No Stupid Questions

This can feel pretty daunting, but the wonderful thing about cooking is that its difficulty almost always scales with what you actually want.

If you have little foundational knowledge about nutrition and what a home-cooked meal actually, like, looks like, I would recommend taking a bit of a hybrid approach: pre-made meals from a service like Freshly, Factor, or Sunbasket, and home-cooking from scratch. Think of this like training wheels.

Freshly, Factor, and other companies like them offer really high-quality, healthy, tasty meals with fully accounted for nutritional and caloric details. If you did a 7 or 14 meal-weekly delivery, you could have at least one guaranteed meal per day that would be something you could study and easily replicate yourself.

Now, as for actual cooking:

Identify a few foods that you typically gravitate to. I don't mean something as broad as "japanese" or "mexican," but more specific, like "ramen" or "quesadillas." Believe it or not, you can make very healthy versions of both of those foods - you just wouldn't want to eat them every day.

Once you identify the foods that you love, you can start to plan what your week will look like. If you want to have, say, chicken with potatoes and some greens for dinner every night for a week, you could do the following:

• Make sure you have at least one cooking sheet like this
• Get some oven mitts
• Get a sharp cooking knife (you don't need to spend more than 20 bucks on this)
• Get a multipack of meal-size tupperware that seals tightly, like this
• Go to the grocery store and buy cold-pressed extra-virgin olive oil (seriously, don't cheap out on your cooking fats, it affects literally everything and can make you hate cooking if you buy cheap shit) sea salt, black pepper, umami seasoning, oregano flakes, and your favorite kind of hot-pepper like cayenne or red pepper flakes

You can buy a 5-pound pack of chicken thighs for between $8 and $17 bucks, depending on where you live. This will make 7 dinner's worth of chicken.

Buy your favorite kind of greens, whether its broccoli, asparagus, kale, etc.

Buy a bag of russet potatoes. Don't peel them!

Buy some parchment paper. Put a piece of it on the baking sheet so it covers the surface. Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees.

Heat a skillet on your stovetop on medium heat, pour a little olive oil in, and wait until the oil starts to crackle a little bit. Put the chicken thighs a few at a time on the hot skillet and get them a little brown - we're talking two minutes either side. Do this for all the chicken thighs while the oven pre-heats.

Once the oven is fully heated, put the chicken thighs on the parchment paper on the baking sheet, lightly drizzle them with olive oil, and sprinkle some salt, pepper, and umami seasoning on them. Cook for 40 minutes at 375.

While this is happening, prep a second cooking sheet with potatoes and greens. Cut the potatoes into quarters, and mix them up with the broccoli or asparagus on another cooking sheet, also on parchment paper. Season them with olive oil salt, pepper, and whatever else you're feeling, and wait until the chicken is done.

Once it is, put the potatoes and broccoli in the hot oven and cook for 30 minutes at the same heat.

Let all of this food cool on the stove - do NOT put it in your fridge while it's hot - and then portion them out in the tupperware you bought. Eat that shit all week.

For breakfast, you're on your own. I've never mastered anything past protein bars and eggs, but that's a willpower thing.

If you're light on nutritional knowledge, I would first start with learning about how to eat properly as a diabetic, for two general reasons. First, it will give you a better grasp of what normal portions of protein, carbs, and fats look like. The second reason is that you'll get a wide variety of healthy sources for each. This would be a good way to eat even if you're not a diabetic, or at least provide a general idea about healthy eating.

Cooking from scratch is much cheaper than buying prepared food, at the cost of... prep and cooking time.

Learn about mis en place, and try to burn this into your consciousness.

Learn how to cook scrambled, fried, and boiled eggs. Poached if you're feeling fancy.

Learn how to use boiling water to cook rice, potatoes, pasta, couscous, or whatever your frequently preferred carbohydrates are. If you have the cash to splash, get a high end countertop rice cooker, and put it to regular use.

YouTube will be your friend for the how to cook. Though myself I learnt heaps from a book called The 4 Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss. There’s also How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman that covers a lot.

As for what to cook? I’ve found the easiest way for me has been to batch cook (or meal prep). You cook up many servings of something and then eat it over the course of a week. I find it easier to stick to because it’s less work to just heat something up, rather than cook every night.

A good framework on what to cook is using a basis of meat + veggies + starch (noodles/rice/bread/etc) + flavour. Think of what you like and you can break it down into these categories. Then experiment within this. It’s not comprehensive but it’s a handy tool.

Here's my favorite go-to recipe:

~5lbs chicken breast, some taco seasoning, some fresh salsa

Throw it in a slow cooker in the morning and shred it in the afternoon.

Eat it over rice (one of those 90 second packets if you don't feel like boiling water)

Over tortilla chips for some nachos (with sour cream, beans, rice, whatever you have)

Or in a tortilla with whatever you have.

start simple. It is all right to just make extremely simple meals while you get in to the habit of cooking on the regular schedule. sit down on Sunday evening and scan the internet for ideas what to cook that week, make a plan, and buy groceries on, say, monday.

It is all right if the plan doesn't go perfectly, something is better than nothing. Most of it is just practice.

You go to the internet!

you google "basic recipe" + something you like to eat, like... chicken and rice.

this could also be something as "stupid" as "how to boil rice", or similar. super simple stuff! (this was the result i found.. its decent enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqaAqpS3UWU )

often you can find preperation info on the package and they're usually just fine.

then you read a few results, pick the one you think is the easiest to understand

then you follow that recipe step by step. Dont use it as "guidelines" or something.

and you do this, with various recipes.

you can also often find videos showing how to cook various things - like chicken - so you can get a more visual feel of how its done. I like some of the basics with babish videos, and some from "Epicurious", they've got some simple ones, such as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTBRThwL-2c (not all their videos are "how to"-basics like this one but they've got a few)

Do not be afraid to screw things up. Just try again.

I learned a few basics from my mother when i was a teenager (how to boil potatoes, how do i know when they're done, etc) and i learned the rest by simply trying..

if in doubt about salt, and "scared" to add too much, just skip it. you can always add it while eating. (again, you will learn. add a bit next time, see how it is. "Salt to taste"!)

then you will eventually be able to cook whatever ingredient.

then its just a question of finding a recipe that contains those ingredients, combine them and boom: you've got a whole meal.

as for "meal plans".

that's an entirely different topic. i suggest you start with cooking some basics, and really get good at it. make large batches, eat left-overs.

My first recommendation would be to get a classic crockpot. The easiest way to cook is setting one of those up with the ingredients + spices for your recipe and letting it stew until done.

I normally use mine for meats but you can also throw in vegetables, broth or beans to make recipes like pea soup, lentil soups, beef stew, etc.

Ooohboy. Foundational knowledge is tricky, because cooking is very much applied knowledge. Book or even observational learning is fairly meh, you have to do it.

Honestly, the best advice I can give is to start with breakfast. Scramble some eggs to eat with toast. Try your hands at pancakes. French toast. Stuff like that.

Just get recipes online, look for well-reviewed ones and they'll at least be okay. Usually. You can watch videos to get an overview, but you're going to find when you go to do it yourself, it's more "uuuuhhh...." since videos always have so much cutting in them and the video can't communicate things like heat. Make sure you google any recipe vocab you don't know. Don't guess, google it.

Reason for breakfast is that the recipes are brain-dead easy, relatively forgiving of any fuckups, and will begin to teach you the basics in a certain order. You'll get heat management and recipe reading, and even work in some knife skills with things like omelettes. Start with scrambled eggs though. Very basic lesson in heat management and cooking time, hard to fuck up, will build some confidence.

BudgetBytes.com and AllRecipes.com are good resources. For basic nutrition info, grab an old high school or college health textbook. Or find a YouTuber who looks like you want to and follow their nutrition advice.

Instead of trying to make all dishes on one go, maybe add one or two new sides/dishes at a time. Soon your fridge has lots of small boxes, which you can combine healthy meal with variation easily.