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For me, it was a combination of defensive cooking, and genuinely being a curious chatterbox who preferred being in the kitchen with my mom over watching TV or playing dumb games that involved a lot of running around after a ball or something. My mom is a good cook, when it comes to thinks in her oeuvre. Ask her to knock up a pot of rasam, a dosai, a spot of daal, or a coconut chatni, and she can do it in her sleep. Ask her to make a batch of garlic pickle, mini mango pickle, lemon pickle, or any other Indian pickle, and she will get it DONE, and get it done right. My brother still talks about that bottle of garlic pickle that my mom accidentally knocked off the shelf. He's still bitter about it. However, my mom is also a cook who had to feed a family of six. This meant that she frequently took whatever shortcuts she could, because when you have four rear end in a top hat kids to deal with, you're not fussed about getting the ginger down to a nice brunoise so that it gently incorporates into the background. That fucker is either getting grated (and the last little chunklet at the end also gets thrown into the pot whole), or getting chopped into big pieces, "because then you can easily pick it out". Spoiler: I never learned to pick things out of my food, because unlike the North Indians who leave in the bay leaves, whole cloves (!), cinnamon sticks, and other random detritus on your plate, South Indians only put stuff in the food that's edible. Anything else gets pulled out. My general approach to eating was to get food onto my plate, and then shovel it into my face hole as fast as possible, because then I could go back to the book I was reading. It was a long time before my mom finally gave up, and let me just read my book *while* eating, because I would sneakily do it when nobody was looking. Anyway. I hated biting into ginger. I hated biting into anything that wasn't properly part of the food that I was eating. It would make me very angry. "Yeah, so if you don't like it, then YOU chop the ginger." "OK I WILL." And then I did. I cut myself several many times on the knives, but we had a well stocked fist aid kit, so I was fine. By being in the kitchen as often as I was (because my mom was there, and I liked talking to her), I became adept at figuring out why she'd be doing something. If I didn't know, I'd ask (while washing the veg, or chopping a thing, or whatever else), and she'd distractedly tell me why she was doing that thing. It was a sneaky way to steal her knowledge, because she doesn't give it up very easily. (Years later, I found out that she loved it when I asked questions, because it meant that she could pass on her knowledge to one of her kids. I thought I was sooooo smart.) However, her cooking abilities are what they are. I couldn't ask her how to make that white sauce that they throw onto the fettuccine Alfredo at the Olive Garden (which, as you may know from another thread[i.e., this one: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4004898 ], I thought was the HEIGHT of sophistication and fancy) that my sister loved so much. We couldn't afford to go to said restaurant very often, so I wanted to figure out how to knock up a batch at home. This was the days before we had Internet at home. Enter Food Network. They had shows that would teach you the basics of cooking. I loved Michelle Urvater, the Two Hot Tamales, The Two Fat Ladies (because what secretly gay boy wouldn't love two women of a certain age who were suspicious of everything, but loved to be outrageous and fabulous), and Sarah Moulton. They would all cover the basics of cuisine that I didn't have any familiarity with. I'd watch them for hours, and recreate the recipes at home with what we had on hand, to varying success. Basically, it was trial and error, and a bunch of Food Network. It's why I'm really sad that Food Network is basically Guy Fieri TV now. :|
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Jul 15, 2022 13:45
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When I was a kid I would make some things my mom made by watching what she did and then doing that. Later to learn how to cook other things, I read recipes on the Internet and in cookbooks.
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Jul 15, 2022 15:16
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When I was a kid I sometimes baked just by following the recipe as best I could (I often ended up making cookies and stuff because I wanted them and my parents would be like "yeah chocolate chip cookies would be good but it would just be WAY too much work to make them" which is still their basic attitude towards any time of cooking in general honestly). My mother is bad at cooking but she at least mostly can follow a recipe and my dad is okay, so I guess I learned some minimal stuff from them, but honestly not very much. When i went to college I guess I somewhat improved my cooking knowledge by checking out cookbooks from the library, reading stuff on the internet, etc. I feel like I've learned WAY more just off of youtube in the last few years though. I don't think I even seriously learned proper knife technique until like 2018 and that was probably also thanks to youtube videos. Also working from home during the pandemic I had a lot of time to just make everything myself for the heck of it which I guess helped since there was a lot of stuff I probably wouldn't have bothered with otherwise. mystes fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Jul 15, 2022 |
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Jul 15, 2022 16:11
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dino. posted:
I was actually just talking about this to my SO yesterday. Food Network also inspired me to learn how to cook. I remember watching a lot of Two Fat Ladies, Molto Mario, Emeril Live, and The Galloping Gourmet. I think Mario and Emeril had the biggest impact on middle-school-age Casu. I also remembered the first actual meal I tried to cook. I was probably 12 or 13 and was going to cook taco salads for the family. I apparently didn't really understand the concept of browning ground meat yet, and just kind of simmered it in its own liquid until it was mushy and grey. And then I was like "oh hey, I see chefs on TV splashing red wine in these dishes all the time to make a delicious looking sauce". So I splashed some red wine my parents probably had leftover and sitting on the counter into the pan of greasy, grey, mushy ground beef.  I think this is one of the only things I've ever made that was straight up inedible. Things have improved since then.
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Jul 15, 2022 16:27
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My mother is a pretty mediocre cook and my dad doesn't do it at all. Neither of them like cooking at all, so if you wanted something made well you were on your own. About as soon as I was tall enough to reach the stove I started teaching myself to cook via food network and a dial up modem. Good eats was a great show for budding cook me, then I got a job as a line cook in high school and that was enough work and practice that I got to be pretty good at it. My parents still can't/don't cook so whenever I visit them I make them some stuff to give them a taste of the Good Life. I taught them how to make real pizza after hearing them complain about the chef boyardee box of it tasting bad
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Jul 15, 2022 17:40
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My mom was a good cook with eclectic taste, my dad and brother were very fussy and mostly wanted American Man staples like steak, hamburgers, etc.. I was a little more daring, which gave my mom an excuse to try new things and return to stuff she cooked in her twenties and teens. This formed a little compact, and if a little queer kid in the 90s likes anything it's having a bonding activity with their mom. and it made it fun for me to go into the kitchen and watch her cook. Over time I'd be enlisted to help with prep and doing little kitchen tasks, paying close attention during grocery trips, etc.. By the time I was in high-school my dad was too sick to work and mostly immobile, so my mom went back to full time work as a lab tech. This meant that most nights I wound up in charge of packing lunches for myself and my brother, making sure he had a snack when he got home, and often doing dinner. I honestly really liked this-- cooking was fun for me, and it let me feel like I wasn't totally helpless in the face of a scary and uncertain situation. When I went off to college I quickly discovered that not everybody my age knew how to throw together a meal, and that, in fact, a lot of them were kind of impressed by someone who knew their way around a kitchen. I wasn't GREAT but being able to bake a cake from scratch or improvise a sauce was pretty hot poo poo in the dorms in 2006. I made a lot of friends just hanging out in the communal kitchen, organizing little dorm dinner parties, bringing treats to movie nights, etc.. It was around this time that I really got into seeking out cookbooks, looking at food blogs, etc.. Which is basically where I found my level. I've never really worked in food services outside of a few years working in a deli in high-school and as a barista at the crappy campus coffee shop in college. I cook for myself and my loved ones which usually means just honing in on what they like and not making a total hash of it.
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Jul 15, 2022 22:29
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My mom cooked when I was a kid, made a meal for us every single night (once every week or two we'd eat out at a restaurant and we never got take-out or ate microwave meals). I do remember the quality going up over the course of my childhood. She taught me how to cook various things but by the time I left home I wasn't some kind of decent cook or anything. I could make noodles and sauce from packets, cook spaghetti, make bolognese, and had the basic idea of how to make a leg of lamb roast, although I'd never done it before. My parents were also really into braaiing, which is to say, cooking lamb chops and boerewors sausage on a grill outside. So I've braai'd a zillion pieces of meat in my life too. I lived alone in various places in my 20's which forced me to learn stuff. I didn't have much time for baking until I started missing my mom's food, which made me ask her for recipes and try to get various things right: cake, scones, etc. When I started earning a bit more and living with my wife (who does NOT enjoy cooking at all), I started getting meal kits. Those definitely also taught me a bunch of stuff I didn't know before, and the way I see it is that they're restaurant quality at a much lower price. I also got a meat thermometer about 10 years ago which made anythng meat-related a TON easier. At this point I can make cakes, quiche, pies, bread and foccacia all from scratch, grill anything outside, cook rice/pasta/etc, and cook any kind of meat, make tacos, etc etc. I'm not great but I've learned a lot over the years. I've got kids now so I make sure that they get the same as I did: meal time at a table every night with the family. Right now I'm working on making pizza from scratch but I haven't hit on a great method (the pizza dough part comes out chewy) and I'm going to concentrate more on baking for the kids.
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Jul 15, 2022 22:49
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Dad was an over the road trucker, and mom worked for a local children's charity, so I spent most of my early life at my grandparents'. Grandma was a former short order cook and baker, on top of having had 9 kids in the house at one time, and Grandpa was retired from the co-op with a pension and kept a half-acre garden and two acres of orchard to keep his hand in. So I spent most of my time following one or the other around, and learned a ton about how to make plain midwestern fare and cook anything that we could grow. My first adventures in baking were church potlucks, where I got a little side-eye for being the boy-child who was comfortably chatting with the old ladies in the kitchen about the dessert spread since there were few kids my age in the area who were friendly. Once Dad came off the road he taught me the art of smoking and bbq, as well as how to put together menus, as he loved to cook too. Combine that with being a latch-key kid from age 10 or so, and having the last gasp of a Home Ec. program at school, and of course I ended up washing dishes in a diner and working fast food as soon as I could legally be employed and stayed in the industry for ~20 years with a couple breaks before I finally got out. Every place I've lived in between I was the guy who ended up cooking for the house, because I knew how to do it cheap and tasty. There are only a few recipes I can do from memory, as my memory is trash thanks to ADHD and I remember technique a lot better than numbers, but absolutely nothing I can't figure out given a half-rear end recipe and a produce aisle. These days I have a serious collection of cookbooks, and pick up new recipes whenever the mood strikes. If they come out well, they go in my rotation of things that I can make without thinking about it too hard. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Jul 16, 2022 |
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Jul 16, 2022 05:54
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Alton Brown taught me how to cook. Oh, I’m good at instructions and could generally follow a well written recipe to the letter if I was feeling adventurous, which does not mean the dish came out well, but until my late 20s never cooked anything more difficult than pasta or grilling dogs, burgers and sausages (poorly). Alton told you why, how and what to look for from a sort of first principles bottom up view where as pretty much any other cook book or show I can remember from around then was more of a top down “here’s a meal just do this, so easy you can do it at home!” With the techniques reduced to a bare minimum if you were lucky or just glossed over altogether if you weren’t.
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Jul 16, 2022 14:43
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I moved to America from Britain. If I wanted British stuff I would have to make it from scratch, so I did Cornish pasties and then a curry. Then I moved back so I have to learn to make biscuits and sweet Italian sausage from scratch instead.
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Jul 16, 2022 16:46
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My grand parents were all of the depression, but of the rural "we can't even afford aspics" variety, and my parents grew up with that diy ethos. My dad in particular had an impoverished childhood in the 50s in the USA thanks to some medical debt and a premature death. As a result, with the exception of bomb shelter tier shelf stable canned goods, in our household we cooked for ourselves. My dad used to be of the "buy an ethnic cookbook and try it out" type, and he'd get me to help with prep as soon as I was able. I don't remember the first time that I washed vegetables or cleaned peas, for example. By the time I was able to ride a bike I was able to make my own eggs and toast while other kids still had to have their parents make cereal for them. My grandfather was a spectacular cook though, in that "seed to table" way wherever possible. I still have some of his tools, actually! He didn't make anything fancy, but nobody could touch his roast meat and potatoes and rolls kind of dinner. I still channel him when making eg Yorkshire pudding. His response to the depression/war ethos was zero waste - he'd make things like head cheese (and hoard spam). And then starting as a teenager I spent a few years in the industry, working once with a chef who had 60 years experience, but in all kinds of places. I hated it and now cook and grow for myself and my loved ones, bringing these approaches together.
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Jul 16, 2022 17:30
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I could wax eloquent about my childhood but the truth is I got into cooking seriously after the line cook I was loving gave me a copy of Kitchen Confidential.
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Jul 17, 2022 10:53
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Both of my parents cooked, nothing hugely intricate or fancy, but solid day-to-day meals. I was involved/taught for as long as I can remember, and was making my own pasta and stuff by the time I was 10 or younger. We never had microwave meals or anything - I used to be really excited to eat ready meals and awful microwave chips when I visited friends - so I never knew any different and was just used to meals being made from scratch. It makes me really sad that some parents don't cook, and/or don't involve their kids in cooking. I didn't realise this was so common until reaching early adulthood and noticing that it was totally normal for many people to be baffled by the idea of knocking up a basic pasta sauce instead of getting it from a jar, or to just be apathetic about making good food. I'm not a highly skilled cook, and I'm not particularly adventurous (mostly because I hate cleaning up a kitchen bombsite), but I can absolutely make a decent meal and can open the fridge and create something edible without a set plan. It's an important basic skill that I hope any future kids of mine will grow up taking pretty much for granted.
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Jul 17, 2022 10:59
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Wroughtirony posted:I could wax eloquent about my childhood but the truth is I got into cooking seriously after the line cook I was loving gave me a copy of Kitchen Confidential. Yes, but your dad is a goddamned delight who buys us random lovely stuff to make. That tends to help with one’s cooking skills. Please give him and mom a huge hug from me.
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Jul 17, 2022 13:07
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dino. posted:Yes, but your dad is a goddamned delight who buys us random lovely stuff to make. That tends to help with one’s cooking skills. Please give him and mom a huge hug from me. Will do. I'm so bummed you couldn't make it up this weekend!
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Jul 18, 2022 02:55
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dino. posted:we had a well stocked fist aid kit Is it gauche for a first-page title suggestion? And is it too long? **** I'm really glad this thread now exists. I was going to ask about Cooking: Origins in other threads, this is a good place for it. I'm curious how many goons can list professional experience as part of their cooking education, including simple things like barista at the crappy college cafe or McWorker. I have no experience at all of getting paid to do things with food. My mom is a pretty good cook, and has always been open to new ideas so every once in a while growing up we'd eat something new. But most nights it was something from a list of about a dozen staples, adjusted for seasonal factors and special occasions. I helped out in the kitchen, infrequently, from about 14. I was in boy scouts and for a camp one year we were tasked with cooking a meal for everybody (about 30 or 40 13-year-olds, if I remember correctly) in groups of 3 or 4. The theme was "International" and my group chose Thailand. Somehow, I ended up with the task of cooking a large amount of chicken. My mom didn't even blink when I told her we needed to buy and cook and chop up the equivalent of something like 8 chickens. As I recall, we boiled them, waited for them to cool, then tore them apart. It was messy and it took a very long time is the main thing I remember. It taught me a few things, mostly about not getting saddled with unfairly complex tasks during group work, but also about scaling: how much food do you need to prepare for a group of N people? I have since encountered people who utterly lack this skill, and I've had rather inadequate meals when, for example, a 2-person serving size pasta combo thing from the supermarket was judged "cute" and then split 5 ways because "cute" and "buy more than one" are mutually-exclusive concepts, apparently. When I moved out and went to university, my first year was in residence and there was a meal plan so my food prep was limited to learning how not to mix drinks. At the start of second year, living with two other nearly-as-clueless flatmates, I had to phone home and ask very basic questions. The recipes I had didn't quite go basic enough, so I had to call mom and ask about how long to boil potatoes, and other simple factoids that others probably absorbed from the kitchen counter. Still, I progressed, and now I consider myself a pretty good cook. My wife loves what I make and I feel comfortable in the kitchen. I'm confident I could make pretty much anything with a decent set of instructions (video or otherwise) and access to the ingredients, equipment limitations notwithstanding. My oven kinda sucks, it cannot hit high enough temperatures for some things so I won't be making baguettes again anytime soon.
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Jul 18, 2022 06:07
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When I was a teenager my dad had Thursday afternoons off so we’d make dinner for the fam to give my mom a break. I think 90% of our recipes came from our copy of the moosewood cookbook. I still remember the night we tried to make falafel by hand-smashing chickpeas with a potato masher cuz we had no other option It did not go well. I’m p sure we had to punt and make pasta to have something that wasn’t just bean crumbs for dinner
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Jul 18, 2022 12:22
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Murgos posted:Alton Brown taught me how to cook. Same. I watched a lot of Food Network growing up and my parents (mother mostly, dad grilled a bit) cooked like 95% of meals consumed so I just absorbed a lot of basic skills. Good Eats really solidified things, though. I knew how to do maybe more than average things in the kitchen, but understanding WHY is what really lets you get creative and experiment without horrific failure. My wife can follow recipes and bakes better than I can (probably because of the OCD recipe following) but when it's time to 'just cook something' she doesn't really have the same baseline, also partly from just not having the experience since I cook 90% of meals. I can skim a recipe real quick (particularly if it's from Serious Eats or another well tested source) and have an idea of like 85% of the proportions and techniques to get the same outcome. Eating out a lot also helps develop some skills to a degree. Not just like, lots of Friday nights at Chilis, but dining at a variety of different types of restaurants from different ethnicities and price brackets can show you a lot about ingredient and flavor combinations, techniques, etc.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:21
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I love reading everyone's cooking origin stories. My parents both had parents who couldn't cook well. So when they got married they decided that they were going to learn to cook really delicious food. The food they'd grown up on in their homes was purely anglo. Pizza didn't enter their lives until they were young adults. The first espresso bar in my hometown came in when mum was in her late teens, so the late 1960s. Dad had grown up in a neighbourhood with a lot of Greek and Italian immigrants and he and his brothers had apparently been such a combination of pathos and charm that the other local mums fed them as best they could. He got a taste for actual seasoned food. So mum and dad got their hands on every kind of foreign cookbook they could, and taught themselves from the ground up. They were determined that my brother and I would likewise learn to cook. My earliest kitchen memories are helping mum make a baked custard - learning what a bain marie was, sprinkling nutmeg over the top before it went in the oven. As a little kid I was mostly allowed to help mum with baking, not cooking. But by the time I was eight or nine I was in the kitchen helping with meal prep, and when I was 12, mum declared that she was no longer going to be the only person in the house doing meal planning. As neither dad or my brother stepped up, it was up to me. So I learned how to plan meals for a family of four on a tremendously tight budget - picking recipes, making shopping lists, and shopping while keeping a running total down to the cent on the shopping list so that we didn't spend more than we could afford. By this time I was in home ec class, but honestly I was just having fun and getting to bring a meal home every Wednesday evening, not really learning. By the time I was 15 I was cooking half the evening meals and baking at least two cakes a week because we simply couldn't afford pre-made snack food. My brother was just eating us out of house and home, but he did know HOW to cook, so when he bitched one week that we were out of cake, I told him to make one himself, and he did. Retrospectively I am mildly bitter that it just turned out that the daughter of the house took on the major unpaid labour as a teenager, while he got to swan around unbothered. But as a karmic outcome, he ended up with three kids within three years age of each other (twins in the mix) and has spent his entire adult life sharing the cooking load with his partner. We all still value food a lot, and it's fun to hear about what he's cooking or what cuisines they've been trying.
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Jul 18, 2022 22:23
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Idlewild_ posted:My brother was just eating us out of house and home
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Jul 19, 2022 00:07
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My mom hated cooking and wasn't very good at it and I wanted a bit more freedom in terms of what I ate, so I offered to take over some of my own meals. I was not very good, but I learned through trial and error and only exploding a cake in the oven once how to gently caress up less, and then Alton Brown and Iron Chef helped me pick up that there were actual fundamentals I was missing and how to start learning. One of my mom's friends is also a massive foodie and loves cooking, so whenever she was in town we'd cook something together and we bounce recipes off each other all the time.
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Jul 19, 2022 18:56
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My mom loathes cook and only likes food so so, and my dad is one of those dads that doesn't cook except three recopies he knows how to do well, but who loves food, so growing up I ate a lot of stuff like fish cooked into a paste and grey steak, (my wife was horrified at the culinary disasters the first time my mom cooked for her). We ate out a *lot* growing up, and I discovered I really liked good food, even if things like a properly cooked steak are obviously impossible for a home cook to master. After all I had had a lot of steak at home that was... terrible. It didn't help that my brother at some point decided he hated garlic and onions and my mom refused to use salt because my dad's family has a history of heart issues... I later discovered that if you actually followed recipes and didn't do what my mom did which was skim the ingredient list and follow 1/4 steps, you could get very good results at home. I started with making slow cooker dishes, which is when I discovered my dad, for his claims of loving of food only liked *very specific* things, and only in specific ways, which went a long way towards explaining some of the more convoluted meal decisions my mom made. When I finally moved out, I started actually cooking for myself and it was a liberation fraught with disasters. There's still a lot of things I'm only so so at, but I can at least turn a fridge full of ingredients into a meal people will enjoy.
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Jul 19, 2022 19:30
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Growing up was weird. The default setting was 'no you can't touch the kitchen you'll mess it up' until my mother got a flight of ideas that her daughter is going to STARVE TO DEATH because she doesn't know how to make a canned mushroom soup casserole (I hate and still hate mushroom soup) so I got lead through making one (1) casserole and then wasn't allowed to touch the kitchen again beyond making like, instant ramen after school. The assumption even into my teens was always that I'd gently caress up the food or the kitchen and that was an unbearable risk instead of, like, part of having a kid lmao The first time I made, like, a grilled cheese, was on a portable gas stove in the middle of a camp site in girl guides. I would have been like 9 or 10 and for lunch we were given gas stoves to assemble and light and then cook lunch on, and honestly that ruled. Most of my cooking experience before moving out was accumulated at guide camp, whether individual campfire or gas stove stuff or in a cabins kitchenette cooking for the entire unit. I honestly do still think the scouting movement makes a pretty good replacement parent and is also why I am generally inclined to let kids use dangerous tools Anyway once I moved into my own place in university i had a pretty decent idea of how cooking for one's self worked because of Literally GWS, I remember the 'how do I cook if I'm poor' thread being especially useful. Though, that doesn't mean there weren't a couple times I tragically underseasoned rice and beans and lunch at school was horribly depressing lmao
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Jul 20, 2022 12:41
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My mom cooked most of our meals when I was growing up. I didn't know it at the time, but she is a very picky eater. She is the type who won't try anything "weird" that she hasn't eaten before, and it can be a challenge when she visits me now. Our typical meals involved canned vegetables with plenty of butter and overcooked steak or chicken smothered in ketchup or barbeque sauce. She does have a few recipes I like and can make some mean desserts, so I don't want to put her too much on blast. But by the time I got to college, I was covering all my food in ketchup out of habit. The only thing I knew in the kitchen was how to warm up Bagel Bites. In undergrad, I was a big goon who ate fast food almost every single meal and then ran upstairs to play World of Warcraft. Or I would just eat while playing. I remember trying to cook exactly once in a half-hearted attempt to be healthy. I roasted some asparagus or mushrooms in my oven, and they came out more or less edible. But that was a one-time thing. I did expand my palate during this time. But that just meant that I was trying medium-rare steaks without ketchup, deli sandwiches, and those frozen pancakes on a stick that wrap around a sausage like a corn dog. By the time I graduated college, I was officially obese and felt awful all the time. I decided to make some drastic lifestyle changes that included getting into fitness and eating healthy. I also moved to a new city and got a job that involved me traveling almost every week. I spent a lot of time the next few years in hotel gyms and tried my best to eat healthy while on the road, which basically meant I cut out all soda and ate a lot of sushi and salads. Within four or five years, I dropped 80-90 pounds. Eventually my job shifted from traveling every week to about once a month, so I was spending more time at home. I had always been a little curious to learn how to cook some basics, and I decided to try out Blue Apron. If you know how to cook, Blue Apron is a total rip off. But it was a godsend for me. The directions are idiot-proof, step by step instructions that will walk you through how to chop garlic or boil water. If you're counting calories, the servings are dense enough that you stretch most recipes for an additional meal. Additionally, Blue Apron really exposed me to different types of cooking and dishes. After about a year of that, I stocked my kitchen with the basics for my favorite types of recipes and canceled my Blue Apron subscription. From there, it's been a matter of growth from exploring recipes on my go-to sites (Woks of Life and Serious Eats), chefs (Kenji, Wang Gang, and Ottolenghi), and stealing recipes from posts here.
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Jul 20, 2022 16:45
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My mom did most of the cooking when I was growing up and I didn't learn anything specific from her besides peeling potatoes and chopping vegetables. The first meal I made at around 12 was a sort of flat meatballs and spaghetti, as someone mentioned earlier the meat was just a grey tasteless mess and the spaghetti horridly overcooked. I wasn't interested in cooking while being a bachelor, could do a decent spicy tomato sauce and fry some eggs, that was about it. When me and my wife met I started to get into cooking, but followed recipes to the number, going so far as ordering food if I couldn't get the exact ingredient that I was looking for. It wasn't until our son was born that I really started to cook, mostly Swedish, Italian and Asian dishes. Nowadays I'm the only one who cooks at home since my wife doesn't have an interest for it, although she's good at it. Still learning, it's getting better and better and having a soon teenage son who's a ruthless critic helps a lot (even if it can be bloody frustrating sometimes).
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Jul 20, 2022 17:26
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Both of my parents are trained chefs - my mom at the Culinary Institute of America, my dad from having cooked his way across America in his 20s working his way up from diners to executive chef at a club for rich assholes. I guess you could say I started culinary school at age 3. Basically as soon as I could see over the counter my parents had me peeling garlic and rinsing mustard greens and the like, the world's smallest prep cook. As I got older, they just put me to work more and more, teaching me how to fine dice an onion, how to cook pasta correctly, etc. I don't think I was ever more proud than when I perfected a couple recipes enough that my parents would say, "Oh, you cook dinner Morality_Police, you make that so well". They both love food and love cooking (less so now that they're retired and don't HAVE to do it), and all of their friends were also restaurant people when I was a kid, so I got introduced to a lot of food early on. They were good, they always encouraged me to try new things, and to learn how to make restaurant dishes I liked at home. My mom has a literal library of carefully annotated cookbooks and handwritten recipes dating back to when she was young, so if I needed to know how to prepare something, she would just point me to the correct book (and often the correct page...), and my father LOVES teaching technique, so any time I expressed that I liked a dish, he'd immediately start launching into how it was made. As a surly teenager I resented it because it felt like being in school (it sort of was, he was a culinary school educator for the last 15 years of his career), but as an adult, I came to realize what a huge gift they'd given me. That and a weight problem I have had to do battle with for like 20+ years, but that's life for ya.
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Jul 26, 2022 16:59
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I guess I'm kinda seen as the one in the family with the most cooking skill, but I'm actually not that crazy about the cooking and baking itself. To me it is work, and seldom a hobby, but it can be very rewarding when it is done right and the people you care about are appreciative and well fed and nourished. I always strive to do it right and consistently. I could work a restaurant kitchen but I'd rather not. I've learned a lot from my Mum and my grandmothers, but most I've learned by doing myself after trying to emulate recipes or just things I'd seen. Both my families are food families. Mum is a decent cook, so is Dad although Mum cooked more often, but both are also really appreciative of good things to eat, no doubt coming from their own family histories. They could talk about what was in season, collected recipes and cookbooks, recanted the history behind ingredients and dishes and what would distinguish them as being good, and tell stories about cooking and food around the table. Dad's mum taught me how to bake pastry, about fish and their uses and qualities, about cheese. My maternal grandmother taught me about jams, syrups and jellies and how to clarify them and test them and how to can them, which is something I am very happy to have learned. Even my grandfathers taught me things, about gardening, about coffee and tea, and about buying fish and meat. Aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings talked eagerly about food and I soaked it all up. Another thing that set us apart was that we were comparatively poor. Both my parents were teachers and we were four kids. At the time I grew up, it was the 80s boomtown days, and people around us were making (and, more importantly, borrowing) money like mad. Mum was thrifty and bought meat on Friday sale, potted jams and jellies with her own mum, and Dad even kept a potato patch for a few years. I helped pick red and blackcurrants for jellies and syrup, and spent whole days in the field picking strawberries and raspberries for jam. She taught me about "cheap" cuts of meat and how they could be gently simmered overnight to make exceptionally clear and tasty stocks and tender, juicy morsels. I didn't eat steak until I was maybe 10 or 11, but I ate things that today could be found on fancy menus, like long-braised pork butt or pork belly or beef chuck. I could hear the kids in school brag that they had frozen pizzas for dinner - this was still considered a prestige item at the time. We made our own, and I even got some flak for it, but the others quickly caught on. In time, we got something of a name as the "food" house. Mum and me baked buns and cakes for potlucks and lotteries, and especially the first always got questions about how they got so soft and so fluffy (her secret to me: keep 1/10 of the flour, and don't knead the dough as you want a "short" crumb and not chewy). I still am rather proud of all that, and I allow myself a little sneer when I see kids I grew up with, that thirty-five years ago would have bragged about having frozen burgers for supper, now posting on Facebook about how they finally tried long-simmered beef brisket. I was a greedy little bastard so if I wanted to put good things into my mouth I had to learn. Mum still gets a little jolt when she hears the sound of a chair being dragged quickly across the kitchen floor - I wanted to climb up on a chair and watch her cook, and was in a hurry, and all too often I'd slam a crossbar from the chair into her heelstraps. Mum kept a leash on me in the kitchen when I got older and wanted to do things myself, and I can still get irritable when someone interferes with my cooking. I borrowed cookbooks from the library and meticulously studied her handwritten notes and her cut-outs. Sometimes I had happy accidents. I finally got to cater to myself when I started uni and lived mostly alone or shared flats, but I had picked up on a good deal of stuff until then, and I was cooking suppers and baking regularly from 9-10 years. I've learned a lot from mistakes, and I kept learning as I cooked for myself and for others. Just all these little things along the way, like how tomatoes must fry to be any good and how There was a lot of mistakes and struggle meals, but also I learned a lot of things and perfected some, like some cakes I'd grown up with or finally refining Mum's candied almonds so they'd always be perfectly toasted. I took a side job in a restaurant kitchen for a few months in high school doing dishes and helping out with prep but I didn't care for the work environment or the approach to food and cooking, I felt everything was done by throwing prestige ingredients around and using lots of cream and butter. These days my cooking centers a lot around picking good vegetables and using them as the basis for my meal planning, using herbs and spices wisely and generously, about acids, the right amount of heat. Of course I love cream and butter, but I am much more critical of when and how to use them. I also don't shy away from meat, but I find that the culture and attitude we had towards meat when I grew up is becoming the mainstream, in that we used cheaper, tougher bits and offal, and used skill and care to cook them right to make the most of them. Around this time Internet access was suddenly a daily fact, so I researched foods and food culture. I found some food blogs I liked and followed them for years. Strange how they have all but disappeared. Then I got on SA and learned from others here. Marrying into a Chinese family got me face to face with the massiveness of that whole food universe, and I like to think that learning Chinese cooking techniques is the single most important cooking thing I've learned aside from baking good buns and how to make good redcurrant jelly. I also helped out in my inlaws Chinese restaurant. Learning Chinese restaurant tricks is very nice when you crave a little chicken in curry or beef in black bean sauce. I think a lot of learning how to cook comes from learning with your hands along with your head, and also learning a mindset. You can't be squeamish, there's spatter and smoke and heat and sharp knives. You have to handle difficult surprises and improvise and keep your wits about you. And you have to like what you cook. This is what I try to instill into my daughter when she helps out in the kitchen. You have to stir the right way, hard or soft or quick or slow, regardless of if you get a little stinging on your hand from the popping fat. You cut things the way they need to be, not the way that is convenient for you. Force de Fappe fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Aug 8, 2022 |
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Aug 8, 2022 10:44
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Both my parents are good cooks. I would say most my life I had a close relationship to my food, part of my rural uppbringing. A part of every day life as a child included every year harvesting berries growing in our garden, black & red currants mainly, and gooseberries, we also had strawberries. We'd make cordial from most of it and freeze it and have enough for a whole year. We'd go into the woods every year and pick blue berries, cloud berries and lingon berries later in autumn, as well as mushrooms. The berries would be frozen whole or turned into jam. We also grew potatoes, onions and carrots and other herbs. We grew enough potatoes to last a year, every spring my mom and I would sit behind the tractor on this potato planting machine while my dad drove the tractor. It was co-owned between several neighbors. When midsummer arrived we'd have the earliest new potatoes, which taste quite differently from a regular mature potato. We also had chickens and even turkeys at one point. My grandparents lived a 2 minute walk away and had a small farm where they had cows, chickens, pigs and one time sheep too. I have seen my granddad chop the head of a chicken for dinner so I knew as a kid where meat came from. I used to help with the canning, picking and so forth in addition to simply watching my parents cook. I also used to cook for myself when I wanted something. e: I forgot, we had a pig once, we felt it was difficult to kill the pig after we had it so we never did that again. My mom told us that when the weather got colder she'd go out at night and put a blanket over the pig and he'd lie under it till next morning. Pigs are intelligent and it's easy to get attached to them. But he just grew too large. e2: Oh and I remember my grandfather would fish a lot, he'd go to the lake next to our house and catch pike and smoke them, I still remember him telling me the brain was the best part while sucking on the skull and eating the eyes. I've never been able to really like sea food.... His Divine Shadow fucked around with this message at 08:47 on Aug 10, 2022 |
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Aug 10, 2022 08:42
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I learned how to cook by working in restaurants for half of my adult life and going to culinary school when I was 21. I never really loved being in a kitchen, but I never really saw myself doing anything else with my life. I eventually came to hate being in commercial kitchens and everything to do with American corporate restaurant culture, but knowing how to cook means we always eat pretty well. I can no longer eat the dishes I grew up on but knowing which spices go well with which meats and veggies goes a long way.
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Aug 14, 2022 23:40
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I moved to the US for two years for work and basically had to teach myself to cook because I had to live on my own. How to Cook Everything and the Best of Classic Cookbooks saved me from two years of delivery/takeout.
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Sep 7, 2022 05:38
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The Pandemic and life brought me closer to my bro and we started with the meal delivery stuff where you cook food from a pack of ingredients mailed to your door. He's a big foodie and we ended up just transitioning to cooking our own stuff, watching peeps like Kenji Lopez, Chef Jean Pierre, and trying new things. Really broadened my palette, learned to enjoy cooking more, and came away with a fantastic japanese curry recipe, among other things. I just wish I had a bigger place so I could cook more.
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Sep 7, 2022 14:52
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Growing up the TV in my room only got Fox, so I watched the Kitchen Confidential sitcom and Hell's Kitchen. Then I moved onto cooking those pasta kits that are basically slightly fancy mac n cheese, then as my confidence grew I moved to boxed cake mix, then tinkering with these kits to full on cooking. I credit Anthony Bourdain through Bradley Cooper for my love of cooking.
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Sep 7, 2022 22:43
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My mom is a pretty good cook, but basically put the kids to work about as soon as she could. I started by cooking one meal a week for my family when I was 11 or 12. I have no recollection of what I made for entrees, but on rainy weekends and stuff, id bake. A few years later in high school, I took a couple semesters of a home ec elective poetically called "foods" and "foods II." we covered a bunch of stuff and that's where i learned how to make a roux and omelets and some other really good foundational skills that I still use to this day. After HS, I watched Alton's Good Eats fairly regularly and it got me to pick up skills beyond my rural midwest upbringing. I moved in with my college girlfriend around this time and I wound up being the cook of the household because I had the time and skill. This continued with my next partner and eventual wife. I watched a lot of food travel shows like Bourdain and have always been fairly adventurous in the kitchen. GWS has been invaluable for advice and whatnot as I try new things or try and troubleshoot my gently caress-ups, so y'all get a spot on my personal cooking Rushmore: Mom, my family and consumer sciences teacher, an Alton Brown/Bourdain chimera, and GWS.
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Sep 9, 2022 16:37
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My first rodeo with a vegan diet, I was entirely too drat lazy to read ingredient lists. So I had to brush up on cooking real quick like. I learned through a combination of books, videos and websites online, and just trying poo poo out in the kitchen. Had a whole lot of missteps along the way, before I knew how to tell a decent recipe from one likely to be garbage.
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Sep 9, 2022 16:43
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Mom did most of the cooking, and it was usually Cream of Soup Casserole or pot pies or fish sticks or Hamburger Helper or something like that. The most exotic spice in our cupboard was oregano, and there wasn't much more else than salt, pepper, garlic salt, Lawry's seasoning salt, lemon pepper, and maybe paprika. I never really helped out in the kitchen, and was never asked to. I didn't learn anything from the folks regarding how to cook. Even so I enjoyed watching the Frugal Gourmet and Yan Can Cook, and other PBS cooking shows for whatever reason. I dunno, I was a weird kid. Looking back on it I think I just started wallowing in escapism earlier than most people. They were making all this crazy, bougie food and I was eating Kraft mac and cheese. Not that I didn't like mac and cheese (and still do), I was just sensitive to the class struggle early on I guess. I never really tried my hand at cooking until my early 20's though, when I started sharing living space with a girlfriend. Early attempts were just trying to cobble together traditionally American meat entree/veg side/starch side dinners with a Lawry's and lemon pepper level of sophistication. Occasionally we would come across a recipe to try, but for the most part things came out of a package or a can. I didn't really get beyond poorly preparing a cut of meat or jazzing up a jar of pasta sauce until my late twenties and early thirties. At this point I was on Serious Cohabitation #2, and we were watching a lot of Good Eats and other cooking shows. So, yeah, like a lot of people itt it seems, Good Eats really changed things for me. I began understanding fundamentals and learning proper techniques. I started moving away from canned and prepared stuff and buying more fresh produce and common staples to toss together meals from scratch. I started being able to throw together a decent meal from seemingly empty cupboards. I began writing down other people's recipes with my own changes to them. I'm definitely not an expert, and I can still gently caress up a meal pretty thoroughly on occasion. I'm still learning new stuff all the time. My current girlfriend is way better at cooking than I am, but she's very gracious when it's my turn. And on occasion I still like to make things that look like Hamburger Helper because I'll never not be trashy and I like comfort food from my childhood. I'm just making it from scratch with fresh ingredients instead of from a box. It was upsetting to find out that the Frugal Gourmet turned out to be a pedo though. And I guess Alton Brown is reportedly an rear end in a top hat and may be a racist. Not too pleased that they're the source of my interest in cooking, but I'm still able to enjoy it. I just really hope Chef John doesn't turn out to be a domestic abuser or something.
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Sep 15, 2022 20:15
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My love of cooking is probably the only positive aspect of my father's personality that I took on. I dabbled a bit after college and was basically flying blind (which resulted in a particularly memorable "sauce" to which I added way too much cornstarch), but the more I cooked, the more I realized that no one in my family (including my father but especially my Depression-era grandma who watched us/made dinner after school, and my semi-clueless mom) really knew how to cook. It helps that I love to eat, so why not make it good? My actual learning about cooking I'd say mostly came from Serious Eats back in its early days, when Kenji was there but well before he got so popular and well-known. I'd watched Good Eats a bit when I was younger but Alton never quite resonated with me nearly as much as Kenji did in his approach to cooking. Since then I've mostly moved on to taking inspiration from various sources - America's Test Kitchen is a big one (I buy their updated compendium cookbook every year), Chef John, and various others I can't think of right now. I don't usually follow recipe to a T (though I do when I'm testing ATK recipes), but mostly use them for inspiration as I feel I have a good enough handle on cooking to make it the way me and my family like it. I've got two very young boys and I'm really looking forward to exposing them to cooking well as they get older.
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Sep 22, 2022 18:38
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One side, the only side in this country, of my family is Italian and there is always a lot of food and a lot of home made food. Food has always been important. There was always fresh made ravioli drying on sheets around my nonas house. "Pet" lambs disappearing. Chickens feathers behind the shed. Salami hanging from the rafters in said shed. I was always at the library, and even today I ignore or push aside a lot of what I know I can easily get or is given to me, that will always be there (right?), and I look for what is not so easily accessible. The different things. I live in a small city, so I did/do the same thing with music and film and anything. Escapism. I would always read the glossy Japanese Food books at the library, I feel like they were probably more wanky coffee table picture books, it was the 80's, and it was just so different and exciting. Then I got a Ken Hom book. Yes, I watched Yan Can Cook. My mum would take me to Asian markets and stuff, so I could try make the recipes I was reading about. It was hard to google "what is a replacement for..." before Google. Going to a Dim Sum or a sushi train restaurant for the first time. Amazing times. But yeah, I wanted to make this stuff at home. And I tried, and that's that. Child Trebuchet fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Sep 23, 2022 |
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Sep 23, 2022 17:13
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it's adorable that you all learned to cook from your parents. mine sucked, and continue to suck to this day, in the kitchen, so i was forced to either learn how to survive or be doomed to bland, boiled-to-death freezer meals for the rest of my life. after i'd mastered basic stuff, like learning to make vegetables not taste overwhelmingly damp, i stuck at it because cooking overlaps with a ton of other things i like - gardening, anthropology, chopping aromatics into really small pieces, all that stuff. right now i have a rule where i won't eat anything i don't understand the cooking process of, so now i have absolutely no excuse not to keep learning how to make absolutely everything
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Sep 30, 2022 20:54
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mystes posted:When I was a kid I sometimes baked just by following the recipe as best I could (I often ended up making cookies and stuff because I wanted them and my parents would be like "yeah chocolate chip cookies would be good but it would just be WAY too much work to make them" which is still their basic attitude towards any time of cooking in general honestly). My mother is bad at cooking but she at least mostly can follow a recipe and my dad is okay, so I guess I learned some minimal stuff from them, but honestly not very much. When i went to college I guess I somewhat improved my cooking knowledge by checking out cookbooks from the library, reading stuff on the internet, etc. Basically, all of that also applies to me. Like up to the fact that my father is a better cook than my mother. In college I started using pre-done spice mixes and making the suggested recipes on the package and learned how to properly cut ingredients and actually get to know what tastes good together. Eventually I stocked up on actual spices and did that stuff from scratch. To be honest, I still use a too small amount of spices if I cook without a recipe, but then again, I do like the natural taste. That and proper kitchen time management are the big skills I haven't mastered yet. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Oct 3, 2022 |
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Oct 3, 2022 22:52
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I started college around the time that I started reading the good poor people food thread https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3442278 and honestly dino although we have never interacted on these forums you are a huge reason that I'm such a proficient home chef today. I've always been fascinated by cooking and enjoyed flipping through cookbooks even as a kid, but you got me in the mindset of thinking more "big picture" about cooking anything from whatever is affordable and stocked in my kitchen (and generally how to keep a kitchen stocked properly), rather than just being somebody who follows recipes. It might sound dumb but your posts did sort of change my life, because cooking food for other people that they enjoy is such a big part of who I am now. I've never had a chance to say thank you so I'm posting here to say thank you 
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Oct 5, 2022 01:09
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