I’m going to argue for a different definition of “good cook” than what most people here are using. I think a “good cook” is someone who can fairly reliably produce food that meets their own hopes and expectations, and can cope with minor problems with their ingredients and equipment while still producing food that is what they hope it will be.
So, if you don’t like someone’s cooking because it’s bland, or overcooked, or oversalted, or overprocessed by your standards, they might still be a good cook by mine. But if they routinely burn the food, or are unable to produce supper because they ran out of butter/flour/tomatoes, then they are a bad cook by my standards.
My mother is a decent cook. She was raised in a different country with a different culture and level of education than myself, so she cooks differently. She does things “by feel”.
When teaching me how to cook, she could not measure time. She taught me to cook chicken legs, and to flip the chicken over to keep it from burning as part of the “browning” process. If you flip too often, the chicken falls off the bones. If you don’t flip often enough, it burns. She could never give me a time, so naturally (to avoid burning) I flip the chicken too often.
Another time she taught me to cook something more complicated, and I told her to use the microwave timer so we could see how long things would take. She would set the timer to five minutes, but long before it started beeping she had already moved on to the next step. (GROWL!) So I don’t know how long a particular step took.
Needless to say, I didn’t learn much about cooking from her. I had to learn from my sister, who was similarly educated in my country.
My daughter would probably quite like your chicken. She tends to eschew bone-in chicken, so your chicken falling off the bones would be right up her alley.
I guess she didn’t teach you that you need to watch the chicken, and smell it, and feel it with the tongs. You really can’t rely on time for something like that. Every leg will be a slightly different temperature, as will every pan. You pan probably doesn’t conduct heat completely uniformly, either.
A lot of pan cooking is like that. The particular heat level on the range, the size of the chicken legs, type of frying pan, starting temp of the legs (and frying fat), & number of legs will all influence the time to cook. It’s the same for stir frying or saute. Grilling and smoking foods, too. Particular times are good for things like baking or boiling (say, eggs or pasta) or where variables can be better controlled like commercial kitchens and factories. Otherwise, go by temperature and sometimes appearance (like grilled cheese or sweating onions).
I absolutely love Foodgawker.com, they compile all the food blogs so I don’t have to visit tons any time I want to decide what to make, and it is searchable.
What drives me nuts is all the people who try to improve recipes by changing ingredients - I get teh whole gluten free, fat free, vegan, allergen, health concern [gout, diabetes, ostomy] but for the love of ghu, carob is NOT chocolate in any universe, and kale is not the best food ever, and please stop putting coconut oil in everydamnedthing. We basically will find a recipe and then spend an hour trying to figure out how to turn it into something edible.
Look, the whole superfood thing is shit. Eat whatever in moderation - blueberries or whatever will not magically cure cancer [trust me, if they would I would fill my largest chest freezer with them to avoid chemo,] and vegetable fat is vegetable fat - there is no major benefit to using coconut oil over olive oil in something. Choose your oils based on need - smoke point, solid at temperature, lack of smell or taste. Not because some idiot online claims it will magically make you younger and take away your fat.
This is the difference between “knowing how to cook” and “knowing how to follow a recipe”. If you know how to cook, you have learned the inherent knowledge about how to know when something is done cooking, how different cooking styles produce different results, how different spices will change the taste, etc. People who know how to cook may not be able to convey how they cook because they aren’t following strict rules. They cook meat until they sense it is done rather than X minutes per side. They add salt until it tastes the right way rather than adding X teaspoons of salt. It’s probably more correct to say that people who know how to cook do so because they “know how to figure out how to cook.” They can look at what’s available in the fridge and pantry and use their knowledge to create an improvised meal that tastes good. A lot of that skill comes from experience. The more you cook, the more you get a feel of how to cook and will be better able to improvise rather than just follow the recipe.
Yeah, as someone who is none of those, when i cook for my friends with celiac disease I don’t make gluten-free bread and yellow cake. I serve roast potatoes and ginger ice cream. I make bean soup for my vegan friend. I guess I do make vegan blueberry pie for her, but using palm oil shortening instead of part shortening/part butter doesn’t make a huge difference, since the star of the show is the blueberries, not the crust.
There’s usually plenty of options to meet any particular dietary need.