Are you one of those lucky people who can cook without ever needing a recipe? Can you taste the subtle spices in a dish and recreate it? Lucky you, I can barely cook with a recipe and when I get inventive with that recipe it never turns out well.
I think one of the most important things you need when living on your own is a good cookbook, I have several. I’ve been looking for the simplest for Hailey, one that will basically tell her how to boil water because if it can’t be microwaved she has no idea what to do with it.
I’ve started a cookbook for her of very simple dishes. Things that even I can cook without a recipe to follow. Hailey needs a recipe for those things. So far there are just few things in there but they are really detailed recipes, things like washing the potatoes and poking them with a fork before putting them in the microwave.
I feel bad that she doesn’t know how to cook, but she doesn’t really care about food. If she’s hungry she will grab whatever is around, a connoisseur she is not.
There are so many things to learn about cooking, like what the big and little T’s mean in a recipe. You forget that once long ago you didn’t know those things either.
I remember well my first apartment and my first disastrous attempts at cooking. I’m embarrassed to say I’m not a much better cook now than I was then, even if I have learned about measuring spoons.
When she moves into her apartment it’s going to be a crash course in cooking and cleaning. Hopefully these recipes I’ve put together will help. I remember reading recipes and not understanding what it said to do and there were no instructions. Hopefully lack of cooking ability is not genetic.