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Everyone should know at least the basics of cooking like rice or pasta, making scrambled eggs or a simple stir-fry. After all, having a nice meal is important for good physical and mental health.
If you have never cooked before, you shouldn’t have to feel ashamed about it. It’s never too late to learn how to transform your love of food into a love for making great food. Here are some tips and hacks to get over your kitchen fears and get you jump started on your culinary journey.
Find A Good Resource
Be it a cookbook, a television cooking show, a social media page, an internet site or a culinary blog, find someone or something that you are comfortable with. For starters, videos might be the best option so you can see the entire process of how a dish is made. If you are a more hands-on and experiential learner, it might be a good idea to enroll yourself in a basic cooking short course so you can do things under supervision of an experienced chef.
Be Attentive, but Stay Relaxed
Most of the accidents that happen in the kitchen are caused by carelessness. The more attentive you are to what you are doing, the less chances of something going wrong. However, the same thing also applies to when you are tense and stressed, so do your best to stay relaxed. They say that one can tell if a dish has been cooked with love and happiness, and this can be achieved if you stay calm, focused and happy.
Minimalism is Good
Social media depicts hundreds of kitchen gadgets that seem ingenious and useful; but don’t let that fool you. Getting into the cooking groove may trigger excitement and create a mild obsession for you to get all those unnecessary kitchen gadgets. As a beginner, you should take baby steps in the kitchen, and the same should follow when purchasing equipment.
Having a good sharp knife and a small set of dependable pots and pans are better than having a ton of different ones that you don’t fully know how to operate yet. Like most other skills, you’ll want to get a good grasp of cooking basics first, before moving to more advanced techniques. As you develop your skills and start leaning towards certain types of dishes, you can start buying gadgets (food processors, grills, sous vide machines, etc.) that will help you cook what you love more easily.
Keep Going
And finally, once you have developed some confidence in the kitchen, keep going and don’t stop! The quickest way to get better and more confident in the kitchen is to keep practicing. Enroll yourself in basic cooking courses until you are ready to go into more advanced ones. Keep reading, watching and exploring to hone that skill!