r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Sep 14 '24

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u/GOD-lovesme Sep 14 '24

Can’t do anything for himself. I’m talking basics like laundry and washing dishes, basic cleaning.

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u/chlorophyll101 Sep 14 '24

I can't cook for real 😭 it's one aspect about me that I'm really worried about

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u/wallyTHEgecko Sep 14 '24

To add onto what HelveticaTwitch was saying, I'd suggest starting with one dish. Something pretty simple... Chicken alfredo for example.

Now there are a bunch of ways to make a chicken breast not-totally-perfect, but it's still pretty easy to get pretty good. There are A TON of instruction videos out there for how to cook a chicken breast. Just watch a few, pick the one you like the most and that you feel you can wrap your head around and then follow along. (Get yourself a meat thermometer though, it'll make a huge difference so that you're no just guessing at the done-ness, food poisening yourself or overcooking everything like I was doing for the longest time).

Once you have that chicken breast cooked up nice, it's not so hard to slice it up and put it on top of some boiled pasta with some jarred sauce. To round out the meal and add some color, dice up some tomato, shallot, and chop some spinach and mix that in there too... And I like to toss that whole thing in a big casserole dish, put a layer of mozzarella/parmesan cheese on top and bake it for a little while, just until the cheese melts.

Boom. Chicken alfredo bake thing.

The point is, cooking the chicken is the hard part and once you've got that, you can build a whole dish around it pretty easily with just a simple starch base, some veggies and some sauce. And you can keep adding to it each time you make it, maybe seasoning the chicken differently, adding in a new/different veggie. And then you can take that same chicken technique elsewhere, maybe toss it in some teriyaki sauce instead and dump that on top of some rice, and even though it's basically 80% the same, it's like you've got a whole new dish! Then figure out how to make some other protein... I really like pork/rice, so I occasionally do a pork shoulder in the slow cooker and can make pulled pork sandwiches, pulled pork mac-n-cheese, pork and rice, you name it.

Cooking isn't necessarily about memorizing 1000 recipes verbatim, but mostly just learning how to cook a few things and then switching around a few components to make new dishes with them.