I’ve never been much of a cook, but it’s something I’d love to try and get better at. I’ve got a growing family and as much as freezer food is serving them now, when they’re older I’d like to be able to cook them something genuinely nice.
Wraps!
This isn’t a fancy meal, but it’s healthy and fast.
Get a wrap (about 12 inches in diameter), and fill it with whatever you think is healthy. For us, that’s cucumber, tomatoes, avocado, lettuce, black beans, cheese. We’ve also included bacon, chicken, salsa, and rice. Add some seasoning, olive oil, and lemon juice.
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Anything I can make in a crockpot. I can do a pretty mean pot roast.
Costco short ribs in the instant pot. With the random Asian spices I have in my pantry. Freezer to table in 50min. The instant pot is my favorite tool.
Now’s a good time to learn then (when they will forget your mistakes.)
Rather than specific dishes, focus on techniques. Learn to make pan sauces and your food immediately goes up several levels. Be generous with herbs and spices (those little pots you get in supermarkets are not supposed to last long). Serve white rice on the side and mix noodles in to the dish (pasta is a kind of noodle). Learn to make stock and bone broths, if you cook a whole chicken you can serve the best cuts as part of the meal, save the rest for a stir-fry or sandwiches and you can use the bones and connective tissue to create a broth that you can freeze for later. Vegetable soups are also great and can use up all sorts of bits and pieces. In cold weather you can put them in a thermos as a hot packed lunch.
If you want to make something sweet, store bought rolls of filo pastry can be quite good these days, add some fruit, fresh or tinned, and cook.
Experiment, most importantly. If you don’t know how to cook with something, find people from where it comes from and see what they are doing with it.
I make biscuits and homemade gravy from either sausage or bacon grease (whatever I happen to cook up that day).
Anything casserole. Beef stew, Reuben or golumpki. Just dump stuff in a pan or slow cooker.
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Bean burritos.
Store bought tortillas. Canned or crock pot beans. Chopped lettuce and tomatoes. Shredded cheese. Avocado mashed with salt and pepper, and lime when I remember. Sour cream. Salsa for those who want it. Can be enhanced by adding taco meat by browning some ground beef and adding taco seasoning.
This one:
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/keith-youngs-chicken-cacciatore-recipe-1946896
You want to cut the quantities in half, the batch is absolutely huge if you do the recipe as-written. It basically cooks enough chicken cacciatore for an entire team of firemen.
It’s a flexible and forgiving recipe, though. You can play around with it, do substitutions, etc.
Lately, I’ve been eating a lot of farro instead of rice, pasta or oatmeal. It has a nice nutty taste and chewy texture that I like.
Mix it up with some veggies like sliced carrots and chickpeas for a complete meal.
https://cookieandkate.com/roasted-carrots-recipe-with-farro-chickpeas/
https://www.thekitchn.com/one-pot-farro-carrots-chickpeas-recipe-23012504
Farro is great. For a side dish I tend to cook it in spiced broth (chicken or beef depending on the main course) instead of water. Another one you might like is kamut.
1 pot spaghetti “non-carbonara”. Cook 130g spaghetti while whisking an egg with some good pepper and fresh-grated parmeggiano. Drain noodles, keep a little bit of the noodle water in the pot. Noodles back in, egg-cheese goodness on top (no heat, just the hot noodles and warm pot). Mix until everything is creamy. Enjoy.
https://damndelicious.net/2014/06/13/one-pot-zucchini-mushroom-pasta/
This recipe is really easy and quick. The only thing to watch out for is to move the pasta around a bit at the beginning as it softens so it doesn’t all stick in one clump. It’s really good if you toss in some thawed pre-cooked shrimp for the last 5 minutes or so.
https://www.jocooks.com/recipes/no-knead-bread/
Also don’t underestimate the comforting smell of home made bread. It’s easier than you think but just takes forethought. Fresh buttered bread turns a simple soup or stew into something special.
One pan chicken and rice! It’s a forgiving dish, and even if it does not turn out great it has never gone uneaten in my home.
Preheat a pan to medium high (medium if nonstick).
Start with chicken thighs, laid flat in a single layer with a bit of olive oil until they’re seared on both sides. Take the thighs out and put them on a plate. It’s ok if they’re not completely cooked through, we’ll finish them later.
Reduce heat to low and slowly add half a cup of warm water. Use that to deglaze the pan.
Add a cup of rice. Stir every once in a while. Add liquid as needed in half a cup increments when the rice gets too dry. You can use up to one cup of chicken or vegetable broth for flavor, but don’t overdo it because it’ll get too salty otherwise. Water is fine otherwise.
Once the rice is starting to soften on the outside but before it’s fully cooked add the chicken thighs back in to finish cooking them.
If you want to get fancy you can add chopped onion and carrots to the rice. You can also change the flavor profile by adding spices (a sprig of rosemary works well, not loose leaves unless you like the feeling of eating sticks), acid (lemon wedges served as a side, or a splash of red vinegar while cooking), or even raisins (early enough so they absorb some of the liquid and plump up).
The biggest thing with getting better at cooking is to just find a recipe that looks tasty and go for it. Follow the directions and see how it comes out. Try to understand the directions too. Why are we cooking things in X Y Z order? Why are we cooking at this temperature? Etc. You might still mess stuff up, Ive been cooking at home for 10 years and still have meals I just have to trash because theybare unsavable, but try to figure out what went wrong, and then try making that meal again but looking to fix your mistake.
There are also some great cookbooks and resources out there to kickstart your journey of understanding cooking. Salt Fat Acid Heat is a fantastic book that dives into the four pillars of what makes something delicious. It was also adapted into a Netflix series so you can watch that as well. The Food Lab is all about nerdy food science. Kenji Lopez Alt has spent his time figuring out the science behind cooking so you dont have to. Also, a lot of info from the Food Lab is also available on Serious Eats’s website, where Kenji was a writer for a long time.
Also if you have kids, get them involved! Learn with them so they have a jumpstart on being comfortable in the kitchen!
Now to answer your actual question, my go to recipe is pizza. Ive been making it pretty much every week since I was 22. I’ve built up a collection of tools for pizza making, so I have a propane oven that reaches 900°F for neopolitan pizza, a baking steel for regular oven pizzas, pans for south shore bar style pizzas, etc. Its all nice to have but you can make pizza on a cookie sheet or in a cast iron pan. The first pizzas I made were store bought dough in a greased cast iron pan with jarred sauce and some shredded mozz. Nowadays I make my own dough and sauce.
For an easy NY style pizza I use Kenji Lopez Alts same day dough recipe (https://youtu.be/uXkT8LbCPOY), and for the sauce I do
- 1 28oz can whole peeled tomatos (I like Cento, but look for brands that dont use Calcium Chloride or Citric Acid in the ingredients)
- ~2tbsp Olive Oil
- Like 2-3 tsp of kosher salt Blend all that with an immersion blender in the can of tomatos (might have to pour out some of the liquid in the can).
Often times Ill just leave it at that, but you can also add dried oregano, dried basil, a pinch of sugar, or some red chili flakes to spice it up.
My first suggestion is to learn to cook and use a whole chicken.
Take a whole, air-dried chicken, remove the gizzard package (if present) and season liberally with a poultry seasoning blend (or whatever—salt, pepper, garlic powder, rosemary).
Bake, starting at 450 for 10-15 minutes, then at 325 for an hour and a half.
Eat the legs and thighs, reserve the breasts to us as an ingredient for chicken-anything—pasta, salad, or chicken salad sandwiches.
Boil the carcass for several hours with some more seasoning, onion, carrots and celery, then strain, reserving solids and broth.
Over the broth pot, rinse the solids with cold water, cooling them and getting everything tasty into the broth.
Pick the meat off the bones, skim the fat off the broth and recombine (or not, for stock).
Boil excess water away, until it tastes like bland chicken, then salt until it tastes good. It’s ok to use some bullion to add flavor, too.
That gives you a base that you can use to make any chicken soup. Simplest is to throw in some fresh veggies and cook for 10-15 minutes.
My current favorite cooking channels are Alex’s and Ethan’s .
The classics that I learned from are all public TV shows:
Jacques Pépin (playlist)
Mario Batali (turned out he’s a creep, but the show was amazing)
