If you’re cooking for one but don’t want to eat the same thing for a week (I’m fine with three days, but a week’s a bit much), a freezer is your friend. There are a few things that don’t freeze well, but most things do; and the frozen meals are right there ready to go on the days you don’t feel like cooking or don’t have time. That also frees you up to make things that are hard to make or to find in amounts that one person can eat at one meal – if you like roast beef or x casserole, go ahead and make it, just freeze the extra in meal-sized portions. If the store’s only got great big onions and peppers packed five big ones to a package, make up a big pan of sauteed onions and peppers, put the extra in the freezer. And so on.
He is, as you said, a college graduate and PhD candidate. So don’t teach him. Let him research it. YouTube will teach him everything from how to boil noodles to how to decorate a wedding cake. A basic cookbook. Maybe a few episodes of Good Eats. My son has been feeding himself since he was twelve or thirteen and his schedule and taste started to diverge (he wanted a high protein low carb muscle building diet, so he learned to cook eggs, chicken, fish and vegetables - I’m more of a “it isn’t a meal without carbs” person) - and I don’t know that I taught him much, he’s figured it out (I remember teaching him how to fry fish - OUTSIDE). Trust me, if my kid who got through high school by the skin of his teeth could teach himself to cook at thirteen - and consistently feed himself for going on a decade in a way healthier than the rest of the family, your PhD candidate will have no problem if he wants to learn.
As for the fine motor skills, a lot of food is sold chopped. I buy chopped garlic in a jar, chopped herbs in a tube. Onions you have to chop or by dehydrated, but that’s a fine cheat. He’s trying to feed himself and anything that is healthier than plain ramen and frozen pizza is a plus - he isn’t trying to win Top Chef.
If your son is a graduate student he can take responsibility for what he wants to learn. Presumably he knows which foods are healthy.
If he wants to learn, there are a number of step by step cookbooks or videos. The Canadian book Looneyspoons has easy and nutritious recipes.
If you want to teach, and he wants to learn, basics would include (for a normal diet): roast chicken, roast beef (pork, lamb) - (both with vegetables), fried fish, a curry, a soup, a slow cooker stew, good hamburgers, a pasta main dish, a stir fry, several vegetarian dishes and side dishes, a noodle sidedish, a few salads. If feeling ambitious, add bread, pizza, rice pudding, steak with potato, jerk chicken, fried chicken, etc. and consider better cookbooks.
Obviously he prefers certain dishes you make, so include those. Basic breakfasts and sandwiches, snacks like nachos, how to buy healthy prepared and frozen foods and nutritious quick meals using canned goods might also be good choices.
Once again, thanks to all - there are many good thoughts here.
Perhaps I should add that he prefers to limit his intake of meat. He’s not vegetarian - he loves his burgers too much, so decided not to have a bright line rule. But he tries to eat mostly meat-free. So any vegetarian suggestions are particularly welcome.
Beans! Learn to soak beans overnight and then slow simmer to cook. Season with a bit of onion, pepper, garlic, chili powder, whatever. Black beans and rice. Homemade refried pinto beans for all sorts of Mexican dishes. Whatever.
Special trick for beans. Add a little baking soda (1 tsp per 1 cup dry beans) to the soak water overnight to soften the skins when make something like refried beans or hummus where you want to puree the cooked beans. Beans soaked in this slightly alkaline solution will cook a little faster too, but tend to get mushy quickly - perfect for refried beans!
This was the most difficult thing I had to learn, when teaching myself how to cook. Lots of trial and error, with half-cooked carrots and overcooked onions.
It occurs to me, as somewhat of a klutz myself though not to the extent you’re describing, that one of the things to learn is relatively safe ways of cutting things. My mother, who was very much not a klutz, used to often cut things with one hand which she was holding in the other hand. Me, I use a cutting board, and am really careful where my other hand’s fingers are; or hold down the thing being cut with a fork, not with my other hand.
And there are various devices that will chop things for you – not only expensive food processors, but, oh help I’ll have to figure out the right search terms – aha! Google “hand choppers.” There are also food slicers slicers of various sorts, some of which can be used with your hands out of the way of the blade.
As a lazy cook and a fairly picky eater, I also agree with others who have said that learning how to cut stuff is important. And having good knives is important. I worked in a prep kitchen from 16-20 and learned how to cut every sort of veggie and fruit, but I also had good professional chef knives and paring knives.
When I started getting serious about cooking at home in my late 20s, I got myself a subscription to America’s Test Kitchen and pored over their knife reviews and invested like $100 in knives. Chef, paring and serrated. And also a magnetic knife holder. Having sharp, well-made, well-balanced knives is a game changer. I do prep at my mom’s sometimes and the difference between her dull, cheap knives and mine is night and day. Oh, and he also needs some cutting boards. I like the flat silicone kind - I store them against the wall behind my knives that hang on the magnetic strip.
The guy likes all of the fixins for a nice salad. He should eat some more salad. Gotta chop to make salad, though! If he adds some cheese and meat (even pre-packaged meat or deli meat) to those things he likes, he’d have a pretty complete meal.
Another thing your son might like about ATK is the well-researched recipes. Like someone else said, he’s a PhD student, he might enjoy the research aspect of it. Their recipes will be like “we tried 17 different ways to make this pork dish and here’s the best way.” Awesome!
He will also want to check out Alton Brown’s show Good Eats and his cookbooks, which are in the same vein as ATK. But he has recently started fixing and plain old retracting some of his older recipes so if you get him any of Alton’s books try for the newer ones, I’d say.
And yes another vote for pre-chopped, frozen onions (found at any grocery store and not just Trader Joe’s). TJ’s does have lovely little frozen cubes of garlic and I think maybe pesto. Keep those handy in the freezer!
Order is definitely something to learn, but onions are almost always the first veggies to go in the dish, unless I’m going a stir fry or something like that where I want them to retain some texture (pretty much only stir fries that I could think of off the top of my head. 90% of the dishes I do, onions need to cook long and settle into the dish.)
An additional thought - if he decides he likes cooking, but doesn’t feel adventurous on his own, consider getting him a short term subscription to one of the meal kit services out there. Most are still running despite COVID pushing a lot of people into learning how to cook at home, and many have vegetarian, keto, or other specialty diet options. For a quick review of some of the options.
And yeah, I’ll second any alton brown cookbooks, he’s one of my go-to-guys on anything cooking related.
If veg chopping is an issue, he can buy the veggies pre-chopped. Many grocery stores have trays of pre-chopped peppers and onions and the like. Many such veg are also readily available frozen - though those aren’t good if you’re going to do a stir-fry as frozen veg are just too mushy.
When I lived in NYC in the early 90s, I was alone (husband was here in the DC area). I often got veggies from the salad bar at one of the numerous delis that were on every street corner, because I had very little cooking equipment and it was just that much easier.
You could consider getting him an Instant Pot. Those do indeed cook rice. Dunno if it’s quite as good as a regular rice cooker but we routinely use ours for the purpose. The ratio of water to rice is lower: 1 cup water for 1 cup rice, because so much less is lost in cooking. The IP, plus a basic cookbook, and he can make nearly anything he likes in it. It also does very well with legumes, if he likes beans - I won’t do them any other way,.
North Bay Trading has some nice soup mixes. I’ll toss some of that in the IP, with the appropriate amount of broth (less than when doing on the stovetop!!) and a chicken breast - which can be still frozen!!. 45 minutes later, dinner for the whole family with leftovers. These mixes have dried veggies in them but you can always add more at the end.
Steam those green veg for the best nutritional effect.
Learn what settings on your cooker achieve which cooking results: I suspect many people use too high a heat at first.
A simple do-it-yourself pizza can be made with baking powder rather than yeast - no kneading or waiting for it to prove.
A simple dish I had in Austria once was a potato cake/rösti with a layer of steamed spinach on it and a fried egg on top of that. I should think you can buy in some sort of frozen potato cake or similar for a base.
Portion control: I work on the principle that 4oz/100g is about the right portion of any one component (protein, starch, vegetables), but you can’t go wrong by bulking up the green veg.
Old and tired (but not actually mouldy) vegetables can go into a soup, likewise any odds and ends of leftover meat. In a big pan, soften some chopped onion, add some tomato puree and garlic puree, a tin of chopped tomatoes, and whatever additional solids you might have: I like a chopped red pepper, maybe some carrot and celery or leek, occasionally some pieces of sausage (previously browned), and a handful of dried pulses (my supermarket sells a “soup mix” including all sorts - peas, beans, lentils, pearl barley). Bring it to a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer for a good while. You can make a big pot and freeze individual portions (if you have enough containers of the right size!).
I agree those things are important, but the OP only has 2 weeks. Teach the kid a few recipes that use those skills but are still not too complicated. If the kid’s overwhelmed, he’ll just forget most of it.
My go-to simple but delicious entree: 6-oz salmon filet, microwaved or pan-fried. Season to taste: butter, lemon, a touch of garlic, whatever. Optional prep: marinate in soy sauce or teriyaki sauce one hour (or overnight). Search the web for simple variations.
One-pot meals. Easy, and web search turns up scads.
McCormick bag and season. Simple, easy clean-up, and the bag collects drippings you can use for gravy.
Teach him to clean up everything after each meal or dishes will pile up and give him an excuse not to cook. No one likes cooking on dirty stove either.
Another useful thing to learn is mise en place, meaning lay out all of the ingredients you’ll need, including the vegetables already cleaned and chopped, spices measured out and whatever else will be needed for the recipe. If you do that, cooking goes more smoothly. (And you might notice the absence of an important ingredient before you’re knee-deep into cooking something.)
I would stick to recipes with only one or two ingredients, with little preparation needed. Don’t make him peel, chop, and wash things, because then he just won’t do it. Make seasoning easy (salt, black pepper, olive oil)
Buy pre-chopped and washed vegetables. A lot of grocery stores sell pre-diced onions/carrots/celery, which easily punches up any ground meat dish.
Teach a handful of basic techniques that are just enough to produce tasty food.
Eggs:
- Hard boiled, soft boiled, fried, poached, baked
- Scrambled eggs and omelettes: Add sauteed vegetables or salad on the side
Vegetables:
- Easily steamed in the microwave with salt/pepper/butter or olive oil: Broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, brocollini, any woody vegetables, really
- Snacks: raw carrots and celery sticks, can dip in peanut butter, cheese, or whatever
- steam in a pot: bagged greens such as spinach, kale, collards, etc. You can buy these pre-chopped and washed. add salt/pepper/olive oil
- Vegetable pastas available in most supermarkets
- Brussels sprouts: roast in the oven with salt, pepper, olive oil
Starches:
- Easy rice: 2:1 water:uncooked rice, bring to a boil, cover and low simmer for 15 minutes. Done
- “Baked” potato in the microwave. Wash potato, wrap in damp paper towel, microwave for 8 minutes
Meats:
Bake with salt/pepper/olive oil: Chicken (easier halved or quartered), fish fillets (cod and salmon are easy)
Stovetop: Chicken breasts, shrimp
Quick and dirty chili:
- Brown whatever ground meat you like
- Add your favorite spice packet
- Add a whole bunch of red kidney beans
Get him one or two books like this:
365 Ways to Cook Chicken
365 Ways to Cook Eggs (The 365 Ways Series)
I learned a lot about cooking from paging through and starting with the easiest recipes and slowly building skill and confidence and wanting to try tastier stuff.
Cooks Illustrated is great. Same people as America’s Test Kitchen. But start slow and cheap, a (used?) copy of The Best Recipe is wonderful and comprehensive. If it is well liked, also get The Best Quick Recipe, Best International Recipe and/or Best American Recipe among others. It would be more useful than the whole set to an occasional cook.
Knowing which fast food and frozen options are most nutritious is not a bad idea, and a graduate student should know this or be able to read product information properly. In general, soups, chilis, partially dressed salads, thin crust pizza are better options and fries, onion rings, shakes, sugary soda and coffee drinks should be rarer indulgences and smaller portions - as you know.
Ramen noodles are not so nutritious. I think everyone should know how to fillet and cook nutritious fish - including shrimp and cheap and versatile mussels (if diet permits).
This is really important. I used to be so into cooking I couldn’t discuss making simple food, everything required a lot of prep and nobody would listen. If someone wants to learn about performing regular maintenance on their car you don’t start by having them do an engine replacement. I can chop an onion in my sleep, but chopping up an onion is complicated enough to stop a lot of people from cooking altogether.