Mark Sisson offers up a bunch of reasons Why It’s Important to Cook Your Own Meals. Here’s one that I think is key (emphasis Mark’s):
The better cooks we are, the richer and more varied our diets can be. The principle worked for our ancestors’ collective health, and it applies to us individually today. Like our ancestors, the right techniques open up new food possibilities for us – like cheaper and otherwise tougher cuts of meat. Additionally, many foods may be wholly uninspiring on their own but become fast favorites when paired with the right sauce or some novel herbs. As we expand our repertoire, we lessen the chance that we’ll get bored with our choices.
It occurs to me that if I could cook like Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet, I’d find far less reason to deviate from the Perfect Health Diet!
Aye, there’s the rub. I suspect cooking is a skill that is best learned the traditional craft way — essentially by apprenticing yourself to someone who knows how. Using your average cookbook seems to me a terrible way to learn (unless you like to be intimidated by scary ingredient lists) and with a few exceptions (like America’s Test Kitchen or the now retired Good Eats), food TV isn’t a great route to learning to cook either.
But where there’s a will there’s a way I suppose! Here are the books I’ve found that seem reasonably promising in terms of teaching actual technique (in no particular order):
- Cook’s Illustrated The Science of Good Cooking
- Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything
- Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for the Food
- Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Chef
- Michael Ruhlman’s Ruhlman’s Twenty
Bon appétit!
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health, & food policy. And cats! 
I big to differ! The BEST way to learn and perfect any skill is practice, PRACTICE, PRACTICE! There are tons of videos on youtube with step by step instructions, but you will never really learn until you actually do. :)
Hi Beth,
Thanks for the cook book recommendations. I’m curious about your take on pros/cons of each.
Thanks,
Mark
Shirley Corriher and Harold McGee have helped me a lot. McGee in particular. The foodie world can get very cultish and extreme and after a while you give up. Use canned broth or make your own. (Use canned if making your own is too time consuming.) To brine or not to brine? Expensive pots and pans or not?
McGee is very laid back about all this. I felt very liberated when McGee said in his columns that brining is not necessary, and cheap pots and pans are perfectly adequate for certain purposes.
That said, here’s a hint: you cannot make decent crepes in a regular fry pan, and a good French crepe pan will cost $20 and last forever.
Cookwise:
CookWise: The Hows & Whys of Successful Cooking, The Secrets of Cooking Revealed
On Food & Cooking:
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Takeway: Just do it. Whatever you come up with will be better than processed crap.
I have to agree with Kat. Cooking is a skill that you learn by cooking. Think of it as an adventure, pick a theme. One summer 25 years ago I decided to learn to make salad dressings. I gathered tons of recipies. It became the summer of salad dressings. I now make outstanding salad dressings without effort. I learned to make soups, hot and cold, the same way. Dig in and cook and then cook again. That is how we learn skills. Once you can feed yourself, you have an amazing control of your life, time, and finances.
To your list of cookbooks, I would add anything by Michael Smith, the “chef at home” man.
In general, just like anything else, there are some people who have more of an innate talent than others. My husband, though he only came to cooking in his thirties, is a fantastic cook: he has a really excellent sense of flavouring (though he usually uses no salt in his cooking),a lot of patience and just amazing “smarts”. I am less talented, but I cook a fair bit and can hold my own in the kitchen.
You just have to keep practicing and finding interesting recipes to try out. I also agree with the fact that something home cooked is almost always better than store-bought food.
A funny anecdote about cooking. Some years ago, I spent a weekend in a rustic camp which was a stop on the Appalachian Trail. A bunch of young dudes who were through-hikers were there at the same time. They could barely boil water, as the saying goes. Not knowing how to cook pasta, they threw the raw pasta into cold water and let that boil. I was aghast. “Everyone” knows you cook pasta by putting the raw pasta into rapidly boiling water.
Well guess what - my mentor Harold McGee recommends cooking pasta the way the hikers did! Ever since reading that, I have cooked pasta the through-hiker way and it comes out fine.
The moral of the story is, just do it.
But I’ve been helped by reading cookbooks. I like to keep it simple - and short. Except for braising (which is simple, but lengthy) I never cook anything that takes more than an hour.
I think one frustration factor is when inexperienced cooks start with something that has many steps or uses an advanced technique. I prepare pretty much everything I eat myself (legacy of a long career as an impoverished grad student, and living in lots of non-US places where there is no other eating option) and I still don’t often cook anything regularly that has more than about five ingredients or uses more than one pot. That’s why I like Bittman — though I don’t have his book, keep meaning to get it — I use his NYT recipes and videos. The best thing I learned from him was that you can prepare pretty much any vegetable by cutting it up, tossing it with olive oil, salt and pepper, and dumping it on a baking sheet to roast at 400 degrees. That’s my favorite because it doesn’t even need a pot. Or a real oven — I do it in the toaster oven.
In this vein can I also recommend this site: http://www.thekitchn.com/ and also Martha Stewart’s little “Food” magazine, although I hear it’s being phased out so you might have to find it in a library. Martha has such a reputation for complicated recipes, but the Food magazine seems to be really about how to incorporate basic fruit, veg, grains, meat cuts into dishes with minimal ingredients and prep. It shows all the steps and also has features that talk about things like planning and shopping for a week, how to use a package of chicken parts for more than one meal, how to read a package label etc. All very attractively photographed, which is a big factor for me, I am more likely to choose a recipe from a photo than a description.
There is one thing I have been curious about since you mentioned it in a previous post. If you don’t cook, what do you eat? (No offense intended, I am genuinely baffled.)
No offense taken ;). I didn’t say I didn’t cook … I just don’t cook as well as I’d like to. I’m more than capable of following a recipe, but I don’t seem to do it. Or at least, when push comes to shove, I tend to go with what’s easy for me at the time.
Most of the time I make do with a lot of semi-processed foods (love the microwave-from-frozen SteamFresh veggie bags). I use a lot of already cooked turkey breast or canned fish. And there’s also takeout that varies in terms of how healthy it actually is. My new regular go-to is Panera’s spinach power salad, to which I add some thawed frozen shrimp.
Ah, I see. Where I’ve spent a lot of time in the last years (Greece and the MIddle East) there is not a lot of pre-prepped frozen or canned food, so that’s what really forced me to learn how to make stuff from scratch. Hmm, this recipe needs a can of chicken broth but there is no such thing in a rural Greek grocery (even in Athens a few years ago), or for that matter Bisquik muffin mix or frozen lasagne … you gotta buy the chicken, tomatoes, flour, oregano etc. and start from there. There used to be a joke in our overseas program about an American student who came back from the market and wailed, “I couldn’t find anything to eat, they don’t have any food there, only INGREDIENTS.” (Although there is usually a counter which sells mystery meat “deli” cuts: you choose from the white cheese or yellow cheese or orange cheese slices, or the pink meat slices. :) Thank goodness for the internet and its recipes. Our program ended up putting together a recipe booklet of everyone’s favorites.
My mom and her sister in the US have being doing more takeout since they’re retired from taking care of kids and spouses. They always relied a lot on pre-prepped since neither is an enthusiastic cook. My aunt likes Panera but my mom finds it too salty, so I try to help by reverse-engineering their favorites when I’m at home. Also their favorite salads from Whole Foods, which opened up a year ago but is too far away to visit regularly.
I wonder if there is a youtube or DVD cooking instruction series that was comprehensive, structured, sequential, incremental and cumulative. Seems like that would be the next best thing to an actual hands-on, in-person, craft approach.