Is it possible to improve my cooking skills?

Do you like food? YOu have to love food, I think, in order to be a good cook. If food is just fuel, as far as you’re concerned, you’re out of luck.

Also, are you an experimentalist? You kind of have to throw out the recipes, and learn what works well by trial and error, or at the side of a good cook. There are so many methods and cookbooks rarely describe anything very completely. Besides which, it’s almost impossible to put everything in writing.

My best advice is tot take a course, and work with someone. Or ask a friend who is a good cook to work at their side. The other thing you have to do is to start experimenting about what works with what. Trust your mental tastebuds. They may lead you wrong at first, but you’ll figure it out.

Learn when you go to a restaurant. How crisp is the asparagus? How is the rice flavored? The meat? What combinations do you detect? As if you are correct. Always ask the waiter what’s goin on inside the food.

I don’t know if you use canned food, but if you do, lock it in the basement. Use fresh ingredients as much as possible. Go to farmers markets and learn what foods look like in a natural form. Try new things. They don’t all work. It’s ok. You kids may complain, but, that’s life.

Just have fun, and don’t be afraid. It’ll take time, but you’ll get it!

If you follow the recipe exactly, you’ll be fine. Don’t substitute, don’t guess if you don’t know something. If a term is unfamiliar, look it up.

If you enjoy cooking, you’ll get there with practice.

Oh yeah, you can be retrained. I was and I come from a long line of bland cooks. The type of people that think ketchup is a spice. Best thing to do is to find a good cook and have them mentor you. I learned on my own, and I have made some incredibly tasteless (and bad tasting) mistakes over the years. The best way is to AVOID complex recipes. Stick to the easy stuff first. I tried to learn which spices go best with certain kinds of food (thyme and eggs is a bad combo, for some reason). Figure out what type of ethnic food you like best, mine happens to be Mexican, and then study the recipes of other cooks. The Intrawebs (I love that word) is a great resource for learning about cooking. I learned pre-World Wide Web, and it was tough. I spent a lot of time at libraries, looking through magazines, and asking people I know who are GREAT cooks. As you get better, you will learn that measurements are simply a guideline, and what some people call a teaspoon, others call a dash, or a bit. You know, a bit of this, a bit of that, etc. Don’t give up, I didn’t and now my RL friends rave about my food. Everyone always asks for my recipes, but they don’t realize I keep them all in my head, and writing them down is harder than making the food.

Listen to daloon – he knows.

Start with simple basic stuff, and build from there, i.e. how to cook/steam veggies, potatoes, pasta. How to make basic sauces. And up, up you will fly, into flavour country!

1) Start simple and slowly add complication and new techniques. That way you might be able to identify problem areas.

2) Take classes in cooking, anything from something formal through a junior college to a couple of hours watching a demonstration. That way it might dawn on you what habits you have picked up from your family that keep you from success.

3) Get a good basic cookbook such as The Joy of Cooking – the type that has a glossary of terms in the back, and then look up any cooking term that you might not understand.

4) Get some good thermometers, for oven and for stove top, to be certain you are using the temperatures you think you are.

5) Stop using inherited recipes from your family until you have learned enough to “fix” them.

6) Use fresh stuff, cook from scratch, keep open containers of herbs in the fridge or use fresh herbs, and don’t use pre-mixed seasonings put together in some factory somewhere.

7) Leave the salt shaker on the table or in the cupboard. In other words, salt the food as needed at the table, and you may discover you don’t need to salt it at all.

8) Stop when it feels right. Go with your gut (or your stomach as the case may be). Start with stuff you like so you won’t have “new food” bias. Cook with friends.

9) Have fun! Enjoy the ride.

@evelyn – I thought ketchup was considered a vegetable, at least during Reagan’s time.

@Darwin don’t mention Reagan, you’ll bring back all those bad memories. (The ones I smoked all that dope back during the eighties to forget).

Daloon is right. Liking food is a big part of it. Picky eaters often have a hard time learning to cook. A lot of it begins with learning or relearning the techniques, and having patience. Start with simple dishes, and move forward from that.

yes, you can cook. when my book is done, you’ll get the first copy. cooking well is a feeling or inspiration. it is a lot like art. some people cannot draw. those who cannot draw have other talents in other areas. but cooking is “watching” and “feeling” and “experimenting.” i do cooking demos in the chicago area. are you nearby?

yes try different recipes

When I got to the point where I was grinding my own spices, I finally felt like I was a cook. There’s nothing like grinding spices in a mortar and pestle to show you what goes into a dish, particularly an asian dish, and most particularly, an Indian dish.

You learn about cinnamon and nutmeg and cardamom and pepper and cloves and star anise and fennel and cumin (mmmm) and coriander. We see them as powders, but they all came from various seeds or seed pods or stems or bark. The cinnamon tree can be a relatively thin tree in the rain forest, and when you walk by one, your guide will take out his knife, and carve you off a slice so you can smell and taste.

When you grind your own spices, you start to learn how to taste new combinations in your head. When you taste something new in your head, and then make it, and everybody loves it—that’s when you know you’re a cook. Or, that’s when I knew. Other people might have other standards, and I’m usually pretty hard on myself. And I don’t mean this as a test or anything. I mean this to say that when you do that, it is so exciting. It’s as if you are carrying around a cookbook in your head, after that. You can look at any recipe, and see what works and what could be improved, and you can just look at recipes to get ideas, and then adapt them to whatever you have on hand, or mix two recipes, or just use them as inspiration.

There’s a feeling of confidence this ability gives me. It’s a rare thing for me. To feel confident enough to actually say that “i’m a cook.” I won’t say “I’m a musician” or I’m a writer,” even though I’ve done those things for a long time, but I will say that I’m a cook. I love food (and my body shows it, rueful lol) and I love cutting and chopping and sauteing and European butter and German chocolate and purple cherokee tomatoes (the best that I’ve tasted), and figuring out which cottage cheese I like best…

Well, you can see how it excites me, and how it is one of the great joys in my life.

Darwin’s list was great – IMO.

There isn’t a lot I could add to this thread. The biggest thing, is to have fun with what you are doing. A good chef friend of mine said if, while at home cooking, he didn’t enjoy what he was doing, he’d eat out. While he takes his profession very seriously, he stressed to me, several times, that some people just get too damned wrapped up on being serious about it – almost snobby about things.

I was lucky to work with some very well-respected chefs. The Executive Chef was trained in Paris, but was Italian – so he had that background, as well. The Sous Chef, had an excellent background, as well. On top of his education, he had traveled, extensively – and learned many things through his travels. I learned so much through them and learned to truly enjoy cooking.

I often receive rave reviews from my family and friends; however, I’ve also had the experiment gone horribly wrong, too! (Can anyone say take-out??)

What would you like to be able to make well?

@cak – We spell take out “p i z z a” at our house. Fortunately it isn’t too often that we have to use it.

@AlfredaPrufrock anything! I would like to make anything well!

This thread is a great start in that direction! Thanks for all the great advice everyone!

In that case, I would start with either breakfast or appetizers. Breakfast is good because it can feed people at any time, and appetizers are fun, and a good way to learn how spices taste.

Practice makes perfect. Did you know at one time Julia Child laughed that she couldn’t even boil water. She burned a lot of dishes while learning and turned out some horrific meals. I have to say I’ve turned out some really bad dishes myself. Over time a trying again they’ve improved. At one time I couldn’t bake bread. Seemed like I was never going to learn how to make a proper loaf of bread. Now if I have the discipline I bake bread every week to two weeks, and then pray that it doesn’t get eaten up in the first day. So yes you can improve, just keep cooking and one day everyone will say “You were a bad cook? No Way! You’re so good.”

I’ve tossed several dishes in the trash, a few even recently. One thing you might want to consider is investing in decent pots and pans, as that can affect how your food turns out. Pans should be solid and have a heavy, stable bottom that distributes the heat evenly. Good cookware can make a difference in how a meal turns out.

Also, if you have a friend that’s a good cook, ask her/him over to cook a meal together. Working with someone in the kitchen can give you a lot of insights and confidence.

Yes, I think a bad cook can be retrained. You have to just keep trying. Practice makes perfect in the kitchen. Is this just at home? What’s going wrong with your dishes? Too much of one thing, burning them?
My husband is a chef, and no you don’t have to love food to cook. He always jokes that he cooks with unbridled hate, rather than love…that’s why his food is so good.

At one point for an experienced cook I found all my dishes having big problems. Then I found out the oven was out of calibration. It was like 150° too hot! So you will want to get a good oven thermometer too.