By Mac McCarthy, Zenergo.com
Keywords: Practice cooking, recipe night, progressive dinner, progressive lunch, potluck, cooking class, find cooking friends.
One of the great things about cooking is that there’s always something new to learn, master, enjoy. There are styles of cooking and cuisines from many cultures; you can get into vegetarian cooking, or decide you just want to improve the quality of what you eat without splurging on restaurants; you can decide to master a particular food and enter contests and festivals. There’s food-and-wine pairing (a whole topic in itself) and BBQ (another whole topic in itself) and baking (ditto).
You might be just out of college and ready to get into cooking for yourself now that the cafeteria is no longer available. You may have decided that more skillful cooking will improve your family’s health and save money. You may simply enjoy the process of mastering recipes and delighting friends and family with your discoveries.
This short guide gives you a few tips on starting your journey getting into cooking. Enjoy!
GETTING STARTED
To get started, you need a little bit of time, a customer to eat your experiments, and probably a regular schedule so you can make progress.
You also need to practice – practice the same recipe several times until you’re satisfied with it. Then practice a few more times with changes and twists and tweaks, see what happens.
You also need to decide what exactly you’re trying to accomplish:
- Become a decent all-around cook, for yourself or for your family
- Learn cuisines and styles you love most
- Explore new cooking techniques, recipes, cuisines.
- Compete — show off, or enter contests, or stick it to some insufferable twit–I mean, your mother-in-law, your always-superior sister, your boss, that smug woman at church.
- Be able to bring something good to your weekly lunch, monthly event, or progressive lunch, something you’re proud of. Not to compete, but to be able to hold your head up, and get a compliment once in a while.
- Broaden your taste horizons with styles, movements, and cuisines you don’t know yet.
- Improve your family’s healthy eating.
- Become known in your circle as the gourmet cook.
- Save money.
- You just enjoy cooking, and the more you learn, the more you enjoy it.
GOOD WAYS TO GET PRACTICE
Practice, practice, practice!
Like every artistic endeavor, becoming a good cook means practice — lots and lots of hopefully delicious practice! It helps if you have some sort of regular activity the schedule your cooking around. And victims — that is to say, people who will more-or-less willingly eat what you are learning to cook. If your spouse and/or your children tend to resist your innovations, you may need to tackle the problem another way.
In that case, you might set up one or more of these regular cooking opportunities:
Recipe night — Declare one night of each week (or month, if you’re really busy or the family is really resistant) as Recipe Night: This is the night when you will try some new recipe, new cuisine, or new technique, and practice on your family, your roommates, or your cooking group.
Progressive Lunch/Dinner — This is a classic: With your likeminded friends, set up a schedule by which you will hold a lunch or dinner every certain period (say, weekly), with the host rotating each week. The host can prepare the entire repast, or, more commonly, it’s a potluck, perhaps on a theme, that lets each member practice on the group.
Parties are perfect for testing new recipes on unsuspecting friends.
Potluck Events — We have a monthly wine event that is like a cocktail party but with wine instead of cocktails. It’s a potluck, with each person bringing some food to share. This lets you concentrate on one special dish to show off. We have been known to bring the same dish several months in a row, until we’ve gotten it down the way we like it — and then try variations on the theme. Since the type of wine being served each month changes, we sometimes have to change up with different dishes, so our “repeat” dishes are spread out over the year.
Roommates — One of our children, who had never expressed interest in the cooking tutorials my wife pressed on her during her high-school years, changed her tune when she moved into an apartment with three other women, and they decided to rotate the dinner chores each week. Our daughter found herself having to learn how to cook a chicken dinner for four, so we got frantic calls from a city far away. Eventually her confidence grew, and she branched out to roasts and other dishes. Her competitiveness drove her to want to do a good job, far more powerfully than any nagging from her parents!
Classes — You can take every kind of cooking class you can imagine, for every kind of meal and every kind of cuisine. It’s especially good for learning tricky stuff — a cuisine you don’t know well enough to know what you’re doing, a dish that requires special handling, or a type of food that the cookbook just doesn’t seem to explain right for you. My wife took a class in preparing Chinese Broccoli Beef, a dish that from the cookbook tasted sort-of OK but not really like you get in a Chinese restaurant. The teacher showed the class a secret ingredient that made all the difference — and now her Broccoli Beef dish is exactly like that from the best Chinese restaurants. You can fit cooking classes into your schedule, with multiday courses, or one-evening one-dish classes, or all-day Saturday crash courses.
“Mom” — If you don’t have Mom to teach you new dishes or improved cooking techniques, there may be someone in your circle or in your neighborhood who’s known for superb cooking. It’s possible you could persuade this wonderful cook to take you in hand and teach you her or his secrets and techniques — kind of a Cooking Mom!
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Using Zenergo to Get Together with Cooking Friends, and organize your cooking Groups and Events.
Our site, Zenergo, is especially good as a one-stop shop for your cooking interests.
You can set up your cooking group (or start one) to learn, practice, and enjoy cooking–a progressive lunch group, for example, or a winetasting group for which you can prepare wine-pairing foods. The Group serves as a base from which you create and manage specific regular events. Zenergo lets you maintain a group membership list so you can easily message everyone, store recipe documents, post pictures, share a calendar.
Set up your cooking Events, such as progressive lunches, gourmet-cooking events, regular dinners, parties, or events that involve or require food. The events can be tied to a related group, or freestanding; recurring or one-time-only. With Zenergo, the Event has its own calendar, attendees, privacy levels, and photo albums to share.
When you join Zenergo (it’s free and pretty straightforward, and we follow all the member-privacy guidelines), you can type the word “cooking” into the text box where it says “What Do You Like To Do?” Choices of Activities will show up, including “Cooking/Culinary Arts,” and “Vegetarian and Vegan Cuisine.” (There’s also “Dieting and Weight Loss,” but this probably isn’t the time for that!) Here’s an example of the Cooking Activity profile page for me. See all the choices?
By the way, there’s also a BBQ activity — type the word “BBQ” into the text box to find that one. BBQ’s a whole world of its own, isn’t it? And a Baking activity, with its own list of specialties.
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TIPS
- If you’re learning a brand-new recipe, it’s a good idea to follow the recipe exactly the first few times you make it. Don’t leave out ingredients (“I don’t like that one/I don’t have any of that handy”), don’t change amounts (“That’s too much sugar!”), don’t experiment — yet. First you want to see how it turns out as written. Once you’ve mastered that recipe, you can start fiddling with the ingredients and timing to make that recipe your own.
- Practice practice practice — Like any art, cooking is a skill set that rewards familiarity with your materials, and that only comes with practice. Don’t be surprised — or disappointed — when a recipe doesn’t turn out the way you expected. (Don’t even be disappointed when you have to throw out a failed experiment!) Pull yourself together and try again — you’ll get the hang of that recipe next time, or the time after that. (It helps to have someone around who is willing to eat whatever you come up with.)
- Gear doesn’t matter as much as you think it does! Don’t put off getting into cooking until you’ve got “the right” pots, pans, knives, electrical gadgets, and stove. Start with what you have — good equipment makes things easier, but it’s not critical. As you master the art of cooking, you can selectively upgrade your tools — you’ll actually know what matters. Don’t run the risk of becoming a Shopping Cook – someone who buys cookbooks by the linear yard, has DVDs lined up at the computer, is waiting for the Viking Stove to be installed, has a pot and pan set worth more than their car — and still can’t figure out when the boiling water is ready! (Every area has this problem: The skier with the great equipment who can’t get down the hill without hitting a tree; the painter with pricey easel and a custom artist’s studio who hasn’t finished a single painting yet. Don’t be that person!) You can start with cooking using only limited gear. (Good ingredients are more important.)
- Handling picky eaters. Your kids won’t eat anything they haven’t seen before, that doesn’t have an action figure, or that’s green. Or maybe that’s your spouse! The ideal would be to raise kids who don’t pick at their food, but that may be asking the impossible. Don’t fret, don’t fight, don’t get discouraged. Ease into introducing novel cooking items at the dinner table, find some cooking friends (on Zenergo) with whom you can share your culinary passions, and be patient: Kids grow up, and one fine day they’ll actually ask you how to make that “fabulous” item they remember so fondly (your memory of that item may vary).
Add your comments below — if you can help others get excited about cooking, please let us know!
When the leaves begin to turn and the air turns chill, when the fields are full of pumpkins and browning cornstalks, then it is time for cider. It should be the official drink of autumn, if you ask me. When I see it arrive on the shelves at the store, then I know, beyond any conceivable doubt, that summer days are now behind me.
While plain ol’ cider is wonderful, mulled cider is a thing perfectly suited in all ways for a chilly day. To hold the warm mug in your hands, inhale steam laced with notes of apple and orange peel, taste sweetness and feel the spice in your belly – is warming in a deeply comforting way. We make it often on those brisk autumn evenings, sipping it huddled next the stove and listening the crackling of wood and wind howling down the chimney. It is a yearly tradition, a ritual.
All the ingredients are put into a pan with a half-gallon of cider, and left to simmer on very low heat (or perched atop the wood-stove) for a good 20-30 minutes with a cover on. Once it’s mulled to your liking, strain it into mugs and top off with a bit of rum if it’s an extra cold night.
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