Have son make at least one basic dessert from a box mix. Brownies or a cake is fine. Make him read the instructions and emphasize that overmixing is not a good thing. If the instructions say to stir 30 times by hand then 5 minutes with an electric hand mixer is not a good thing! This is a good opportunity to show him how to grease and/or flour a cake pan. Tell him it prevents the cake sticking. And you can show him good technique for cracking eggs.
Make a batch of chocolate chip cookies from scratch. Just use the recipe on the bag of chips. Teach him how to cream together butter and sugar. You can get fancy and use both butter and shortening if you are up to a challenge. Can get a better cookie texture that way.
Teach him how to add some liquid to the pan after meat is done cooking to make a sauce. Scraping up those browned bits that are stuck to the pan is the basis for many a great sauce or gravy. That stuck on stuff, the fond, is great flavor.
If he can cope with chopping an onion and a couple of garlic cloves (or better still use a garlic press) Here’s a simple and tasty recipe I got out of a student cookbook when I was learning the basics and still use to this day. It’s not exactly super-healthy, but I tend to think that while knowing how to cook can be helpful when losing weight, they are essentially 2 different goals.
Creamy chicken
1lb diced chicken breast
1/2 a pint of heavy cream
1 white onion
2-3 cloves of garlic
Dried basil
Peel and chop the onion and fry in butter (or oil) over a medium heat in a large frying pan or wok. Top tip - toss almost continuously to prevent burning!
When the onion is lightly browned, add the chicken and chopped/crushed garlic. Cook until the chicken pieces are cooked through (If you poke them in half with a spatula and they’re no longer pink in the middle, you’re good).
Add the cream and reduce the heat to low. Simmer for a few minutes to reduce the sauce to your desired thickness.
In the last few minutes of cooking add a pinch of dried basil and stir in.
Serve with rice or potatoes (boiled or mashed) and veggies of your choice, e.g. carrots, asparagus, green beans, zucchini.
This! (Oops my quoting failed NEEDSCOFFEE Nailed it!)
Teach him to roast a chicken. He’ll be able to eat for a couple or few days off of one cook up.
The sides are pretty easy to add. Consider getting him a rice cooker, makes rice perfect every time, enough for several meals (microwaves a charm!), if he’s a rice eater, of course!
Make sure he owns two large pots, give him a recipe for chilli and one for spaghetti sauce. Both to be made in large quantity and then (portion) frozen. Cook once, eat 10 times, it’s both economical and makes life easy for weeks at a time.
This. Get a roast chicken from the grocery store, rice (or couscous) and veggies for sides.
For leftovers, chicken pot pie. Sounds like you’ve already got pie crust covered. I use a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, frozen potato cubes, and chicken gravy in a jar for the filling. Quick and easy.
I know you can buy diced onion in Trader Joe’s and other supermarkets. They also have other vegetables already chopped in the produce aisle. Sure, it’s a little more expensive, but it avoids some of the fine labor. (And it really sucks when you only have one onion and you wind up getting blood on it from klutziness with a very sharp knife.) There are also little manual gizmos that are designed to chop or dice vegetables.
If he is going PH.D, teach him the ways of the Slow cooker. Very little prep, cooks itself, and keeps itself warm, for when you get home, whenever you get home. Frozen and canned or other pantry stuff are perfect for the crunch periods when you can’t make it to the store for three weeks, and are good slow cooked.
Similarly to the slow cooker, buy him a sous vide wand. I really wish I had owned one earlier in life; after buying one and using it I felt like I’d never had a properly cooked chicken breast before in my entire life (sorry Mom). You don’t even need a vacuum sealer, any Ziploc bag will do.
It’s almost impossible to fuck it up. Put whatever you want in the bag, drop it in the water, walk away. Come back in at least an hour, or literally anytime after that, even 10 hours later, and it’s ready to eat right now and perfectly cooked.
That reminds me; I gave my brother a sous vide wand at Christmas last year. I’ll have to ask if he ever did anything with it. (On the other hand, I might be disappointed to learn that he didn’t. So many of these kitchen gadgets end up unused. I thought he might enjoy this one, though and they don’t really take much room to store.)
My wife can’t cook. I’ve been trying to teach her for ages and never got anywhere, except with breakfast. It’s easy to make bacon, you can even make a passable form of it in the microwave. The texture and flavor suffer a little but it retains all the precious bacon nutrients. My wife has learned to not ruin eggs. They could be better but they aren’t burnt anymore, she does pretty good with a lightly fried egg, just keep the temp down and take your time. Breakfast cereals are easy, also feasible to cook in the microwave. You can get little plastic jugs of Pillsbury pancake mix where you just add water to the container and shake it. Corned beef hash comes in a can, it takes some patience to get a nice crust on it but it’s perfectly good to eat if it’s just heated through. French toast is about as easy a dish as you can make, it only gets easier in France where they have some kind of magical toasters. In the US just use a frying pan, our toasters aren’t made for that. In time he could even learn to make biscuits and gravy even if it’s just Bisquick biscuits.
There’s a whole thread on eating breakfast for dinner. It’s excellent food, very nutritious, quite economical even with the price of bacon running high. Very few cooking utensils are needed. So start there, he can survive and even thrive on breakfast.
OK, I apologize for being flippant. I thought you were speaking colloquially, not describing a diagnosis. And yeah, not being able to handle fine tools/tasks in the kitchen is a handicap to cooking for sure.
This. I love my slow cooker, and prefer it in a lot of applications to my pressure cooker, as it is a lot less finicky, not to mention less expensive, even a model with more temperature and timer options. Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned upthread, is that for a first time cooker, the sheer number of dishes created by conventional cooking can create a ‘BLEEP this work!’ attitude.
Especially if he isn’t going to have access to a dishwasher. So I recommend getting a good slow cooker/one pot cookbook. One thing that worked for my younger brother was having him go through a cookbook and finding things he wanted to eat, which made him much more enthusiastic that picking options that I thought he’d like or would be easy - his interest made him more willing to try.
Is the cookbook I got for him. It’s slightly euro-centric which I appreciate because I prefer metric to 'Murikan unit chaos, and runs a gamut of silly easy to REALLY complex, but also includes a large section on basic techniques and cooking information.
Teach him to follow a recipe: but also teach him that you don’t always have to follow the recipe. In most recipes, substituting what you have around or what you like better will work just fine.
And teach him that if he occasionally makes something not worth eating, this isn’t a disaster; it’s just part of learning how to cook.
I have run into people who wouldn’t cook just because they were so afraid of getting some detail wrong.
My advice would be to not teach him only recipes. Show him visual and textural examples during to cooking. For example, if a liquid needs to thicken, show him how it should look running off the back of a spoon.
Also explain that medium on your stove may not be the same as medium on the stove at his father’s place. Poor temperature control seems to be at the heart of many cooking mistakes.
Cooking can be lots of fun if you are willing to experiment and take some chances. Make sure he gets the fun part of it. If cooking is a chore than it will not happen.
I have cooked for myself and others pretty much my whole life, but I don’t like to cook particularly. It is a job, like vacuuming or shopping. In my experience, people who love to cook are particularly bad teachers of basic cooking, as they assume an enthusiasm in the pupil which is in fact rare.
I evolved a repertoire of simple healthy meals from basic foodstuffs, and your son can too. I put this together when I first lived on my own, and I still eat like this when I cook only for myself, fifty years later.
Start with a carb. Whole grain bread, polenta, tortillas, rice, potatoes, or pasta.
PIck a protein. Tofu, eggs, beans, fish, meat, cheese.
Add vegetables. One yellow or orange and one leafy green is ideal.
Add salt to taste. That’s it. Sauces, herbs, pickles, broths, those are of course great but not immediately necessary.
This covers a wide array of perfectly adequate meals like rice and sauteed vegetables and tofu, polenta with black beans and melted cheese plus a green salad, eggs and potatoes with spinach and cheese …
You cannot teach him much in two weeks unless you are offering an immersion cookery course. I suggest providing a “let’s learn to cook” book and Joy Of Cooking (the new one is completely different than the old standard but if you love to cook you already know this), and tell him to call you if he has questions.
Lots of good advice here; I’ll just add that there are plenty of cooking channels on Youtube for fast, nutritious and easy meals. Protocooks, Tasting History with Max Miller, Food Wishes and Basics with Babish are good starting point.
Another thing is that cooking for one can be a hassle. I’ll cook something and then portion it out into four amounts that can be eaten on separate days, or even freeze one or more of the portions for later. If he has friends nearby, some things are more fun or easier to make in a group.
I was coming in to say this. You don’t learn how to cook by making recipes. You learn to cook by learning the building blocks of cooking.
How do you roast something? Make rice? Sautee vegetables?
Once you know the fundamentals of how to put heat into food to make the food edible, you can learn the details and figure out the specifics of what you like.
Keep recipes simple, 5 major ingredients or less, he is not going to be happy following elaborate instructions, at least not at first.
Send him off with a set of spices that he would like. Salt, pepper, garlic powder, celery salt, whatever you think he will use. Sauces, Worcestershire, tiger sauce, oyster sauce, bbq, again things that he might actually use. Dried packets, gravies, meatloaf seasoning, stew seasoning, taco seasoning, chili, ranch dressing packet, alfredo sauce etc.
At least he will have something to put on his top ramen.
Teach him that frozen vegetables are a great time-saver and will make meal prep much easier – especially if his knife skills aren’t up to snuff. If he sticks with plain frozen veggies (corn, peas, carrots, onions, etc…) they’re usually pretty cheap and can be tossed into whatever he’s cooking in a snap.
Also freezer-related: ground meats like hamburger, loose sausage, etc…, can be pre-cooked, cooled off, and then repackaged for the freezer to give you a jump start in prepping a meal. For instance: I’ll fry up a pound of ground beef and then season it just a bit with garlic salt, pepper, maybe some oregano, drain it, then cool it off in the fridge before dividing it into two 1/2-pound bags and shoving it in the freezer. When I get a hankering for spaghetti and meat sauce, I open a jar of decent pasta sauce (or make my own basic marinara), toss in a package of the frozen pre-cooked beef along with whatever frozen veggies I prefer and then bring the sauce up to a low simmer until everything is thawed. Season to taste, then boil up some pasta for a quick dinner!
If you’re cooking for one, a meatloaf can last a week and matches with nearly any sides. Meatloaf can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. If you think you’re going to get tired of the taste, divide it into quarters and season each differently, or add different inclusions. Then either cook miniloaves or mash them back together into a frankenloaf.