Junk. I dont know how to cook.
Which is sad because in all this time alone I could have easily learned how to cook.
It's easy, once you know the trick! It only requires 2 things:
1. A willingness to do simple work
2. A system to support your efforts
Cooking can be a broad thing to discuss, but I like to keep it simple. I've taught a lot of people how to cook & how to deal with meal-prepping, especially over the last few months. Let's start out with the basics:
Concept #1: What is cooking?
Cooking is only 4 things:
1. Assembly by hand
2. Stirring
3. Cutting
4. Proper heating
Let's define each one of those a little bit:
1. Assembly by hand: This means using your hands to do work, such as rolling cookie dough into balls.
2. Stirring: This means using a spoon to stir stuff. This also includes using power-stirring, such as an electric stand mixer like a KitchenAid.
3. Cutting: This means using a knife to cut stuff. This also includes using power-cutting, such as using a blender to chop stuff up.
4. Proper heating: This means babysitting the ingredients to make sure they come out right. For example, with chicken, you don't want it raw, but you also don't want it dry & over-cooked. So, you have to babysit it - but not with magic, but rather with tools & techniques, such as using a meat thermometer or checking the browness of the meat. If you're making sushi, then you don't want it heated at all - you want it to stay chilled, because being served cold IS the proper level of heat for that particluar dish. But if you're making blackened catfish, then you actually want it burnt. So that's why you need proper heating - it depends on what you're trying to make!
That's it, no more things! You know know the
entire foundation of cooking & can now cook anything you want to. I'm quite serious about this - cooking is no longer something other people do - armed with this knowledge, you know own the foundation of how to cook literally any recipe on the planet. So you can no longer use the excuse "I don't know how to cook" because now you do! Assembly, stirring, cutting, and properly heating. Internalize this knowledge & accept the fact that you are now know the secrets to the cooking universe.
So now that you know how to cook, what's next? How do we actually implement this knowledge? The good news is that it's stupid simple, once you have the right perspective! For starters, there are 2 basic kinds of cooking:
1. Following a checklist (recipes)
2. Doing it freestyle (flowchart)
Recipes are really nice because someone else has already made it 50 times in a row to perfect it, and all you have to do is follow their directions. It's the same idea as learning a math formula - YOU don't have to do the years of legwork to figure out the formula, you just have to learn it in order to use it. Unlike Isaac Newton, an apple doesn't have to fall on your head to figure out gravity! And we live in the greatest age of food in all of recorded history: grocery stores carry over 40,000 products. Pinterest has millions of recipes. Youtube videos will walk you through step-by-step. Amazon will ship you affordable tools & machines to help you cook faster, better, and more easily.
Freestyle cooking is also a lot of fun. This is where you take a base idea, such as making a sandwich or stir-fry, and throw something together. It looks fancy, but it's built on a framework of options & knowledge. For example, if you wanted to make a freestyle pizza from scratch, you'd need to walk through a few layers: the type of crust, sauce, toppings, and cooking method. So it might look something like this:
1. Crust: Thin crust, hand-tossed, or pan pizza?
2. Sauce: Red sauce, white sauce, or oil?
3. Toppings: Cheese, pepperoni, sausage crumbles, bell peppers, etc.?
4. Cooking method: Indoor oven, grill, pizza oven?
Maybe I just want a simple pepperoni & cheese thin-crust. Or maybe I want to get fancy with a 72-hour cold-fermented dough & make a goat cheese, fig, and onion pizza (which is bonkers delicious btw). The process really isn't any different between them. And within those processes, all you're doing is: assembling by hand, stirring, cutting, and properly heating. All of which are simple things to do!
Concept #2: Attitude
The attitude you take, which I call Approach Theory, and your willingness to adopt a new system, are the two key factors in having a good experience cooking & in getting consistently good results. Approach theory is really important because cooking is really all about developing a relationship with food, like dating - the first few dates might be a little awkward, but then you get into the swing of things & eventually you're cruising!
We have a lot of internal barriers towards doing things. The first step in Approach Theory is learning about the fixed vs. growth mindset. A fixed mindset says "I can't" & makes excuses, and a growth mindset says "I can & I will" & looks for ways to make it happen. So with cooking, we want to adopt a growth mindset. A big part of this is accept that we're going to fail, and that that's OK, and that we're not failures ourselves, but rather we just need to find an improved way of doing whatever it is we're doing. A lot of people will try cooking something, fail miserably, and adopt the fixed mindset of "I'm terrible at cooking" or "I can't cook".
To internalize this, I recommend doing this silly yet effective exercise: say out loud "I am an amazing master cook". Adopt this as your cooking "identity". Repeat it & don't question it! Remember, that phrase IS true: you know now all 4 hidden elements of cooking - assembly, stirring, cutting, and properly heating. You now have the power to make ANYTHING you want!
So with that in mind, being a Master Cook & all, you now need to do 2 things:
1. Try out & master new recipes
2. Adopt a food management system
There are over one million documented recipes in the world. There are over 80 cuisines, and virtually infinite sub-cuisines. Take American food, for example: there's Sourthern cooking, there's Tex-Mex, Chicago-style pizza, New York-style pizza, just tons & tons of really specific stuff. No chef could possibly learn everything there is out there, which means that you'll never be bored & can have a lifetime of enjoyment, if you like trying new things! Or alternatively, if you just want to build a solid recipe base to live off for the rest of your life, you can do that too! Remember, cooking is about developing a relationship with food, not being perfect. A lot of failure is involved, but part of our attitude is about persistence - we're willing to keep trying until we achieve the results that we want! That persistence, or grit, is really
the secret to success in any field!
Concept #3: Adoption
Adopting a really nice food management system is, for me, a key part of making cooking easy, accessible, and something you actually do every day (or at least on a regular basis). This is split into several parts:
1. Kitchen setup & organization
2. Workflow management
3. Meal-prep system
4. Inventory management
I have tools for all of these if you're interested (the details are a bit outside the scope of this post). For starters, you need a kitchen setup & organization system: what tools, storage areas, and work surfaces do you have? You don't need to memorize this stuff, but your system does, which requires an initial inventory & some decision-making about what goes where & how to make stuff actually accessible so you'll use it. Workflow management comes next: how do you actually do a cooking job? For me, that involves deciding what to make & when to make it, getting all of my tools & supplies out, along with the recipe, following a written recipe or mental flowchart, and then doing cleanup. Again, your system takes care of remembering to do these, not you - you just show up & follow the instructions!
A great meal-prep system helps you decide what to cook & when. My system includes both stuff I make at home & stuff I get out to eat (junk food, restaurants, take-out, cooking classes, etc.). Again, not big or hard or scary - just some simple instructions to follow on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on how often you want to plan out your days. A note here - as long as you insist on doing this stuff solely in your head, unless you have a great love of cooking, it's going to be daunting because that's a LOT of stuff to carry around in your brain all day, and if you only eat 3 meals a day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), you're looking at figuring out 21 meals a week or over 1,000 meals a year, which is no joke! To me, it's far better to use an external, written, clearly-defined, scheduled-with-smartphone-reminders system so that you only have to show up & follow a checklist, instead of figuring out 50 different things like what to make, what ingredients you need, when to do it, how many people you're cooking for, etc.
Inventory management is another aspect, and is also an easy task when using a solid external system. Mine manages my fridge, my freezer, and my pantry on a weekly basis. For perspective, the reason this isn't hard is because the system manages all of that crap for me: I get an alarm to do my afternon checklist, which includes things like pay bills, do chores, and cook. My system helps me split up the work over time, so I only have to do a quick scan of say the freezer to check what's in there, so that when I do my meal-prep planning, I have a full list of everything I have in my cupboards & cold storage systems like fridges & freezers. Piece of cake with hardly any work required & no thinking required on my end, because it's all scheduled out into tiny little pieces & I never have to think about it ever again for the rest of my life lol.
This is what I meant above by "a willingness to do simple work". Complexity really only exists in our minds, as does difficulty (outside of say, a 60-minute gym session lifting weights, which is a lot of hefty work). With a really great food management system, you can make cooking as easy as shooting fish in a barrel - basically make it laughably easy. On the surface, from all of my posts, it looks like I'm some crazy food nut. In reality, I spend an average of 20 minutes a day preparing food as a scheduled chore. Sometimes if I'm in the mood, sure, I'll just whip out some cookies or something, but mostly I make the decisions ahead of time, do the preparation for the work of cooking separate from the cooking itself, and...it's all really easy & fairly trivial to maintain, because I don't have to mentally manage the scheduling or the workflow or the inventories or anything like that. At a very basic level, all I really do is just get a reminder & follow a checklist to get a result.
So there you have it:
1. You are now a Master Chef. The foundation is in place, the knowlege is yours. All that remains is to fill your bucket with new recipes that you'll fall in love with!
2. Adopting a really great food management system will help you enjoy cooking a lot more (or at least hate it a lot less), vastly reduce the amount of work, and also reduce the stress associated with cooking
3. You can eat like a king for every meal, every day for the rest of your life if you simply decide to. You have no more barriers - you now have the foundational knowledge to be an incredible cook, and combined with choosing to adopt a strong food management system & build up your personal favorite & well-loved recipes over time, you're in for a wonderful food adventure for the rest of your life!
The barriers you're feeling are what I call "fog statues" - they look & feel like big, impenetrable barriers, but when you walk up close to them, they just dissipate because they're not real at all! Which is great news, because armed with the knowledge above, you can choose to move forward to adopting a food management system & start finding great recipes, and your life will improve in so many ways: you'll save money over eating out, you'll be healthier because you're not eating so many preservatives & chemicals & stuff, you'll have more energy, you'll enjoy your food more & actually look forward to your meals instead of being sad with your lunch or rummaging through your cupboards & fridge over & over again, and basically just be a happier, more fulfilled person overall because you're exposing yourself to great food, reducing stress, having the confidence that you CAN actually cook, and enjoying the experience of doing great work instead of having it feel like a mega-chore all the time.
Having the right tools help (i.e. a food management system), having the right attitude helps, adopting a Master Chef identity helps, and being willing to put in the time & effort (which is not all what you think it is right now) helps. This is coming from a guy who, 15 years ago, literally didn't know how to boil water (and still get teased about it by my wife, lol). I'm not a cooking savant or anything now, but I have a ridiculously efficient & effective & amazing system in place & a willingnness to use it, and that's all that's really needed to get great results!
The biggest shift comes in breaking through that mental barrier of "I don't know how to cook". That's something internal that you have to shift from "something other people do" to an identity within yourself. It's silly, and it sounds stupid, but by internalizing the phrase "I am a master cook" is really the first step in becoming one. You simply have to decide to give yourself permission to move forward with doing the simple work of cooking. Which again, remember is just: assembling by hand, stirring, cutting, and properly heating. None of those things are hard, and backed up by a strong system, is also easy because you're not keeping everything in your head anymore & checking out mentally whenever it's time to cook, which is something I often did growing up because I just didn't clearly understand the game & didn't have a set of simple checklist tools to help me do it!
So, if you're willing to adopt the identity of being a Master Cook & want to know the details of how the food management system works, let's party!!