What are the two most important cooking methods in your opinion?

Read the directions and don’t fuck up lol.

1. Power level
2. Number of seconds

1) Read the recipe
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2) Read the recipe.

Really
Braising or “low and slow” for cheap cuts of meat.

Baking including breads and pizzas.

:Baking seems to cover a wide range of necessities. (cookies, cake, bread, muffins)
:Cooking meat (your favorites I suppose) I think is crucial. Pairing things with your meat is easy (pasta, veggies, etc…), making the meat edible… thats the hard part.

poach

eggs, veggie, proteins

I’m partial to roasting/baking myself, oven work is good stuff. I do a fair amount of sautéing too.
There is really nothing to either of them, fairly basic nonsense, alls is you gots to knows is when to remove the foodstuffs from the heat.

@everephebe You mean like after it’s cooked and before it burns? That can be tricky to a non-cook.

@Sunny2 Once upon a time I was a non-cook, and I ate lotsa Cheerios, this practice became tedious.

The very first thing I learned how to cook on my own was chicken, and the method I used was cooking by panic. I’d watch tv in another room while I was cooking, between commercial breaks I’d check on the food, sometimes I’d forget and when I finally remembered (usually due to a smell wafting from the stove) I’d panic and run into the kitchen—usually right on time to take it off the heat. I cook a pretty mean chicken nowadays, especially for a pseudo-vegetarian. Pseudo? Perhaps I just mean quasi… I still set off the fire alarm from time to time, but never to poor results. Fire alarms are so sensitive sometimes, “Hello I am trying to burn me up some food! Don’t you know? Brown = yummy.”

I think learning good timing is probably the second important thing you can do in terms of cooking. Not just how long you’re going to cook the food, but what to cook first and when to put something else on another burner so that everything is finished at the same time.

Of course, this is information I’ve gathered mostly from observation. The first most important method, of course, is finding someone else who is willing to cook.

Sautéing, easily. At least half of what I cook involves sautéing things. The other half involves the boiling spectrum – steaming, but not simmering, soft simmer, simmering, slow boil, rapid boil, etc.

As to the style you choose, you are on your own – but I will say that boiling potatoes (whole, with the skin on) is much faster than baking potatoes & they taste every bit as good.