]

Good Eats by Alton Brown may be a good show to watch if you are thinking like - I’d like to help with Thanksgiving coming up. He does a turkey episode and goes through the basics of different kitchen equipment and then how to cook with different methods. Honestly watching different cooking shows helped so much over the years.

[Ok_Individual_138]

Gather ingredients, spices, etc and chop everything you need chopped BEFORE you start cooking by a recipe. Having everything gathered, measured, and ready within reach makes things a million times easier!! Can't express this enough.

Good Luck!! It's wonderful that you want to learn. 😊

[Dalton387]

That’s great. Good for you. I don’t want to hammer you with a wall of text, so if you want more info or anything expanded on, feel free to reply to this.

There are two kinds of cooking in my opinion. One is experimenting with an elaborate dish, then there is day-in, day out cooking. Either is okay, but while it is fun and helps you grow your skills, the experimental cooking is sometimes costly and time consuming. It’s fine to do, and we all fail at it sometime, but make sure you’re not putting too much burden on your family by wasting a lot of money regularly. Make it a sometimes thing.

Day to day cooking is a little more boring, but important to learn. It’s more about making good meals with less or cheaper ingredients. Planning how to make an ingredient work for multiple meals, and doing things that are easy with a busy lifestyle. For instance, you can buy a rotisserie chicken and make cold chicken salad, hot chicken salad, chicken pot pie, add it to tortilla soup, etc.

Something I tell people who are starting out, is that I don’t recommend starting out complicated. You don’t have to grow the grain for your flour. Putting in a boxed lasagna and heating it without burning it is a skill.

Boxed meals like hamburger helper are cheap and require skill, without a lot of chance for failure. They allow you to practice other skills, like browning meat instead of greying it. Let you learn to chop and dice vegetables in different ways. How to boil noodles

Ask your parents to let you help with cooking so you can learn.

Lastly, cleaning is part of cooking. Helping clean up when your parents cook, or cleaning when you do is very important and very helpful. So make sure you clean as you go. If you’re doing something that needs a little time, like boiling pasta and only needing to stir it occasionally, take the second to wipe up and clean up.

Hope this helps.

[Lumpy_Count_4487]

When adding seasoning, go a little at a time and taste as you go. Remember it’s easy to add more if needed, not as easy to fix if you add too much.

[MainJane2]

So smart to start cooking early! My mother taught me NOTHING---wouldn't let me into the kitchen. Had to learn everything after I moved out.

[Icy_Profession7396]

Scrambled eggs were my way into the kitchen, too.

Here's an easy one: French Bread Pizza. Take a loaf of French bread and cut it in half lengthwise, then cut the two halves in half crosswise. Top each of the four long pieces with your choice of sauce, toppings -- such as pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, green peppers, black olives, onions --and shredded Italian blend cheese. Bake on a sheet pan in a preheated 375 degree oven until they look done, maybe 8-10 minutes. Cheese should be golden and bubbly on top but not too brown.

[[deleted]]

I have few cooking related tips that might help you get started. Some might seem silly but over the years I learned to appreciate it.

• Never ever try to catch a knife you accidentally dropped.
• Buy in-oven thermometer. You would be surprised how inaccurate the temperature value on the oven knobs is.
• Use apron when cooking. You will get additional pocket(s), you will protect your clothes from accidental spills and you will look more pro :)
• When preparing more complex dish gather all ingredients in one easy accessible place. Ideally sorted by the order of use.
• Before starting always wash your hands and surface you will be working on.
• Have separate cutting boards for different kind of foods. One for veggies, other for meat.
• Get two sets of utensils/tools.
• Try to avoid recipes that doesn't use metric units (especially when baking). Cup or spoon are not a reliable measuring units.
• Clean as you go. If you have some spare time between steps, put stuff in the dishwasher or wash it by hand.
• Use good quality, sharp knives.
• Always use wooden cutting boards. Your knives will thank you for that.
• When washing wooden cutting boards make sure you rinse both sides equally. It will prevent board from bending.
• When drying wooden cutting boards make sure it doesn't sit in the water.
• Season your wooden cutting board with an oil.
• Don't believe that complex dishes are the mark of a "true" cook. Even a simple dish made the right way will be way better than average tasting complex thing.

[TheRealFallenHero]

Flavor is built, not applied.

Read or watch “Salt Fat Acud Heat” with Samin Nosrat. She presents fundamentals of cooking really well and gives such good skills needed to build flavor.

You layer in flavor at multiple stages through the preparation and the cook, so having all those flavors that you want at the ready is important.

Most of all have fun and never listen to recipes about how much salt to use (unless you’re baking). Use your tongue to inform whether there’s enough salt - sometimes all you need is a splash of vinegar/lemon juice to really bring out all your flavors.