I started as a kid with simple things. Cooking and frying eggs, pimping an instant soup, etc.

Then they had a real chef in a weekday afternoon TV show. I started emulating his job, learned about using the “claw” to cut vegetables, how to make soups and sauces from scratch, and what spices to use.

When I was a teenager, I was visiting relatives, and a bunch of farmers wives were peeling and cutting onions en masse. They invited me to join, more for the fun of having a young man on the table. This was a time and culture where a male had no place in the kitchen, so imagine their surprise when I got a different knife out of the kitchen, sharpened it, and started cutting up onions way faster than they did…

I wanted japanese dishes, so I was promoted to “Japanese home chef”.
Othee than that: I wanted to keep up with potential peers and not be reliant on Hotel Mom™ to provide me food.
And thus began my quest into collecting and documenting recipies :)

I had a mom who was able to pass the basics of cooking down as well as home ec. classes. We’ve done a major disservice to the younger folks by not offering such classes honestly. Learning how to read recipes, basics of cooking, knowing when food is good to eat, etc. is a highly useful skill even now.

Have kids to feed. Have random things to cook. No time. Get creative. Fail. Try again next time. Succeed. Repeat. Fail. Succeed. Fail. Succeed. Start to plan ahead. Continue to fail or succeed. Try to teach kids so they fail less than me. Hope kids teach their kids. Break cycle of family not knowing how to cook. Family line succeed. Humanity saved.

I learned to cook the same way I learned to have sex. Trial and error, usually by myself, sometimes with a partner, and I read some publications about it that had plenty of pictures.

It started from sloth and gluttony, actually. I remember wanting a cookie, but not having the motivation to go out into the world to buy cookies. So I looked around the kitchen, looked up a couple of recipes, and tried to make some simple sugar cookies with what I had on hand. I didn’t have the right kind of flour, and ended up using whole wheat flour, so I had these odd looking brown-ish sugar cookies.

They were so good. I couldn’t believe I’d made them. So I started picking up the spices and other ingredients that cookie recipes commonly asked for, and I started making cookies every weekend. Then I started collecting cookbooks. Eventually I changed the way I bought groceries, I don’t buy finished food anymore for the most part, I buy ingredients. I have an impressive spice collection built up at this point, some of which was grown by my wife. I have all the cool stuff like cooking sherry and at least three different kinds of vinegar.

And now, a decade after making those first ugly cookies, I can create an amazing meal at the drop of a hat using only the stuff in my house. And then I can make cookies that melt in your mouth and are so tasty they would make a medieval peasant cry.

Tl;dr: Man is too lazy to drive to town, changes his life and eating habits over a decade instead.

My mom was a chef, and she taught me some absolute basics like how to hold a knife and a couple of recipes. She also told me that when learning, if I mess up it’s okay, but try to eat everything you make to learn to taste what went wrong.

I got really good after I started watching “Good Eats”, though.

My mom taught me to cook from a pretty young age. Not that it’s exactly cooking, but the first thing she taught me to make myself was just a bologna and cheese sandwich, which obviously left an impression on me lol.

Start by watching YouTube videos about cooking - specifically single skills like how to chop with a Chef’s knife, how to get a good sear on cast iron, how to sauté, fry, etc.

Then try some recipes that incorporate these skills.

Then once you can follow recipes alright then move on to experimenting and tweaking recipes. Try your spices. Identify what goes together. You’ll get the hang of balancing acid, heat, sweet, salty, etc. You’ll fail sometimes but you’ll learn.

Eventually start making your own combinations and you won’t need recipes (which doesn’t mean you’ll never use them).

Combination of my parents teaching me and the necessity of learning when I was poor living on my own at 18. For the latter, lots of youtube videos, cooking shows and cheap 5 dollar cook books. Now I do well but still try to learn new cooking things as a fun hobby instead of survival need.

Back in 2009 our youngest was born and I had lost my job due to the economic downturn. My wife was the cook at the time, but was also the sole bread winner as well.

I had some basic skills in the kitchen, but really could not say I could cook. My wife was a great cook. However, it did not make any sense for her to work a 12 hour day and come home to cook. When I had been home with the baby and our older son all day.

So I had her teach me what she knew. Mainly it involved in how to read recipes. Learning the difference between a TSP and Tbsp and those types of things. While I would not say I have a talent for cooking, I did have a penchant for it. That lead me to cooking almost every day and discovering that a lot of getting good at cooking is practicing cooking techniques.

Fast forward to today and I’ve been a hobbyist cook for 17 years. I can confidently open any cookbook to any page and at least competently make that recipe, if not put restaurant quality meal on the table.

Am I as good as professional cook or chef? Oh hell no. I’m a home cook… A great home cook, but still a home cook. I’d probably be lost in a professional kitchen.

Trial and error. Lot’s of meals that I just… forced down. Learned what I did wrong and changed it. But well, I don’t really cook specific recipes, mostly I just boil things and know when to add stuff and what spices might go good with it, if any.

I’m happy other people had their parents to teach them but my parents mostly made stuff from boxes like hamburger helper and kraft dinner. Then they had all that free time to themselves to watch tv and get drunk.

It is an ongoing process.

Learned the basics from parents, friends, and others when young. Nothing fancy, just how to cut things and apply heat when needed.

As a young adult learned more from the internet, expanded what I could make a bit. Kept it simple because undiagnosed ADHD made complicated cooking tedious. Baking was fine because it is a regimented process with exact measurements and steps!

As an adult learned from my wife, Good Eats, Youtube, and more. Learned how to cut properly, what ‘high, medium, and low’ on the stove actually means. Learned how to adjust cooking for different pans and stoves and whatnot.

Still not great with remembering which spice adds what flavor and frequently still guess wrong on temps and whatnot because I don’t cook often enough for it to stick, but still improving. Next month I will most likely be cooking almost daily and the increased frequency will be great practice that greatly improves my skills as well.

The basics at home as a kid

But once I started watching cooking YouTube, my cooking improved massively

I’m still learning, but Rainbow Plant Life is the only reason I can make a 1/2 decent dish. To this day, I still need recipes for things I haven’t made before/in a while. Generally I think of cooking as a “You get out of it what you put into it” kind of deal. If you want good food, it’s going to cost money and time.