Yes.

Another vote for Gousto here, ive cooked more in the last 2 years than the previous 20. No idea how i survived before i met my missus.

crack a beer open and cook a fish pie

I’ve been here so long my first thought was that @ton was coming to dinner!

For the OP stay away from stir-fry from scratch just now. It can take hours to prep veg for fast frying in 3 minutes.
Herself does the day to day with some help from me and I get to bake cake/bread/biscuits and do the odd fancy meal or dessert. One of my most treasured recipes is written in my mum’s spidery hand-writing as her health was failing due to the brain tumour. It’s called Canadian Lemon pud and produces a lemon custard under a sponge in the oven.

Yep – I have always loved cooking and pottering (and having a few beers) in the kitchen – I very rarely make anything from jars of sauce and only refer to recipe books for a few of the more complex dishes. Indian, Chinese, Thai, Italian, Mexican, Moroccan etc. Things like risotto and pasta dishes are dead easy. I also do Sunday dinners for the family / in-laws almost every weekend but we do have a hostess trolley so I never have to think about timings of different parts (I usually end up doing four or five different veggies, homemade gravy etc so I am happy to have the hostess on hand.

Last night was kung po chicken, tonight would ordinarily be homemade pizza but I am going out for beers with friends, tomorrow it’s a Mexican with fajitas, enchiladas, nachos, black bean rice and roasted spicy sweet potato chips.

Started making hot food during COVID, had no interest before. Now I’m able to get things heated and mixed and served that is edible. Unsure if say I can cook, but we don’t go hungry.
I’ve always happily done fry-ups or steaks/lamb but there isn’t much to really do with those. Now I can cook other things, so hopefully healthier, but no-one ever asks me to cook…however, no-one else wants to so I’m happy to give some just-above-basics on a plate.

If you can read and have a bit of sense then you can follow a menu . I think that cooking , along with first aid should be on the national curriculum . I was a chef for 34 years but if im cooking for just me or can’t really be bothered I just stick a jacket potato in the microwave , heat a tin of ratatouille and throw a tin of tuna into it . open the spud , pour in the ratatouille and tuna mix , put some grated cheese on top and eat . There are hundreds of things like that which need minimal preparation and are healthy and nutritious . Pasta and rice dishes that you can cook in one pot are everywhere . You can even eat them from the pot if you are particularly lazy .

I think that cooking , along with first aid should be on the national curriculum .

Well….it is! And has been since the advent of the national curriculum.

As ever, it might not always be taught uniformly well, by the right people with the right facilities and sufficient resources. And schools held to account for not providing it if they don’t.

If you are old and remember home economics and portly rosy cheeky middle aged ladies making jam roly poly, or if you are a bit younger and remember teachers being forced to get kids to ‘design’ the layout of pizza toppings and the like – those days are now thankfully gone. It’s not just cooking – there is also a lot in there about being a good consumer of food – understanding food groups, having the ability to identify healthy from the unhealthy etc.

This is the English version of the national curriculum…..

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-design-and-technology-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-design-and-technology-programmes-of-study#cooking-and-nutrition

Cooking and nutrition
As part of their work with food, pupils should be taught how to cook and apply the principles of nutrition and healthy eating. Instilling a love of cooking in pupils will also open a door to one of the great expressions of human creativity. Learning how to cook is a crucial life skill that enables pupils to feed themselves and others affordably and well, now and in later life.

Pupils should be taught to:

Key stage 1
use the basic principles of a healthy and varied diet to prepare dishes
understand where food comes from

Key stage 2
understand and apply the principles of a healthy and varied diet
prepare and cook a variety of predominantly savoury dishes using a range of cooking techniques
understand seasonality, and know where and how a variety of ingredients are grown, reared, caught and processed

Key stage 3
understand and apply the principles of nutrition and health
cook a repertoire of predominantly savoury dishes so that they are able to feed themselves and others a healthy and varied diet become competent in a range of cooking techniques [for example, selecting and preparing ingredients; using utensils and electrical equipment; applying heat in different ways; using awareness of taste, texture and smell to decide how to season dishes and combine ingredients; adapting and using their own recipes]
understand the source, seasonality and characteristics of a broad range of ingredients

I haven’t read the entire thread so apologies if there’s already lots of recommendations of YouTube channels, but I can wholly recommend Kitchen Sanctuary on YT. There’s lots of great recipes, some really tasty stuff and they’re all dead easy to follow. Although I’ve just done the mince beef fried rice one and it was a bit of a let down…. But that’s the only one so far!

https://youtube.com/@Kitchensanctuary

And this is also an extra tasty, very easy recipe

Creamy Tuscan Sausage Gnocchi (One Pan, 20 Minutes)

Yes.
I worked as a short order/steak cook in my teens and all but ran a fish and chip place for nearly a year. Not much cooking really, but you learn about looking after food and timings (and drunken arseholes).
Both my grandfathers worked in the catering trade between the wars. One was Head chef at a posh hotel in London (Claridges maybe?) and the other worked for a high end chain as their “events” chef.
My mum was taught to cook by her dad. Because Grandma couldn’t cook for shit. Her brother wasn’t, same story with my dad.
My generation is me (can cook) brother (award winning chef) and 5 cousins. None of whom can cook for various reasons.

Do any of you have a nice simple recipe that’s easy to follow?

TBH no. Simple stuff I usually do on the fly, depending what’s in the fridge.
Only use receipes for complicated stuff.

I made sprout and sweet potato samosas last week, but don’t normally cook that much unless I have to.

Yup can cook a variety of meals, I can’t get away with slow cookers though.

double post

Im lucky in that my mum taught me the basics and how to do a decent bolognese somewhere around the age of 17 and somewhere around Uni time I got a bit more adventurous. I gave Gousto a go last year as after twenty plus years of cooking and a year on my own again I’d fallen into a rut of just making the same things again and again. It was good for making stuff I normally wouldn’t and eating more fish and veggive stuff, but as the minimum serrvings were for two it presented some issues in terms of left overs etc. Also, a number of them required doing a few things at once and I just cannot do that in the kitchen. If there’s two kinds of beg they’re in the same saucepan. Doing a proper roast with all the trimmings etc is my idea of hell.

I’ve got a reasonable stack of books, but invariably there’s only two or three things you cook from each one. Jamie Olvivers early stuff was pretty good – there’s a great gumbo recipem in his america one I still use. Youtube can be useful, but like most stuff you need a certain base level of knowledge to tell is soemthing is completely bunk or not. J Kenji Lopez-Alt has a youtube channel and I’ve done a few of things he cooked and they’ve always come out bang on. In particular I’ve now got the knack of making beef with black sauce and noodles way, way better than any of the incredibly medicore places round here, so that’s good.

My mum is an awful cook. Maybe rebelling against my gran who was a classic model of domesticity. Anyway, I learnt nothing about cooking at home (apart from it being stressful and potentially calamitous).

This left me slightly short on life skills until I spent a summer helping in a B&B on the Pennine Way when I was 15. I chopped vegetables and watched as they were turned into delicious soups. It seemed like magic. I peeled and diced and Brenda made roasts and stews, quiches and crumbles. I was taking it all in l, doing simple things and by the end of the summer I could even fry an egg without breaking it and serve up cooked breakfasts where all the components were hot at the same time.

Food and cooking is important to me now. I like buying seasonal vegetables from the market and local ingredients. My view is that food is one of our connections to the world. It’s pretty fundamental to our existence and it’s so basic that it merits taking care over it.

being able to make a few ‘base’ sauces off the top of your head is always handy, as it enables you to build a load of dishes from there.

Basic white (béchamel) sauce – Roux (flour and butter) – milk and seasoning

Basic Italian tomato sauce (pomodoro type) – basil, garlic, oil, onion and tinned whole tomatoes.

Basic curry base – onions, garlic (about four times as much as you think you need) ginger, garam masala, or even a basic curry powder( you can add a lot more spices in as well such as cumin, coriander, turmeric etc), + tinned tomatoes – tip is to blitz half after cooking and it gives you that rich, thick base.

with a white sauce you are half way to – Mac and cheese, fish pie, Welsh rarebit, lasagna, creamed spinach, coquilles saint Jacques, cauliflower cheese. just to name a few.

A basic pasta sauce is delicious on its own, we never buy jars now.

And even if you just mix a jar of any store bought curry sauce into a curry bases sauce. The resulting dish will taste better and go further.

Basic curry base – onions, garlic (about four times as much as you think you need) ginger, garam masala, or even a basic curry powder( you can add a lot more spices in as well such as cumin, coriander, turmeric etc), + tinned tomatoes – tip is to blitz half after cooking and it gives you that rich, thick base.

This is good, I found it a few days ago:

Free BIR Recipe Book

Free “British Indian Restaurant” cookbook. It tells you how to make a base gravy in bulk and then turn that into various BIR staples like a korma or a madras, whilst being devoid of the pretentious recipes. There’s a bunch of sides in there too like onion bhajis and chapati bread. The link asks for an email address but it doesn’t validate it so a dummy address will work (I feel sorry for anyone who might own a@a.com, I’ve signed them up for so much crap over the years…!)

It can take hours to prep veg for fast frying

What are you doing, carving them into intricate shapes?

I can cook, enjoy it varying amounts as it a necessity these days coming family meals rather than what I enjoy – the two are getting closer. I learnt largely from watching ready steady cook religiously throughout a-levels. Was on at just the right time to then get in the kitchen and practice, the techniques and thinking from that program I really believe at me in good stead.

Nowadays I pride myself more in efficiency – using every last scrap in the fridge, a military precision pricyes to each meal, minimal cleaning and tidying. Which conversely goes against me when msjimmy cooks; puts the broccoli on first when there’s potatoes still to peel, sprays everything all over the kitchen, pans boiling over, oven on for an hour before needed… Then swans off and leaves the tidying up to…

Thankyou all for the replies, and especially those that added links / recommendations. I made a chicken & potato bake type thing this weekend. It looked an absolute mess on the plate, but it tasted rather nice so I will persevere!

I had the same issue serving tray bakes until my wife told me to use a bowl not a plate and to scoop the veg in to the bowl first and then use tongs to put the protein on top…. 🙂

I can follow a recipe no problem and I cook an amazing roast potato (or so my kids tell me as they snaffle the lot of them). Bolognese is probably the only sauce I could cook from scratch without referring to a recipe.
I need to up my game and get more adventurous but young children’s palettes don’t agree with my experimental approach to herbs and spices. Neither does my wife, who apparently isn’t a fussy eater, she just has “specific tastes”.

For cooking basics I recommend the James May Oh Cook series on Amazon Prime and the accompanying book.
Also, if you’re yoof enough then @lagomchef on tiktok has a great approach to cooking (even if some of it does loose me when he’s on about balancing flavours) and doing what you want as long as you enjoy it.

OP – if you want a dead easy recipe to give you some confidence…

Chop up some bacon, a red onion and a couple of cloves of garlic. Crack open two room temperature eggs. Start a pan of pasta boiling and then fry the bacon, onion and garlic. Once the pasta is done, drain it then return to the pan with the bacon mixture and the eggs. Stir and serve (if you aren’t keen on over easy eggs, return to a low heat for a minute or two).

Serve with parmesan (preferably freshly shaved, not pre-ground stuff).

I got it from a student cook book when I moved into my first house some 30 years ago and still do it regularly (having it tonight in fact).

Chop up some bacon, a red onion and a couple of cloves of garlic. Crack open two room temperature eggs. Start a pan of pasta boiling and then fry the bacon, onion and garlic. Once the pasta is done, drain it then return to the pan with the bacon mixture and the eggs. Stir and serve (if you aren’t keen on over easy eggs, return to a low heat for a minute or two).

Serve with parmesan (preferably freshly shaved, not pre-ground stuff).

I got it from a student cook book when I moved into my first house some 30 years ago and still do it regularly (having it tonight in fact).

Even simpler, get rid of the onion and once the pasta is cooked just add the egg, bacon and parmesan mixture to the pasta, with maybe a splash of cream if you think that’s needed. It’s not quite carbonara but it’s really not far off. For this meal, you need plenty of decent, freshly grated parmesan, not that dried horrible stuff.

Even simpler, get rid of the onion and once the pasta is cooked just add the egg, bacon and parmesan mixture to the pasta

Agreed – we tend to use less bacon and use the onion to bulk it out but the ‘no onion’ approach is, in fact, the correct recipe – as is adding the parmesan to the mixture rather than afterwards as I do (my wife isn’t keen on it so I just bung it in later).

I Do ok.

Though I miss having a gas hob here.

Might go the butchers tomorrow see what hes got infact

Just to give kitchen sanctuary another plug, but she’s posted this today which will probably prove useful.

As an alternative to this, and is great for fussy kids, get slow cooker out, couple tins toms, some chick or veg stock, loads of chunked up veg (anything you’ve got, the more the merrier) loads of herbs, Worcester sauce and anything else you’ve got… BBQ, Tabasco anything, s+p. Cook all day then whizz it up and divide into freezer bags and freeze flat. Then just defrost one and serve with pasta when you want a quick tea that fills the kids with veg. Fry a bit of bacon or add meatballs to mix it up a bit 👌

We’re not great at it, very lazy really. To give me a kick up the backside I’ve bought the biggest in the ninja foodi range (15in1) our cooker is rubbish so that’s my justification. So far I’m very impressed with it. Eaten more fresh stuff in the last few days than I have in weeks.

Yes, living by myself in my 20’s meant that I had to learn cook and I still cook around 95% of the meals in our household. I can cook most things and modify recipes to suit what I have.