I always recomend the Joy of Cooking as a first cookbook. It covers everything in an easy to understand format. For tools you might not think of I’d go with a vegetable peeler. That plus several sharp knives and a couple of pots and pans will allow you to do everything. Maybe a dutch over if she likes stews and chilies and stuff.
I really like Budget Bytes. The recipes are reliable, easy to follow, include pictures, and typically have plenty of vegetables.
I might start with the recipes for college students.
Easy dinners.
I’d recommend a combo rice cooker/vegetable steamer.
If she eats poultry, an easy recipe for roast chicken (they’re all easy!), a recipe for chicken salad, a guide to making chicken stock, and a chicken soup recipe will take her through the week. Also, 1\2 or 1/4 size sheet pan for roasting the chicken and all kinds of veg to go with it. Maybe an Aeropress if she likes good coffee. An espresso machine would be awesome, but 4-100 times the price.
That’s the cookbook I started from my senior year of college. The internet is great for recipes and research, but I think a cookbook gives you a much better general understanding of food and recipes. These days, I might recommend Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything as a good baseline starter cookbook that is easy-to-read, and gives a solid introduction to ingredients and technique across a wide range of recipes (around 2000), though I certainly would not disagree with The Joy of Cooking.
Thanks for all the suggestions!
She’s actually a fairly competent cook - I just want to make sure she has a repertoire of easy recipes so she doesn’t get all bogged down in “I need to cook, and I wanted to make such-and-such, and it’s too much time, so I’ll eat a cookie for dinner”. She’s never had to do meal planning before, and when we’ve had her (and her brother) choose recipes to make each week for their turn at dinner, she tends to come up with stuff that’s a bit more elaborate. The budget cookbooks will, I think, be good choices.
Definitely a good basic bit of everything cookbook like Joy of Cooking or Betty Crocker - I got one like that when I graduated college mumble-mumble decades ago and still use it. I remember my mother having Joy of Cooking (she got it as a gift) and the format was awful - her version didn’t have the ingredient list at the top of the recipe, but was rather “Take 2 cups of flour. Cut in 1 stick butter. Add 3/4 cup whatever…”. Very hard to use. Hopefully they’ve improved it…
Mixing bowls: I have a set I bought in 1981. I still use them nearly every day. Ditto the stainless colander I bought. I was actually NOT raised with dry measures - Mom literally never owned a set. They were quite a discovery for me. Moon Unit knows how to use them. So both of those will go on the list for her “trousseau”. I doubt she’d take care of a regular cast iron pan, but I might get a lower-rent enameled one for her (not Le Creuset… I don’t even have one of those and I have a job!).
She’ll get my smaller Instant Pot, so that should cover most rice cooker / slow cooker needs. I’ll have to remember to give her a cookbook for it; she’s used mine once or twice but I’m sure does not remember how.
I should start printing favorite recipes and putting them in plastic sleeves, to make up a binder for her. We have one here; every time we discover a real “keeper” we put it in that, and it’s great because we can take out the recipe while preparing the meal, and the plastic provides it.
I’ll need to find out whether her apartment has a microwave; if not, we’ll need to bring her one.
Essentially, every good cook learns from three words: “Eat your mistakes.” Cookbooks can wait until she figures out what she can afford, what she can cook, what she likes. Before “how to cook” comes “how to eat,” and you and she have had plenty of time to figure that out.
At this point, it’s not so much how to cook as it is how to shop. She needs to learn how to eat (and cook) two meats, three vegetables, and three starches. Baking, later.
This may seem odd, but I recommend, um, soups. They usually have a wonderful combination of proteins, fats, starches and vegetables, they are hard to screw up, they’re easy to make a lot of, cheaply, and then freeze, and they can be the perfect cheap, easy, healthy companion to whatever deep-fried crap will inevitably accompany it. The best soup recipes are, unfortunately, the easiest recipes in the hardest cookbooks, which turns a lot of people off. Still, soup is the way smart people learn to cook.
Some very good advice. One thing I would be concerned about is how much counter space she will have.
The Crock Pot/Instant Pot is very handy. I have a version made by Crock Pot that can sear, slow cook, and pressure cook. I assume the Instant Pot can do that as well.
One thing that I found very useful when I was younger was a George Foreman Grill. I now have a grown up version that is much better. Temperature control for the top and bottom, change the plates to griddle or grill, ability to adjust the height so it doesn’t have to smash everything. I can cook tons of things quickly and easily on it and it is simple to clean up. The problem is it goes against my concern of counter space. Something similar to this https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/cuisinart-griddler-grill-griddle-panini-press/?catalogId=69&sku=6417778&cm_ven=PLA&cm_cat=Google&cm_pla=Electrics%20>%20Indoor%20Grills%20%26%20Panini%20Presses&cm_ite=6417778&gclid=CjwKCAjw8NfrBRA7EiwAfiVJpR4Kxmg2wcmmSiOGctNFRxzJDPOTIGKQJMOJKXDBuGIZ7381zvzsIxoC-wkQAvD_BwE
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Cookbooks… I agree with Joy of Cooking or Betty Crocker. I love How to Cook Everything but it could be intimidating to a new cook although if they try it the recipes are really fairly easy to follow.
Joy of Cooking is a great reference cookbook, but the prose can be a little… awkward for some new cooks. I’d recommend Good and Cheap: How to Eat on $4/day by Leanne Brown. It’s an outstanding cookbook - and not just for how she shows you how to made food, healthy, interesting food for less than a Happy Meal, but also for how she shows folks how to plan meals (and how to use leftovers).
The book itself is beautifully done, but, if you’d rather, she also makes the whole thing available for free as a PDF download (at the same link as above).
It’s been revised and updated numerous times; last time in 2006, and there’s a new version coming out soon, which adds a section on fermentation. I believe I had the 1997 edition in college, and I don’t particularly remember the prose being odd or anything.
There are a bunch of cookbooks with recipes using only 5 or 6 ingredient, which are pretty simple to make, but have good variety.
There are tons of Weight Watcher cookbooks, which are good even if you aren’t on a diet. Their recipes are usually pretty quick to make. I wouldn’t use them exclusively, since they are heavy on boneless skinless chicken breasts and shrimp, but there are tons of them in used book stores.
Ramen is actually pretty versatile and inexpensive. We used to eat fried ramen all the time.
You can eat it as soup as intended, but we’d boil it, with or without the spice, then drain it and throw it into a frying pan with some scrambled egg, frozen mixed veggies, cooked cubed pork or chicken or steak. Sometimes we’d add soy sauce.
It was always a favorite.
A boxed set of Alton Brown’s Good Eats series might prove helpful. Brown does a pretty good job of explaining not only how to cook something but why it should be cooked a certain way. It’s one of the most useful and entertaining cooking shows I’ve ever seen.
Ramen soup with an egg dropped into it is cheap, nearly as easy as plain ramen, and a decent meal.
There are actually 3 volumes of recipes/commentary from the show- it’s basically a recipe companion for the show- each episode’s recipes are defined in the books, and in a few cases, were revised for publication based on show feedback.
That might be better than a set of DVDs or whatever. Plus, if she wants to see it done, I’m sure that the show segments in question are on YouTube or Food Network.
It’s been suggested (by you even) but a cookbook for an Instant Pot is going to be all she really needs.
You can do so many cool things with an Instant Pot that are easy, quick and don’t take many ingredients. If by “my little one” you mean the 3qt version, you might want to spring for the 6qt for her. She’ll be able to cook for friends and when she’s by herself she’ll have room for leftovers.
ETA: Forgot to mention…Aside from cookbooks, Instant Pot has pre-made mixes that all you need to do is add water (or stock) and the meat and you’re good to go. The pumpkin chili and lemon risotto ones are fantastic. They have jarred mixes as well that you just add meat and veggies. The Texas chili is the only one of those I’ve had, but it was very good.
Yeah…Joy of Cooking is a must-have, but can be (as others have said) surprisingly difficult to use. I’ve gotten in trouble more than once with recipes that turned out to be a lot harder than they looked at first glance. So be warned, there’s some advanced stuff in there.
I believe many basic cookbooks do a good job of selecting easy, tasty and nutritious meals that “anyone can cook” and feel good about. So you’ll definitely want a couple of these.
Far easier to have a good cookbook with several great recipes than have to look a bunch of stuff up on the internet then find a way to concentrate that info yourself. (Save to your device? Print it out? Bookmark it and hope to find it later??)
I have a very tattered 1969 edition that the covers have fallen off of, and a 1991 “40th Anniversary” edition, which is also starting to show some wear. In the 60s, there was apparently a recipe for “tuna and jello pie”, which could put you off cooking forever, methinks.
I think this is getting at a good point.
Maybe the OP’s daughter is different than me, but at that age living on my own, cooking was something I did because I had to eat, not because I wanted to cook. Most everyone I know was the same way in their 20s. We had better things to do, like drinking and finding trouble.
During this time in my life I prepared a lot of very simple meals: 1 lb of ground meat (I liked sausage meat), 1 lb of pasta (I liked penne rigate), and a jar of pasta sauce. Cook the meat, boil the pasta, combine it all together. That’s dinner for like a week.
I’d do a similar thing with a box of Zatarain’s jambalaya and a can of baby clams.
It’s basically the “Hamburger Helper” approach to cooking.
I’ll still make those meals occasionally to this day.
One problem with internet recipes, and some book recipes, is that they are not well vetted. I made one the other day which took two cups of spinach but never said when to add it. I’ve seen some that neglect to mention the oven temperature.
An experienced cook can figure it out, but it could drive a new cook crazy.