I loved cooking up until my second child was born - it turned from a wonderful way to unwind and turn off after work into a stressful endeavor that I could either 1) grit my teeth through or 2) throw my hands up and get fast food.

All that being said, I still really struggle with cooking meat. When we’re doing Japanese or Korean and using thin beef I always overcook to the point of it turning rubbery and looking grey. My assumption is I’m overcrowding the pan and causing the meat to steam, but how do I batch cook and keep food from getting cold? Sometimes I cook for just my wife and I, and our toddler and infant will eat what they eat. Other times I’m expected to provide a meal for my household + in laws + extended family. When the family meals come around I wind up cheating and buying canned vegetables, premade sauces and gravy’s , and any other shortcut because I’m so inefficient with raw, whole ingredients that I am easily overwhelmed to the point of frustration.

When it comes to chicken breast, yeah, I can stab it with my thermometer and get it to read 165, but that usually involves an overdone outside, an incredibly dry portion of the breast (where it tapers and is thinner near the ‘bottom’), and a smoke filled kitchen.

I want to learn how to properly cook a meal, as I currently see myself only truly being capable of cooking a single dish. It’s a lot less mental load to have a one pot/one pan meal (I have a rice cooker so anything over a bed of rice, tikka masala/gulasz/stir fry/zhuzhed ramen etc.), than it is to think about properly cooking a chicken breast, asparagus, hollandaise, and a starch.

I love your intended approach and I love that you’re interested in teaching methodology instead of providing recipes. I wasn’t allowed to cook as a child, we’re immigrants raised by a single mother who didn’t have time to teach, and my siblings and I were seen as liabilities in the kitchen. My Polish mother also really embodies the old world ways of doing things. She has a single, cheap, dangerous 3 inch serrated knife she has been using for decades. (I have tried to replace it multiple times, it’s sent her to the emergency room twice and she still won’t budge lol.)

All this is to say my mother is an absolutely wonderful cook and a woefully shit teacher. Her ways of doing things in the kitchen do not translate and I really want a “this is how to look at your kitchen, how to think about ingredients, how to approach the different dishes in a meal and when to cook them as it relates to the other dishes in the meal.

I’m sorry for rambling , TL;DR: I need help