105
How does someone with no experience learn to make food?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
105 points (97.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
36194 readers
842 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I highly recommend subscribing to a meal delivery kit for a few weeks, I think they’re fantastic for beginners. Reasons:
I definitely don’t recommend doing this long term because it starts to get repetitive and is ultimately more expensive than doing your own shopping and planning, but it removes quite a few barriers to entry. Home Chef was the one I enjoyed the most personally but Blue Apron is also reliable and liked by many. Once you are comfortable with the basics you can really just search any recipe you’re interested in and just go for it; follow your interests and the skills will come with experience.
I'm going to second this idea having used a couple meal prep services in the past.
Similar idea to this is to look at CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in your area. Each are a bit different but the ideal would be one where you can do a smaller share that will let you get a wide variety of produce in weekly pickups. I'm subscribed to one this summer I'm quite liking. Each week it's a different variety of fruit and veggies with recipe recommendations. They give out pack lists in advance so you can do your shopping to make sure you have what you need for cooking (because it doesn't give you everything like a meal kit).
The big thing is it forces you to figure things out and just try things to a greater degree than meal kits in my opinion. Like recently summer squash and zucchinis were in season so I ended up cut them up together and throwing them in butter and oil really lazily due to some random recipe suggestion I found. Had too much zucchini left over so tried out zoodles which is surprisingly trivial. I've even now done quick pickling because they gave me so many fucking mini-cucumbers, which also is surpringly easy as long as you have glass jars. I liked that especially as it gives me much more of a sense that I actually made something VS something immediately eaten.
It's only about a year ago I started making any attempts at cooking, having the CSA has done a lot more for pushing me into the deep end than anything else. I tried meal kits in the past and it never really stuck with me or felt less overwhelming. Starting from an ingredient just seems to click more for me, but it'll definitely depend on what is it about cooking that's a problem for you. For me I knew the basic mechanics and have no problem grocery shopping but how ingredients combine and why was a mystery that following a complex recipe roboticly didn't help with.
I know not everyone has the same availability for access to local farms and it can be an upfront cost that's difficult for people. But if you look around you might be surprised what's available, some farms will really go out of their way to make things convenient since CSA can be a huge way for them to stay in operation. And you get a lot of the freshest food possible over the course of months.