Just so you know, those of us who are considered “good cooks” also have lots of failures when trying new things. (Recipes found online are hit-and-miss, due to different tastes.) Don’t be too hard on yourself - the more you try, the better you’ll get.
Just a reminder - that’s 200 F, ~95C. Keeping food warm in a 200C oven would go poorly.
Also, do you have any friends that cook? They may be able to show you how to make something simple. Alternately, there may be cooking classes you can find that are geared towards beginners - see if you have a friend or two to go with you, or use it as an opportunity to find new friends/dates.
Hey! Thanks for popping back in! I looked up what consitutes a proper English breakfast and … whoah. Multi-course stuff is really, notoriously hard to pull off. As others have said, try toning it back. Simplify, man. Also, if you don’t have $ or shelf space for cookbooks, you can check out online resources such as allrecipes.com and look at what others have done right/wrong. Everyone’s made the same mistakes you’re making now .. might as well learn from 'em.
Mental image: small baby, still in diapers, can’t quite get his chubby, wobbly arms to hold him up, so he’s not even crawling yet. He looks up and sees an Olympic-medalist sprinter, just flying past him, those long, lean legs pounding the sidewalk.
I bought my wife a cooking for 2 book (which is British, btw) for Christmas. Lots of interesting ideas there, and the recipes seem simple, not that we need easy recipes.
Go to a bookstore, look at recipe books, and find one with both basic information and some stuff you’d like to make. Any recipes with steps you don’t understand you can skip for the moment. You can try them when you build up confidence.
Hell, I cooked for two years in a dorm using only a toaster oven and hotplate (this was before microwaves.)
Try meat loaf. They are easy, consisting of meat, a binder, some liquid, and something for flavor. You can make a pound, eat half and freeze half.
French fries at home from scratch are too much trouble. Even freezer ones are better than takeaway. We make them by cutting potatoes into wedges, spraying with cooking oil, and baking. Healthier and tastier than normal fries, and much easier.
For veggies, frozen is fine, at least to start.
Cooking is really easy so long as you don’t try to reproduce what you get in a restaurant or want to play Julia Child.
OP, what’s your favorite part of the English breakfast? You could start by tackling one aspect of it at a time. Can we help with anything specific about those foods? How did you cook them when you tried before? (In a nonstick pan w/ a cm of oil, in a big pot filled with oil, in the oven, in the microwave…)
Also, **please **tell us what a fried onion sandwich is. It sounds delicious! How is it supposed to come out?
Yeah, what everybody else said. The stuff you’re trying seems like it ought to be simple enough to do because every crappy little hole in the wall turns them out, and they are simple enough if you have everything already set up exactly perfectly like they do in a restaurant. However, if you don’t have everything set up perfectly, they’re going to go to hell in a big way.
Stick with easy stuff like pasta or soups or casseroles for the time being.
A full fried English breakfast is not too difficult. You need to be able to time things correctly so that you can put the ingredients in in the correct order and you need a large pan so you can push the done components to the side where they’ll keep warm.
Blimey, your diet is giving me heart failure. Ever eat a vegetable?
I heartily recommend investing in Delia Smith’s ‘How to cook’ books, which were based on her series targeted at exactly people like you. She even tells you how to boil an egg properly.
The ‘starter’ dishes for all new cooks - generally students - are one pot dishes that really can’t go wrong – chilli, spaghetti bolognese, curry, beef stew. It’s what we all start on. You can make a whole pot full and freeze it in batches.
When I was a fresh faced student I was given the book ‘Grub on a grant’ (a phrase which will mean nothing to USAians, I imagine) which focussed on all sort of cheap and easy dishes from beans on toast up to three course dinner party dishes. I would’ve starved without it.
Boys! :smack:
Why wouldn’t it be? Grub is a common enough synonym for food here, and plenty of us obtain grants to go to school, so it’s perfectly intelligible to an American.
Damn! you’re talking about onions>fried>between bread. I was picturing sliced raw onions, between bread, dipped in egg, fried, or something. Actually, I might try that tonight.
Ask a female friend, or girl you fancy, to teach you the simplest dish she knows how to cook. Humorously throwing yourself at her mercy ought to work.
Great meal, awesome company, better dining future. Win, win, win.
If you hit up a few different females, you’d have some choices! Get your Mom to teach you how to roast a chicken (use a pirex brownie pan, much easier to clean up!). By which I mean, go over and you do it all, with her instructing.
Just doing these couple of things, will give you the confidence you need, a whole new world will open to you. Better diet/health, growing new creative skill, lots of money saved.
And if you can cook one, really great, meal the ladies will love you!
You know, now that you mention it, a roast chicken is a great place for the OP to start. I do mine in a Pyrex pie pan or brownie pan sometimes, too. It’s dead easy, plus leftover chicken meat can build all sorts of future meals: quesadillas* or chicken salad sandwiches or things like that.
Heat oven to 400 F. Take a raw chicken. Pull out any giblets or things that are in the cavity of the ribcage. Rub the skin and inside the cavity with salt and maybe a little pepper. Place into a pan - something oven-safe with at least 2-3 cm high sides, to catch juices. Rub outside of chicken with cooking oil or melted butter. Pour a little water or broth into bottom of pan - keeps things from burning. Wash your hands. Slide pan into hot oven. After about 30 minutes, turn it to 375 F. Give it another 20-40 minutes, until the skin is brown but not black. Pull it out of the oven, and let it rest at least 10 minutes on the counter while you sip something tasty. Pull off a drumstick and start gnawing like a caveman.
That oughta do the trick.
Bonus recipe for OP: Quesadillas. Can you get tortillas where you live? If so:
put skillet on heat, turn to medium … 5 if your dial goes to 10. Put in a approx. 2 cm. pat of butter. Let it melt.
have a sip of something tasty
put a tortilla in the melted butter. Make a small mound of shredded cheese of your choice in the middle. You can add shredded leftover chicken, onions, peppers etc. as well. Put the 2nd tortilla on top. Press down gently, mush it around a bit.
have a sip of something tasty
peek underneath with a spatula - is it getting golden-brown? Yes? Then flip it - this is the only hard part. You can use your spatula, or turn the thing upide-down onto a plate and then slide it back into the pan. Not browned yet? Give it a minute, check again.
Brown second side. Slide onto cutting board, slice like pizza.
Still, I’d wager there is one simple meal they know how to throw together. It may not be fancy, but it will be better than take out and some place to start.
Do let us know how it goes. I recently taught my neice, (in Grad school, “I hate to cook”, living on cold food out of her fridge!), to roast a chicken. In that, she came by, did it all with her own hands, with me just instructing. She has since graduated, moved to the big city, taken a corporate job and has several times now thanked me for teaching her. She reckons she’s saving tons of money, and eating a lot better! She just needed to see how simple it really was, she’s a smart girl she’ll figure out the rest on her own, I’m confident.
"…a cooking repertoire of three basic recipes can get anyone into the kitchen and beyond the realm of takeout food, microwaved popcorn and bologna sandwiches in a few days.
One could set off a heated argument with a question like, “What are the three best basic recipes?” but I stand behind these: a stir-fry, a chopped salad, and the basic combination of rice and lentils, all of which are easy enough to learn in one lesson. (“Lessons” might be called “recipes,” and need no “teacher” beyond the written word.) Each can be varied in countless ways. Each is produced from basic building blocks that contain no additives, preservatives, trans fats, artificial flavorings or ingredients of any kind, or outrageous calorie counts; they are, in other words, made from actual food. The salad requires no cooking; the stir-fry is lightning fast; the rice-and-lentils, though cooked more slowly, requires minimal attention."
The article includes links to the three recipes and they are, indeed, both straightfoward and open to near-endless variation. OP, I do sincerely hope you’ll try his suggestions and, ideally, report back to brag about your success.
A chop salad, like you say, isn’t even cooking. I’d say stir fry (yep), something to do with rice and beans (like rice and lentils), and spaghetti with meat sauce.
Broiling is also incredibly easy - steak, pork chips, even cut up chicken. The first few times the new cook might slice the hell out of he meat to see if it is done enough, but if you keep an eye on the time you’ll have something in good shape before you know it.
Boneless skinless chicken breasts in a George Foreman grill can be the basis for many dishes, and is almost foolproof.
I would actually make my top recipes a bit different.
A proper omelet - it can be the really thin sort, or the fluffy thick sort. Depending on the bits added in it can be a light breakfast, a hearty breakfast, or a delicate dinner or a hearty dinner. With toast, english muffins or a nice muffin it can be breakfast, with a nice bread and butter and a selection of fruit for dessert it can be dinner.
A hearty vegan minestrone - can be served to vegans, vegetarians or carnivores. You can add sausage to it for carnivores who absolutely feel they must absolutely have meat at every meal. Serve it with a lovely hearty multigrain bread to round it out, and some nice fruit for dessert.
Roast chicken and veg. Your balanced meal in a roasting pan. I usually take baby potatoes, baby carrots, small boiling onions [the size of golf balls] and celery cut to the length of the carrots. Rub a dash of salt and pepper inside and out, dump a cup of wine on the veg and a shake of italian seasonings, lay the bird on the bed of veggies and roast away. The drippings go into the pan, and you use a basting bulb to baste the bird every 15 minutes or so. Just make sure that you keep an eye on things so nothing burns.
Pasta salad is also very easy to make. Just boil pasta and drain pasta, add in a mix of olive oil and red wine vinaigrette, throw in some chopped drained frozen spinach and then mix up a bit of feta for flavor. Chill and eat.
If you aren’t a veggie person try some bok choy. Chop up each strand and add to a pan with some heated olive oil. Gently push around in the pan for a few minutes until the greens wilt, add a bit of grated ginger and some soy sauce and you’ve got some really tasty greens. I hate broccoli and many greens but I really love bok choy.
Make the sauteed boy choy a full meal by boiling some rice, draining it and throwing in some leftover chicken on the whole mixture. Just as good as takeout.
I feel the same way, and I think I know why: many dark/cruciferous veggies get a slightly (or more-than-slightly) bitter taste when cooked; also, to me, many of them smell like dirty diapers when they are cooking. Bok Choy, OTOH, maintains a really mild, slightly sweet flavor, and crispy (when not overcooked) yet almost creamy texture.
