Welcome!

So, how does a person cook, anyway?

Basically, you go into the kitchen and you start messing around. I'm not being sarcastic; I truly believe this is the best way to get started.

When I was three, I recall waking up before my mom one morning and heading into the kitchen. I monkeyed my way onto the counter top and began opening cabinets and removing ingredients. Then I hit up the fridge. By the time my mom awoke, I had most of the base of a pumpkin pie mixed together in a bowl. And on the floor. And on the counters. Never mind that. The point, really, is mom's reaction.

Did she freak out over the mess? Did she bemoan the waste of a few dollars' worth of ingredients? Did she shoo me out of the kitchen and do her best to keep me out? No. She praised my "innate talent" in figuring out pumpkin pie filling. She did her best to turn it into an actual pie, and we all ate it. It was a little bit weird, but it was edible.

Over the next few years, she endured many plates of scrambled eggs green with herbs, spaghetti sauce incorrectly seasoned with dill, and hamburgers salted to the point of physical pain. I'm sure the houseplants did their part in hiding huge portions of these experiments, but mom did her best to bite her tongue about the mistakes and the mess and let me go. She advised me on how to put out a grease fire, how to handle Teflon pans, how to use the cast iron without ruining the seasoning. She did not go into gales of sympathetic frittering over sliced fingers, bumped heads and splatter burns. She taught me how to stop the bleeding, wrap it up, and finish cooking the meal. She broke off a piece of the ever-present aloe in the windowsill and showed me how to slice it open and wrap it around the burns with a piece of medical tape. She did not hover and grab things out of my hands, trying to steer everything into a successful result at the expense of my sense of competency.

By the time I was ten, I was cooking dinner for our family more often than she was. By the time I was twelve, I was also handling our family's food budget and grocery shopping, and arranging everyone's breakfasts, lunches and dinners. These days, it's surprising to find a ten year old who is trusted to use anything other than a microwave to heat a bowl of leftovers. I think this is ridiculous. We're so afraid of our kids suffering the pain of failure that we never let them try things.

If you are qualified to eat, you are qualified to learn how to cook. It's not hard, people just psych themselves out about it. You don't want to make your first sewing project a king-sized patchwork quilt, and likewise, you can't expect to walk into the kitchen and immediately make a stuffed rack of lamb on the first day. But you can quickly learn to handle a handful of basic staple recipes, and during the process of becoming comfortable with those recipes, you WILL internalize some basic principles about how food works. These little rules will accumulate until you, too, have an instinctual knowledge base and can feel comfortable going into the kitchen and figuring out how to feed yourself from what is available.

Come on, don't be scared. If my ten year old and sixteen year old can do it, so can you. :)