I cook (my father was in the restaurant business before World War Twice) so I can’t answer the survey, but I have a question for older, non-cooking Dopers. Was it harder not to cook before the microwave and takeout? There were TV dinners when I was in college (I very rarely ate them) but there was far from the range of frozen microwaveable foods there are today. It was also hard to get takeout, except maybe in big cities. Did you have to cook, or did the men get married fast?
Pancake mix and water. 
I don’t really cook at breakfast- on weekdays, that would mean getting up earlier, which is to be avoided at all costs. On weekends, I’m almost never up until it’s a reasonable time for brunch or lunch.
I do cook for other meals, though. But I am definitely a cook, not a baker- I stay away from recipes that require much precision in terms of time, temperature, amount, anything. My cooking style also leans toward using canned or frozen ingredients instead of fresh, just so I don’t have to go to the store to get fresh stuff. I think this comes from learning to cook in college, when I didn’t have a car and had to take the bus to the grocery store, so I went about every two weeks.
My usual reason not to cook is “I’m too exhausted to think of anything to cook.” It’s not the actual cooking process that’s so hard, it’s thinking of what to make.
And yes, I have been known to eat a can of tuna fish, directly from the can, and call that dinner.
Miracle Whip tastes like mayonnaise 6 months past its expiration date. I know this from experience 
. As a result of that incident, I tend to avoid all mayonnaise, and I’m pretty religious about checking the expiration dates on stuff in the fridge before using it in cooking.
When my sister was a freshman in college, she walked into the dorm kitchen and found another girl trying to boil an egg in a saucepan. The saucepan was in the oven.
You really eat ramen every night for TWO MONTHS?
Man, I ate a lot of ramen during college… but that much would have killed me dead.
And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think everyone who doesn’t cook has no taste and are fat, lazy, slobs. But I do think that once you hit 30 or so, a diet of pure ramen (or whatever pre-packaged food you choose) is gonna catch up with you one way or another. What you can eat when you’re 20 and feel/look good versus what you can eat when you’re 35 and feel and look good are vastly different things, in my experience.
I read the OP, and was prepared with my response: “I often say I can’t cook because I really hate doing it.”
But after seeing the culinary disasters were described in this thread, I’m like Wolfgang Freakin’ Puck combined with Bobby Freakin’ Flay.
That’s why I read threads like this. They make me feel so much better about my own skill level
I honestly can’t imagine how this could be. The time it takes to go to the deli and buy a grilled chicken breast > the time it takes to go to the store to buy an uncooked chicken breast and then cook it and then wash the pan. Having done both, I honestly don’t think the deli is doing anything nefarious to the chicken breast when I’m not looking to make it less healthy. It’s a nice deli. Their chicken is very tasty. And someone else is doing the work. And I’m supporting the local economy. It’s win-win.
And the above would make more sense if I could manage to learn the difference between the < and > signs! :wally Good grief, I meant it takes less time to buy the chicken already cooked.
Nope. I live on campus, therefore, am required to be on the meal plan. Since that’s “pay one lump sum per semester regardless of how much you eat”, I do Campus Slop most of the time. But if I lived off campus (as I hopefully will next year), then I probably would. It’s palatable, if not particularly tasty, and again, ten cents a pack fits a student budget quite nicely. Sometimes I splurge and get the higher-quality cup-o-soup, which is something like a quarter or thirty cents per serving.
I’m really dubious that home-cooked food is nessecarily better for a person. Doesn’t it pretty much come down to “eat some occasional fruits and veggies, and burn as many calories or more than you consume”?
Yeah, but you can do the “go to the store to buy an uncooked chicken breast” part ahead of time. Then, you can cook and eat at home without changing out of your pajamas or doing any of that other stuff you have to do to look presentable before going out.
Sometimes. It’s not whether it’s cooked at home or not, but many prepared foods have lots of extra starches, salt and sugar that you don’t really need, and/or have a lot of the vitamins cooked out of them. When you prepare it yourself, you know what you are or are not adding.
OTOH, some home cooking is gawd awful in terms of nutrition and/or taste. My Mother-in-law’s cooking comes to mind but that’s another story.
It’s also especially important, at your age, to be sure to get enough calcium one way or the other lest you develop osteoporosis later. You probably don’t care a whole lot now what your quality of life will be when you’re 60, but you should anyway.
I didn’t learn to cook from my mom- for us, it was mostly packaged stuff for everyday meals, and real cooking was for special occasions or guests coming over. And most of her special-occasion foods are either not to my taste, too labor-intensive for me (especially since I don’t have dinner parties), or not kosher.
I learned in college (from the Washington Post Food section) that it is actually possible to make your own salad dressing. (The then future) Mr. Neville laughed at me when I told him that- he said, “What did you think vinaigrette dressing was?” I had always thought of salad dressing as something you buy in bottles and pour over the salad, not as something you could make at home.
There’s only one way to make sure that doesn’t happen- a little while before you think the pasta should be done, fish out a piece and eat it. If it’s cooked right, take the pasta out then. If not, repeat in a minute or so.
My wife’s best friend and her daughter survive my wandering down to our house about 5:30-6:00 every evening.
I, like a lot of people have already mentioned, am quite nervous about cooking.
I don’t know enough about basics, I feel, to successfully put something together. The things I can cook (the ones that are more complicated than ‘pasta’!) I have learned by doing over and over, not by having some inate knowledge of how it’s coming together.
Based on my own likes and the comments of friends game enough to eat at my house, I can make one excellent bolognaise, one fantastic butter chicken and one thing called ‘astro chicken’ which is only so named because it was Astro Boy’s ‘birthday’ the first time my mother made it and that was the way my family remembered it - ‘Hey can we have that ‘Astro Boy’ day chicken thing again!?’
But I can only cook these though years of repetition, I know I have to put this in then, that this other thing needs to be chopped into that size, not to add this before that, how long after this it is that that needs to happen. But I don’t know WHY or what it’s doing to the meal.
Nor do I know how to find out.
Most recipes that I’m game to try, even claiming to be ‘for beginners’, seem to assume prior knowledge. But I have no instinct for it. Something that says ‘until it is cooked’ makes me go 'How do I know when it is cooked? Don’t all the different meats and foods have different cooking times? Tell me how long this should take, curse you! How do I tell if it is undercooked, just right or overcooked? huh? ’ Similar questions occur with other things like ‘slice up’ and it’s instructionary ilk.
I feel I could learn, if I could find some resource or other that could actually teach me enough to know the answers to all the questions that plague me with even the simplest of instructions. It makes me nervous and unmotivated. I’d like to cook well, but with the voice in my brain saying ‘You know you don’t know what you’re doing’ I just assume I’ll take an hour to make it, fail miserably and then just have another hour of washing up to do. So I just buy chips and chicken from down the road.
My other problem is when something is finished, I don’t know if I’ve done it right. ‘What if it’s cooked completely right and I just don’t like the taste? How do I tell? I don’t want to make my friends taste this. What if it’s absolutely horrid and I just happen to be the only person in the country that thinks it tastes OK?’
No.
Trust me, you’re in for a rude shock at about the age of 30 if you stick with an all-crap diet. And if you ever want to have a family, it would be nice if someone knows how to cook so your kids don’t end up rounder than earth balls. Maybe you’ll marry a cook, but love isn’t always lucky in terms of meshing skill sets.
We don’t all have to be Emeril, or have a carefully prepared meal every single night, but knowing some basic cooking is a fundamental life skill. Eating Ramen noodles every night is gross, and yes, it will eventually make you very unhealthy. There’s a very direct correlation between eating shitty packaged foods and obesity, and other health problems, as well as the fact that you’re missing out on one of life’s great joys.
I mean, it’s your life. I’m just sayin’. You asked if there was a reason to know how to cook, and I’m telling you what it is.
I’ll recommend Mark Bittman’s book, How to Cook Everything. It has instructions on how to pick out meat, vegetables, etc at the market, what to do with various items, and how to tell when they’re done.
I’d recommend a probe thermometer like this one for telling when meat is done.
Er… no.
Most dietary plans (not “diets” - I mean plans made for people who want to eat a healthy, balanced diet) specify 5-7 servings of vegetables a day. A diet of convenience food supply very little vegetables. Sure, you can easily add a salad every day and/or frozen veggies, but we’re talking convenience here, and I get the idea that most people who eat convenience food don’t make a salad and/or cook a bag of frozen veggies to go with it, much less prepare fresh vegetables.
Fruit’s the same, although the RDA isn’t quite as high. Easy to no preparation. But I still know a lot of people who never eat fresh fruit.
Fruits and veggies aside, in my experience, convenience food is either incredibly high in fat, sugar, or salt. They haven’t been able to come up with a balanced meal that also tastes good without going sky high on one of these. Ramen? The “Maruchan Chili Flavor” that I found in the back of my cupboard lists 16 grams of fat per serving, not too much sugar, and sky high sodium at 1420 mg. According to the US RDA - which you may or may not agree with - that’s 60% of your allowance of sodium and 24% of your fat allowance for the day. Calorie-wise, we’re talking 380 calories. Given how filling Ramen is - that is, not much - that’s a hell of a lot of your daily allowance.
You’re in college, right? Go take a class on nutrition. I think you’d be very surprised at just how bad “convenience” food is, compared to more natural food.
I just get so tired of cooking. As for the suggestion that someone should just go buy a chicken breast and cook it…I despise chicken breasts. I have never found a way to cook one that I liked. McDonald’s makes a damned fine chicken breast to my way of thinking - very moist and easy to chew - but it’s like $3.50 for ONE. Can’t afford to eat that way. 
Can’t bake a chicken, because 4 kids want 4 drumsticks. I always get stuck with the breast. I hate white chicken meat. We tend to alternate between things like ‘chicken nuggets’, Costco version, potstickers (ditto), french toast from scratch with whole wheat bread, omelettesque sort of egg thing with ham or bacon and cheese, waffles or pancakes, peanut butter sandwiches, lunchmeat sandwiches with cheese of some sort on them, quesadillas, spaghetti with meatballs, an assortment of frozen veggies but usually broccoli, carrots and brussels sprouts, or if raw, celery or baby carrots…we eat a lot of fresh apples, grapes and bananas, sometimes other fruit in season (esp. strawberries, satsumas and persimmons) but I’m loath to spend money on other fruits and vegetables which the kids won’t eat, and which either I must finish up myself, or will be thrown away.
What I need are ideas for food that my kids will actually eat, and that I won’t get stuck having to eat all myself just so not to waste it.
Alton Brown has a series on the Food Network – Good Eats – and a couple of books out. He takes pains to explain in detail and in a very entertaining way why things work the way they do. He’s excellent.
I just used his recipe to make granola. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. I’m amazed at how much we’ve been spending on packaged granola from Harris Teeter, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe. It’s so cheap when you do it yourself and it’s hardly cooking at all.
Restaurant and prepared foods have a lot of extra fat, salt, and preservatives. And processing often kills a lot of the nutritional value.
I love McDonald’s myself, but if you take a close look at the way they make their burgers and chicken nuggets, you can hardly call it food.