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How To Cook When You're Bad At Cooking

17 Mar 2024

Are you bad at cooking? Have you never cooked in your life? Have you been thrown into a situation where you need to cook regularly for the first time in your life and don’t know where to start? Well lucky you, I’ve got a few tips and tricks to help you get started, and a few basic recipes that will serve you well. First, the tips:

1) Don’t be ashamed for using a recipe. Eventually you’ll get to the point where you can mess around with recipes you’ve memorised and change stuff and it’ll be great, but for now you need to focus on learning the basics, and that’s alright. No shame in using something someone has made for that exact purpose. 2) Make sure you’re actually regularly consuming all the food groups. Every meal should have large portions of carbohydrate and protein, and also some vegetables for vitamins etc. You should try to minimise fats, but don’t completely wipe them out of your diet - you still need fat and sugar for digestion and short-term energy! If you struggle to eat veggies, it’s ok to put them in a sauce or fry them or do whatever you need to do to eat them. Eating salsa and nachos is better than eating no veg at all. 3) Batch cooking is your friend. If, like me, you grew up in a household with no leftovers, this will be a foreign concept to you, but a lot of recipes can be cooked in bulk and either fridged or frozen for later. If you get a day with the time and inclination to cook, spend that time cooking something big for a day when you’re too exhausted. That way you’ll be eating well all the time. 4) Bringing an office chair into the kitchen and sitting on it while you prep food is excellent for any achy joints or general lack of inclination to stand for long periods. It’s also super fun to kick off counters and stuff and whiz around the kitchen like a tech genius in a movie. If you get bored, stick on a movie or something. Make accommodations for yourself. 5) When buying food, make sure you’ll actually use it before it goes off. If it’s freezable, freeze it. Try to have a vague plan in your mind of what you’re going to use and how much of it you’ll be using, and try a few shops until you find a good balance of quality and price. Local markets can be great places to find cheap veg, but sometimes the efficiency of a supermarket is what you need. 6) Seasoning is mandatory and you measure it with your soul.

Another fun thing about cooking is that frequently, when you learn one recipe you can then modify it into a bunch of different dishes. For example, when I was a kid I learned to make chicken stir fry. This is a good dish, but by changing the veg mix or protein (prawns usually) or seasoning, you can make entirely different stir fries. If you can make a stir fry, with a bit of fish sauce you can make a pad thai easily. And if you know how to make a pad thai, it would be rude not to learn egg fried rice on the side. Maybe your vegetarian friend is coming over and you can substitute in tofu for protein, which is great fried! And if you can make tofu pad thai with egg fried rice on the side, you can learn to fix a Lynx Mk. 8 helicopter, a Pacific 24 seaboat, a 4.5 inch naval gun, a Samson RADAR system, or a Type 45 destroyer. And when you can fix all that, you’ll be a Royal Navy engineer.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Recipes! All of these can be multiplied up to serve any number of people. The base servings given here will do 4 small portions or 2 big ones. They can all also be stored in the fridge for a few days or frozen near-infinitely.

Recipes

Spaghetti Bolognese

Ingredients:

Method

1) Chop the top and bottom off the onion, peel off any brown skin and dice it as small as you can. 2) Wash the carrots, and (with the skin on or peeled depending on your preference) dice them too. 3) Remove the garlic cloves from the bulb, top and tail them and peel off the skin. Crush them either under your knife or with a dedicated garlic crusher. 4) Add a tablespoon or two of olive oil to a decently-sized saucepan and warm it up to a medium heat. You can tell it’s warm enough when you see the oil shimmering, or if a single bit of onion or water flung into the pan sizzles nicely. DO NOT PUT MORE THAN A DROP OF WATER INTO A PAN OF OIL. 5) Add the garlic to the pan for a few moments to let it fry (and double check that your pan is a sizzling and not instantly burning temperature). 6) Add the onions and keep stirring them until they go vaguely transparent and floppy. 7) Optionally, add about half a teaspoon of chilli powder. I like to, but it’s hardly traditional. 8) Add the mince. If you’re doing it from chilled, just keep stirring until it’s all brown. If you’re doing it from frozen, firstly that’s probably bad, but I can’t say much cos I do it too. Just do the same, trying to smash apart the Meat Block to expose as much surface area as possible. This will take a lot longer. 9) Add the chopped tomatoes, a decent squirt of tomato puree if you’re using it (think a couple of teaspoons to a tablespoon) and more mixed herbs than you think would be an appropriate amount. You’ll get the hang of seasoning eventually. You can also add some black pepper and, if you’re not highly salt-averse like my girlfriend and I, a pinch of salt. 10) Once everything’s combined, you can leave it to simmer (bubble slightly) until it looks like spaghetti sauce should look - probably 20 minutes to half an hour. Keep stirring it so it doesn’t burn onto the pan. 11) In the meantime, cook the spaghetti as per instructions on the packet. It will probably be done at about the same time as your sauce. Serve up and enjoy!

You can modify by frying bacon before the onions, taking the bacon out and chopping it, frying the onions in the bacon grease and then re-adding the bacon with the mince. You can also add a small glass of red wine (usually a crappy cabernet sauvignon) after the onions. Either or both of these steps will have your meal tasting a little more professional!

So that’s one meal down. But say you’re not feeling pasta? Never fear, you can easily modify this for…

Chilli con carne

Ingredients

Method

1) Follow steps 1-6 from the spag bol recipe (without the carrots, obviously). 2) Add a couple of teaspoons each of chilli powder, paprika and cumin. 3) Brown the mince as described in step 8 of the spag bol recipe, then add the tomatoes, tomato puree (2tsp) and black pepper. 4) Add the stock cube. Either you can add it directly, if you’re in a rush, or if you want to do it properly you can add about 300ml of boiling water alongside the stock cube. It’ll make the dish take longer but taste better, and the trick for a good chilli is to let it cook as long as possible. 5) Let it cook for as long as possible, or until it pretty much looks like how a chilli is supposed to look. 6) Chop one bell pepper into pieces a little smaller than 2x2cm. Make sure you wash it and get rid of all the seeds. 7) Stick the rice on as per the instructions on the packet. 8) While the rice is cooking, drain and add the kidney beans and throw in the bell peppers. 9) Serve and enjoy!

Chilli can easily become part of a bigger meal if you buy tortillas, lettuce, tomatoes, guac and salsa - burrito night! You can also stick it on some nachos, cover the whole thing in cheese and enjoy it that way. Adding a square of dark chocolate at the end is also supposed to improve the taste but I can’t say I’ve ever noticed a difference.

That’s all well and good, but chilli takes forever. What if you only have half an hour? Let me introduce you to:

Tuna pasta

Ingredients

Method

1) Follow steps 1-6 from the spag bol recipe (without the carrots, obviously). 2) Add a couple of teaspoons each of chilli powder and paprika. 3) We’re skipping the meat this time, so just add the tomatoes, tomato puree (2tsp), mixed herbs and black pepper. 4) Add the veggie stock cube directly. 5) Start cooking the pasta - that’s right, we’re almost done already! 6) Chop one bell pepper into pieces a little smaller than 2x2cm. Make sure you wash it and get rid of all the seeds. Add it to the pan. 7) Drain the tuna and add it too, stirring it through. 8) Once the pasta is done and the sauce looks fairly thick, you’re good to serve it up!

To take this from something light and Mediterranean to a more substantial comfort food, stir in the pasta and pour the whole lot into an oven-safe casserole dish. Top with excessive amounts of cheese and bake in the oven until it starts to get a little crispy on top. Boom. Tuna pasta bake.

Well, that’s three recipes that are actually just the same recipe for a homemade tomato sauce. They taste good and contain some nutrients, though I’d recommend making some veg to put on the side. I hope that was helpful, and who knows, I might make another article like this with some more of my go-to recipes (like that pad thai?) at some point!

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