Ask HN: What are some skills you have that are worth learning?

Being a home cook (as opposed to being a chef) is actually a lot like programming. Learn a few simple patterns and you can recombine them in different ways. Look for patterns in any recipes that you follow and then you can reuse them in other situations. I can give some examples.

Basic cream sauce from fat (butter or pan grease), liquid (normally milk or stock), flour and seasoning.

The many ways of cooking eggs.

Basic grilled cheese

Seasoning with salt and pepper

tasting and adjusting as you go

Pancake variations

Biscuit variations

Quick-breads

Temperatures of doneness for meats (there are charts, get a good meat thermometer).

Chopping (you really need at least one good knife).

For example, I can make a very nice sandwich by combining white sauce, a fried egg, and a grilled cheese. (Put a fried egg and cheese and inside the sandwich, lightly coat with white sauce, fry as with grilled cheese. Season with salt and pepper.

I make biscuits, boil pasta or veggies and cover them with a very similar white sauce.

Boil macaroni and some broccoli, add cheese to the white sauce heating until it melts, combine both in a baking pan with some breadcrumbs on top, bake until it looks set (25-35 minutes at 350(f) is a good bet).

Basically the idea is to learn a few basic recipes (each a different ‘sub process’ or function) and use or them combine them with other ingredients that you have.

Taste every so often to ensure that you don’t make something inedible. Give it your full attention.

Sometimes you’ll make something truly weird and other times you’ll make something amazing and different that no one’s ever had before.

Just don’t burn your house down and don’t deep fry anything until you’ve got plenty of experience and know the dangers.

Obviously the recipes I’m giving are very vague, thats kind of the point as it is all up to your taste, which is different from mine. The key is paying attention to what you think is good.

It certainly takes a lot of time to learn, especially as an adult without another person to teach them, and the wasted time and money from a failed dish can be greatly discouraging.

I use Google Bookmarks to "queue" up readings that I want to review; generally I don't let this exceed ~10 (otherwise I know I'll never get to them). I use Google Keep to jot down raw thoughts/notes (e.g. if I'm learning a new concept or hear something interesting on a podcast) throughout the day. Then, every weekend I review all of these notes (say between 10 and 60) and "structure" them into organized domains (e.g. sociology, biology, finance, psychology, history) and clean them up before putting them into OneNote.

I generally don't check my OneNote so often - except if I know I have notes related to a topic and I'd like to review them (say antifragility or neural annealing) - but the two-step process of writing down the notes, then revisiting/refining them later tends to aid my retention substantially.

I'd say during an average week I spend about 1-2 hours on this process. Sometimes, if I've been inundated with new information, it can be up to 4-6 hours, especially when I have a lot of queued readings to go through. Overall though I've considered it well-worth the investment.

Buy a cheap food that you can stand that is boxed (mac and cheese, canned soup, ramen) and add some vegetables or pre-cooked meat you like to fill it out. Cook the vegetables with the meal and follow the directions on the box. Even after eight years, I still do this several times a week to have easy cooking days.

Next, try cooking something a little more involved but use a prepared base. Buy pasta or a pizza crust and add your own toppings plus store-bought tomato sauce, for example. Again, the directions should be on the packaging.

Next, choose some foods that you like but don't know how to make yourself. Find a simple recipe and pair it down to the bare minimum. For example, I like lasagna so I found a simple recipe that only had a half-dozen ingredients and bought noodles that don't need to be pre-cooked.

Mix it up with a fully prepared meal (either order take-out or a frozen pizza or something) once or twice a week. When you get started cooking, it can be easy to miss a key nutrient that you need and having a cheat-day where you eat something you're more used to and can't mess up makes things much easier.

When you're starting up, stick to 1-2 cuisine types. Each cuisine has its own staples and commonly used spices, that they combine in different ways. Figure out what makes good staples for your chosen cuisine and how to prepare them (not necessarily from scratch). Find the commonly-used spices and add them to everything, experimenting to see how much you want to add.

For example, Italian food uses a lot of pasta or pizza crusts. Fresh pasta tastes much better than boxed pasta, but isn't shelf-stable. Pasta cooking times are short but generally somewhat precise. To cook Italian pasta, you'd want to learn how to tell that pasta is fully cooked.

Mexican food uses rice and tortillas instead of pasta and pizza crusts. Pre-cooking your tortillas makes a huge difference. Cooking rice in a rice-cooker is easy, and it's do-able in a pot. The trick to cooking rice in a pot is that, since it's steam-cooked, checking the rice early can really slow down and mess-up the process. The first several times will be slow and messy, but once you figure out how long to wait it's actually quite low effort.