Well, you’re going to have to be patient, and suffer through some imperfect results, before you’re Jacques Pepin. (God knows my mom did, but that’s what you get when you have your 10-year-old daughter making dinner with whatever she can find in the house, because you’re too tired after work. To her credit, she always looked like she was enjoying the results, even if they were apple-cinnamon omelets.) It might help to watch some of the TV cooking shows; if Julia Child is still in reruns somewhere, she is hilarious! (I wonder what she thinks of the old SNL skit of herself?)
Hint: taste stuff as you’re going along, frequently. This doesn’t apply so much to baked goods, but to anything that needs stovetop and/or long, slow cooking. And if something looks like you wouldn’t want to eat it, then probably other people won’t, either. Is the chicken still pink in the middle? Then keep cooking it, but keep an eye on it, because a few minutes too long and it’ll be dry. Keep checking, checking, checking until you get the hang of how long things take to cook.
You appreciate good food, right? You can tell if there’s too much or not enough of something when you’re eating food that someone else cooked, right? You know what kinds of flavors you and/or your wife like, right? That’s why I recommended starting with something like soup, so you can fool around with it as it cooks. Soup is very forgiving; there are very few recipes out there that are completely inedible if the proportions are a bit different here and there. Not all medium onions are exactly the same size, I promise. So your recipe may not come out exactly like in a test kitchen, but it’ll still be good! Then, when you get a bit more comfortable, you can move on to foods where proportions are more important, like nost baking. (Oh, and brownies from scratch will kick the butt of brownies from mix, every time. If you want to try a dessert, fruit crisps are pretty simple, and proportions are more flexible than for many other baked goods.)
(Hint about preheating ovens: this is so the temperature is even throughout, and so that you’re starting on the temperature that the recipe calls for rather than from room temp, because ovens heat up at varying speeds. Boiling water: it doesn’t matter how long the water has been boiling, just that it is, in fact, boiling. For butter: yes, swish or spread it around in the pan; its purpose is partly to keep the other ingredients from sticking to the pan, so the whole pan should be covered. Same for oil, unless you’re deep- or shallow-frying rather than just sauteeing, in which case the actual oil temp may be important, but if that’s true, a well-written recipe will say so.)
And keep in mind: to me, anyway, few things are more charming or sexier than a guy who is trying like hell to make me a nice dinner, even if he doesn’t get it 100% perfect on the first try. I tried to teach an ex-boyfriend to cook; he wasn’t, shall we say, a natural talent, and it was almost more than I could handle to keep from getting up and grabbing the damn knife out of his hand as he tried to peel garlic cloves so I could do it myself, but it was so adorable that he was trying…and 10 years later, he would definitely agree that his efforts paid off in multiple ways. (One of which is that he is now functional in the kitchen!)
