Regardless of age, cooking, like many other technical skills, demands that you have fun. Why? Because you need time to master the basic skills and then more time to develop them. And after that you'll need time to forget about technique and to put some of you into it. I'm an amateur cook. It all started by necessity until I developed a taste for the right way of doing things for making things taste better, to prepare faster, to create surprise. Nowadays I like to watch the surprised look on my daughter's face when I present her with something she hasn't tasted before or that is totally out of the box for her. Cooking for others is awesome. Technique and know how give you a reasonable amount of certainty. My first attempt went very wrong. My father tried his best to say it was delicious, my sister tried her best to be able to eat that damned rice, but I understood I had missed something fundamental: proportions. Later in my life I proposed to cook my favorite dish to a great friend of mine and her family and it all went wrong because I was sloppy remembering the right proportions between two ingredients. Proportions again! Knowing the basics avoids embarrassments. But repeating things and correcting makes you remember. In cooking as with many other things, you need to make mistakes to learn. And after the basics are grasped you can fly into new directions. Along the way I learned a few rules you can't escape in the process of learning how to cook. Here they are.
1. Get to know the ingredients
Their origins, their history, how they relate to humans and their history, how they impact our health and what is their value in a meal. Try to taste things raw. Is it bitter, salty, sweet, acid, basic? Try to chew a bit of leek. How does it taste to you? And how different it is after it's cooked? How about sugar? What happens to it after it boils for 30 seconds? How about 2 minutes? And 5? And 10? Can you spot the differences in aspect, texture and taste? How about if you add some butter to the boiling sugar? What happens then? And why? What is the most common food or recipe in your area? Do you know why? Keep asking questions. Start with your favorite ingredients. Do you like peanut butter? Then start by knowing more about it. How many varieties are there? How is it made? Is it composed of what? What's the benefit and the downfall for your health? Does it have a big ecological footprint or not? How does it taste? How many ways are there to use it? Why do I like it? Keep asking. Questions bring answers with them.
2. Get to know the most efficient tools for the job and how to take care of them
Okay, let's say one of your friends is a rancher, a farmer or a fisherman and he or she offers you an entire animal or an entire pumpkin for food. Do you know how to cut it? How to take the skin, the seeds or scales out? How to cut it? And what tools you'll need? And why so many kinds of tools? And why we see professional chefs using a limited set of tools and companies keep trying to sell me all kinds of gadgets on the TV? As you can see the pattern here is posing questions and getting the best answers.
3. Learn about your body
Know how different ingredients affect human health in different ways and use that knowledge to your advantage. Try to know how your body breaks an ingredient into its chemical components and how it uses them.
4. Know about production and distribution
Know how ingredients are produced and how that potentially affects your region or the entire planet. Find the differences between a local ingredient, made or caught using traditional means versus those made in large scale with industrial techniques. Discover why sometimes traditional is better and sometimes not.
5. Start with very simple and fast recipes
If you're a beginner, it's useful if you start with very simple and fast recipes with only a couple of ingredients. That way you'll learn deeper, in small but sure steps. You'll start to grasp the difference between preparing and cooking. What's like following a recipe and what does it take to create something new. You'll get a better notion of times and amounts. Little by little you'll start memorizing some basic rules that will help you along the way. For example, start by learning how to cook rice. Then try a different cooking process. Then try a different rice type. Note the differences in water amounts, times to cook, techniques used. You can also search for tutorials and articles on certain techniques that you might find useful. You have an example in the video below:
Remember to always have an open mind. Maybe later on you'll discover some new technique better than the one you've learned today. That's usual and part of the learning process.
6. Never leave what you're doing to attend to other things
If you want to cook face it like it's gardening. It needs focus, calm and thinking. You cook with your hands, with your intelligence and with your emotions. You'll need all of those available. Don't leave your tools, ingredients, pans and ovens to answer calls, talk to a neighbor (unless it's really important), or play on your cell phone. If you have kids, elderly, pets or a very busy life use a kitchen timer to alert you when something needs to leave the oven. How about your cell phone's timer? This tip also relates to the next one. Never leave knives or other dangerous tools unattended. Particularly if you have kids or pets in the house.
7. Be safe
When cooking you deal with raw ingredients, bacteria, boiling liquids, hot metal, flammable substances, knives, pointy and heavy tools, chemicals and so on. There's a safety and hygienic aspect to cooking, that's of major importance. So, learn about it. Or else you'll have a recipe for a kitchen disaster.
8. Know things
Read a lot, travel a lot, go to the cinema, talk with people a lot, ask questions a lot and don't forget what was said in the beginning: have fun! If you want to start to know a bit more about food you may start with my post on curry: what is curry?
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