Learning how to cook

I remember the time I was a little girl and I used to watch my mom cook. I loved staying in the kitchen and observing what she did and how she did it and then licked the pans! Yes, it was a wonderful time until I thought I knew everything and stopped spending time in the kitchen. At 14-15 years old I wasn’t realy interested in how to cook or how to learn. Nope, I found more joy in eating the final result of mom’s cooking rather than helping and paying attention at what she does.

Everything went as planned for quite a while. I was hungry, mom fixed something, I came home from school, food was already waiting… it was all perfect until disaster struck: I had a boyfriend. Okay, that wasn’t the bad part… the bad part was when I decided to cook for the first time.

All my life all I heard from women was “love goes through a man’s stomach”. I didn’t realy know what it meant until my boyfriend at the time chose to eat what I prepared. I say chose because nobody forced him… Let’s just say he made a bad choice.

Turns out, love realy does go through a man’s stomach!
He didn’t say anything the first time, nor the second or third.. but eventualy we did ask ourselves what the heck do we do if later on we move in together and can’t digest any meals?
I then had 2 choices: live with my mother-in-law forever or learn how to cook!
Guess what I did… 🙂

I began to learn cooking step-by-step.
I started with real easy recipes like boiled eggs and fries (yes, i wasn’t even able to boil an egg…) and I ended up liking  cooking so much that later on baking a cake actualy relaxed me.

Learning how to cook is easy. Not everyone has talent, that has to be said from the beginning, but with a little patience and concentration, you can’t go wrong.

The first advice I got was “don’t cook when you are nervous”. This is the golden rule of cooking: always be calm and concentrate on what you are doing, not on anything else or you’ll end up burning the food, adding to much salt or whatever else can go wrong, it will!

Another good advice would be don’t cook if you are hungry. Or at least don’t try out new things, chances are nothing good will come of it. It’s just like shopping on an empty stomach: you want fast abundance and end up forgetting the essentials.

That being said, learning how to cook will be a piece of cake if you want to learn. It’s not an exact science, as I pointed out, and with a little patience and will everything can be done (except those fancy recipes, I’ve never been able to bake an interesting looking cake).

I don’t remember how long it took before I was able to cook a decent meal but all I can say is learning how to was fun and worth my while.
I began small, with simple recipes that required minimum skill (omlette, soup, pudding) then started trying more complicate ones (stew, sautés , roast) and ended up baking cakes (not all of them are eatable but i’m still learning!).

Suming up, learning how to cook can be a piece of cake 🙂 You just need patience and a decent cook book.