Here's my list of gift ideas! Mostly stuff I own and love:

1. This blanket is soooo soft and warm and feels more expensive than it is. It's my fave blanket to cuddle up with on the couch. I've washed it a bunch of times and it doesn't get pilly. https://www.wayfair.com/bed-bath/pdp/eddie-bauer-fairisle-indiana-fleece-throw-blanket-erb1198.html?refid=TEM_WF178294&mmid=1836553907&csnid=2704DFEA-3249-43C6-A15B-609AA2148800&libra_c=&libra_d=&libra_g=&cltr=
   
   
2. Just bought myself this cute slouchy hat from Madewell. It's soft and the color is on point. https://www.madewell.com/kent-beanie-in-coziest-yarn-H3306.html?dwvar_H3306_size=ONE%20S&dwvar_H3306_color=PK6774&cgid=accessories-hats&position=7&position=7&activeChunk=0#start=1
   
   
3. This is my forever holy grail hair product! Makes my hair so soft. It's better for people with thicker/coarser hair, I think it could be a bit heavy for fine/thin hair https://www.sephora.com/product/hairdresser-s-invisible-oil-P375391
   
   
4. I've sent a box of Jenni's ice cream multiple times for a gift and it's always a hit. They send it on dry ice and the packaging is cute. There are fun flavors to chose from plus the classics (I sent this to my sister last year and she was obsessed with the Riesling Poached Pear flavor) https://jenis.com/gifting/
   
   
5. I read this cookbook this year and loved it. It's more of a book on learning to cook on your own, than a typical cookbook, but also includes recipes. https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering/dp/1476753830
   
   
6. Society6 has tons of stuff (total black hole for browsing, beware) but I own and have gifted their makeup bags which come in a zillion fun prints. They also have tote bags which could be a good gift. I'm a cat lady and use this one for makeup when I travel: https://society6.com/product/a-lot-of-cats_carry-all-pouch?sku=s6-998120p51a67v445
   
   
7. I think I'm about to gift myself this vest this year for Christmas :) https://www.llbean.com/llb/shop/118915?page=mountain-pile-fleece-vest-misses&bc=12-27-610-504729&feat=504729-GN3&csp=f
   
   
8. This is on like every gift guide ever, but for a reason! My mother-in-law got me one of those Barefoot Dreams sweaters last year and it is SO soft and cozy. I love it for long airplane rides. https://shop.nordstrom.com/s/barefoot-dreams-cozychic-lite-calypso-wrap-cardigan-nordstrom-exclusive/3112763?origin=category-personalizedsort&breadcrumb=Home%2FBrands%2FBarefoot%20Dreams%C2%AE&color=black
   
   
9. Have you seen the Sephora scent samplers? I think these are the best deal ever. You get a sample of 15 different perfumes. And the kit includes a certificate to redeem for a full-size bottle of whichever of the 15 perfumes that you liked best. (The price of the full size bottles is pretty similar to the price of the kit, so it's like getting a bottle plus the 15 samples for free.) Maybe a good gift for a teen girl? https://www.sephora.com/product/holiday-perfume-sampler-P435370?icid2=products%20grid:p435370:product
   
   
10. Last one: My forever favorite gift is a gift certificate for a massage! My husband gets me this for my birthday every year and I always look forward to it :)
    
    EDIT: I guess I'm overflowing with gift ideas today, here are some more:
    
    
11. These wine glasses are pretty: https://www.worldmarket.com/product/recycled+stemless+wine+glasses%2C+set+of+4.do?sortby=ourPicks
    
    
12. These candles are a cute idea. I just got one for my sister but it hasn't arrived yet so I can't review it. https://homesickcandles.com/
    
    
13. If you want to send flowers or a real wreath, I have bought flowers through TheBouqs.com for a few years and loved them. Sending a holiday wreath could be a good idea for like an mother-in-law or grandma who already has everything.
    
    
14. Every year I send my Grandma a Williams Sonoma food gift. Last year it was these chocolate croissants. https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/chocolate-croissant/
    
    
15. My sister got me a few months of a Birchbox subscription last year. It was not something I would have bought for myself but I enjoyed it! You could also gift one of the cooking box subscriptions like Blue Apron, etc.

Not Cocktail of the Week #93: The Earl Grey MarTEAni and the Mandala

This week's NCotW is a Modern Classic created by contemporary legend Audrey Saunders, along with an original twist on the recipe. I'm /u/ems88, filling in for /u/hebug this week.

Saunders is responsible for a fair number of cocktails that have spread far beyond the walls of the bars where they were first shaken or stirred including the Old Cuban, the Gin Gin Mule, and Not Cocktail of the Week #19: Intro to Aperol.

Background

The Earl Grey MarTEAni is a tea-infused variation on the classic Gin Sour (with egg white). It was first developed in 2002 for an event at the Ritz Hotel London. Saunders continued to offer the MarTEAni as part of her cocktail program at Bemelmans in Manhattan's Carlyle Hotel, and when she opened Pegu Club in 2005 she brought the drink with her.

The drink rose in popularity to become one of Pegu Club's most ordered cocktails, but in 2010 it found itself at the center of a controversy related to use of raw egg whites in bars and was temporarily removed from the menu. The substantial fines and citations initially threatened were never imposed, and the Earl Grey MarTEAni returned to the menu in triumph.

The cocktail has since taken on a life of its own, appearing on menus from Vancouver to London to Beijing. In 2013 Difford's Guide included it on their list of the Top 100 Cocktails. I have seen the MarTEAni served (under a variety of names; sometimes credited, sometimes not) at more bars than almost any other drink developed since the Cosmopolitan, thus cementing its status as a Modern Classic Cocktail.

Recipe

Audrey's Earl Grey MarTEAni

New York Magazine, The State of the Cocktail, 2004

• 1 ½ oz Earl Grey tea-infused Tanqueray gin
  
  
• 1 oz simple syrup (1:1 ratio)
  
  
• ¾ oz fresh lemon juice
  
  
• 1 egg white
  
  Measure all the ingredients into a mixing glass. Add ice, and shake hard to a 10-second count. Strain into a chilled martini glass, ½ rimmed with sugar, and garnish with a lemon twist.
  
  For the Earl Grey-infused gin:
  
  
• 1 750 ml bottle of Tanqueray gin
  
  
• 4 tablespoons of loose Earl Grey tea
  
  Measure tea into bottle. Cap and shake, and let sit at room temperature for 2 hours. Strain through a fine sieve or coffee filter into a bowl. Rinse out bottle to remove loose tea, and pour infusion back into clean bottle.
  
  Technique
  
  While not addressed in the New York Magazine recipe, for drinks incorporating egg whites there are a few techniques to help achieve an optimal texture. Once the ingredients are assembled in the shaker tin, a 10 second “dry shake” without ice will help with the emulsification of the egg white. In addition, adding the coil of a Hawthorne strainer during the dry shake will provide additional agitation. Remove the coil, add ice and shake vigorously for 15 seconds. Finally, it is especially important with egg white drinks to “double strain” with both a Hawthorne strainer and a fine mesh strainer.
  
  Results
  
  I've played around with a few different gins as the base for this infusion. I did these in small batches, using 1½ teaspoons of tea for 3 oz of gin (which is also a good way to make this cocktail at home if you don't want to commit to infusing a full bottle of gin). As the initial recipe called for Tanqueray (a London Dry Gin), I decided to compare it with Venus Spirits Gin (a New Western Dry Gin from Santa Cruz featuring citrus and lavender) and No. 209 (a Bergamot orange-forward gin from San Francisco).
  
  The Tanqueray version I treated as a baseline, for which it served quite well. The juniper-forward notes play well with the drying tannins of the tea, but beyond that no distinct botanicals stood out. By comparison, the Venus Spirits Gin brought floral notes to the table making the resulting profile reminiscent of a cup of Lady Grey tea. Finally, the Bergamot elements of the No. 209 accentuated the Bergamot of the Earl Grey to create a veritable orange bomb which, while not entirely unpleasant, had a few rough edges and lacked the balance of the other two.
  
  While the original recipe calls for a sugar rim, I prefer my Earl Grey MarTEAni without. As is shown in the picture, I also opted to garnish with a lemon wedge instead of the lemon peel called for in the original recipe. I did this because the overall profile is more likely to be found a touch sweet than a touch sour, so the option to add a squeeze of lemon seemed like a good way to provide the ability for the drinker to modify the cocktail to their palate.
  
  As with other egg white drinks all three versions had a luscious, creamy texture. In each case the tannins of the tea created a drying sensation which brought an unusual element to the cocktail's balance. The dryness added depth to the sour and sweet profile of the Gin Sour base.
  
  This cocktail serves well as an introduction for people skeptical of egg whites as an ingredient. The flavors expressed in the Earl Grey MarTEAni are familiar, but the format in which they are presented is entirely novel, allowing the drink to be at once both provocative and simultaneously comforting.
  
  The Mandala
  
  The frothy, creamy texture of the Earl Grey MarTEAni reminds me of a cappuccino. This inspired me to create a chai-driven twist on the cocktail for the menu at 515 Kitchen & Cocktails in Santa Cruz, CA. The name is a reference to the Sand Mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism: intricate works of symbolic art created over the course of days and destroyed upon their completion as a meditation on impermanence. An ephemeral work of art that is crafted with the intention of being destroyed reminds me of some of the elements of cocktails that I most enjoy.
  
  Recipe
  
  
• 2 oz chai tea-infused gin
  
  
• 1 oz simple syrup (1:1 ratio)
  
  
• ½ oz fresh lemon juice
  
  
• 1 dash cardamom bitters (Scrappy's)
  
  
• 1 egg white
  
  
• Angostura bitters (for garnish)
  
  Follow the process described above for egg white drinks, omitting the Angostura bitters from the shaker and instead using them to decorate the surface of the cocktail.
  
  For the chai tea-infused gin:
  
  
• 1 liter London Dry Gin
  
  
• 4 tablespoons of loose chai tea blend
  
  Decant gin into a non-reactive container and add tea. Allow to infuse for 3 hours (I find the longer infusion time lends itself to a better extraction of the dry spices in the chai tea blend), stirring occasionally, then strain using a coffee filter or a fine mesh sieve and return to the bottle. For a smaller infusion use 1½ teaspoons of chai tea for every 4 oz of gin.
  
  Three Ways to Decorate the Top of an Egg White Cocktail with Bitters
  
  (Click on the links for demonstrative gifs)
  
  First Method: Using an Angostura bitters-filled atomizer, spray a stripe down the middle of the cocktail. Using a straw, in a continuous motion draw a switchback of lines perpendicular to the stripe starting at one end. Upon reaching the other end, stop the switchback in the middle of the stripe and draw the straw along the center of the stripe back to its base. This creates a rosetta pattern.
  
  Second Method: Using a dropper (or a straw in conjunction with a bitters-filled shot glass), create a spiral of dots starting in the center of the cocktail and expanding outwards. Using a straw, trace the path of the spiral. This creates a spiral of leaves.
  
  Third Method: Using the Angostura dasher bottle, dash parallel lines across the top of the cocktail. Using a straw, cut across the lines of bitters in alternating directions in individual strokes. This creates a herringbone-like set of parallel zig zags.
  
  Further Reading
  
  (Partial) List of Bars that Have Featured an Earl Grey MarTEAni on Their Menu
  
  2004 New York Magazine Earl Grey MarTEAni Recipe
  
  2004 Business Week Audrey Saunders Profile
  
  2005 Gary Regan's Account of the Pegu Club's Opening Festivities
  
  2010 New York Times Article on the Egg White Crackdown
  
  2013 Difford's Guide Top 100 Cocktails
  
  Cheers!
  
  Thank you to /u/hebug for the opportunity to contribute to the NCotW series, as well as for consistently providing such high quality content. Tune in next week for another exciting installment.
  
  Also, check out the new book from venerable cocktail behemoths Death & Co. It just came out and is absolutely gorgeous. Finally, keep your eyes peeled for Liquid Intelligence, the cocktail science book from Dave Arnold of Booker & Dax which should be hitting shelves in early November.
  
  Here's to you and thank you for reading.

Well, I'm half-Chinese. I'll give you two cookbook recommendations which are full of recipes which really resonate with that part of my background:

• Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo. While I'm generally not big on Chinese cookbooks not specializing in one or two regional cuisines, this book gets a pass because it's so organized and pedantic. It builds itself up from simple to complex and includes recipes which build on each other. It also features a large section on ingredients. An additional pro is that it includes the Chinese characters which makes it easier to find the proper product at your Asian grocer. I love it so much that I lugged this book to Taiwan with me and used it as my cooking guide/reference.
  
• Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop. Of all the regional Chinese cuisines with which I have experience, I love the multi-layered flavors of Sichuan the most. It was through Dunlop's book that I first discovered this magnificent cuisine and it encouraged me to discover some of the Sichuanese restaurants in the Bay Area. Instructions are clear and she does a great job bringing Sichanese food to life. An absolute must own if you are at all interested in regional Chinese food. Her book on Hunanese food is also pretty killer.
  
  In addition to the aforementioned Chinese food, I'm just a fat piggy who loves to eat. Here are a few more recs:
  
  
• Thai Food by David Thompson. This is the bible of Thai food for English speakers. It's nearly 700 pages long and not a page is wasted on fluff. It's more than just a cookbook, it's a anthropological study on Thai people, their history and the way they eat. An immense book. If you are more into pictures, check out his book on Thai Street Food.
  
• Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen. This was the book that really unlocked Vietnamese food for me. I adore how many fresh herbs/veggies are used and how it creates a complex, yet light, cuisine. And don't get me wrong when I say light...it's as full flavored as can be, but without heaviness. In the interim since this book came out, others have showed up on the market which are as good (see Charles Phan's recent book), but Nguyen's book will always have a special place in my heart.
  
• ad hoc at home by Thomas Keller. Thomas Keller is arguably the most important American chef of the past 20 years, so when he turns his sights on homestyle food, you can be sure it's done with correct technique and style. While this book isn't as notable as TFL cookbook or his sorta primer on sous vide cooking, I'm including it because it has recipes which people will actually use. Unparallelled technique, good recipes and delicious food equal a winning cookbook. One note: it's not dumbed down and some of the recipes take time, but everything I've ever made from it has been great.
  
• Alinea by Grant Achatz. {Disclaimer: I worked for Grant Achatz for a couple of years.} Everyone should own at least one cookbook which is completely out of reach, but serves to inspire. When you flip through this book, your jaw will drop and you will wonder, multiple times, "WTF?!?!?!" It's an amazing testament to how open and possible American cuisine is at the moment and you'll do yourself well to flip through it. Additionally, the photographs and the book itself are phenomenal. The paper, in particular, is well worth the price of admission. It's sexy shit, yo.
  
  Feel free to drop me a line if you need more recommendations. I've got quite the cookbook collection (I love to cook, it's not just cookbook porn) and love to share my thoughts.

I was about to list out all my favorite resources, the ones where, looking back, I can point to as being the bedrock of all the cooking knowledge I've cobbled together over the years, and I noticed they have one thing in common: PBS. The cooking shows that air on PBS (and their companion materials) are just awesome. They're not gimmicky, they don't have puppets or catch phrases, but they're reliable. There are other great sources of food knowledge, but if somebody's on PBS, you know they're the real deal.

If I had to learn it all over again starting today, here's what I'd be looking at, in rough order:

Martha Stewart's Cooking School

Martha's got a great new show and companion book to go along with it. The reason I'd start here is because it's structured the way you want it: an emphasis on technique, with clear goals for each lesson. Just about every one of your topics listed above is covered in here, and the recipes are almost secondary. Like, a show or chapter will be about braising, not about boeuf bourguignon. Pretty heavy emphasis on French and European cuisine, but some nice forays into other cuisines, too. Covers all the basics: equipment, stocks, sauces, cuts of meat. Lots of good reference sections, too, like charts on cooking techniques for different rices and grains.

It's mostly pretty traditional stuff. No "hacks" or "science", but she will occasionally throw in some neat updates to a traditional technique. In particular, her hollandaise method is the best I've ever come across. Almost completely traditional, double-boiler and all, but she uses whole butter instead of clarified. Really easy and probably tastes better, too.

Incidentally, most of the substance of the show probably comes from editorial director for food at Martha Stewart Living, Sarah Carey, who happens to have an awesome YouTube channel.

Julia Child

Julia needs no introduction. She made French cuisine accessible to us servantless American cooks half a century ago, and I don't think anyone has done it better since. You'll want to watch every episode of The French Chef you can get your hands on, and also grab a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

You could start with Julia, but her show seems to focus on the recipe first, followed by the technique. So Julia's episode on boeuf bourguignon will be about boeuf bourguignon. She'll teach you all about technique, too, of course, but I think it's easier to start with Martha if you want a run-through of the basics of a technique.

Jacques Pepin

Probably the most talented cook to ever appear on television. The man elevates mincing an onion to an art form. Probably the best shows of his are Essential Pepin, Fast Food My Way, and Julia and Jacques Cooking at home (which used to be on Hulu, if you have that).

Every show he'll cook through a bunch of recipes, and he'll make these off-the-cuff comments on why he's doing what he's doing. How to peel a carrot. How to puree garlic with a chef's knife. Adding a splash of water to a covered skillet to steam the contents from the top while cooking them from below.

There's also a lot of his older stuff on YouTube that will show particular techniques: parting and deboning a chicken, preparing an omelet, and so on. He's remarkably consistent, so if you just watch enough of his stuff you'll get the spiel on every topic eventually.

Jacques does have a compilation of technique, but frankly I think Martha's is better. The photography in Jacques' book is pretty poor, and he devotes an awful lot of space to techniques that have probably been out of fashion for forty years. That said, there's a lot that's still useful in there, so it's worth at least checking out from the library.

(By the way, while you're at it, you should read My Life in France and The Apprentice, Julia's and Jacques autobiographies, respectively.)

There's a lot more to learn, but if you start with Jacques, Julia, and Martha, you'll have a rock-solid foundation upon which to build. Once you've got the basics down, my favorite new-fangled cooking resources are Serious Eats and ChefSteps.

Happy cooking!

You sound exactly like my fiancé. He's gotten better, but when we first started cooking together, I was always a little worried because he didn't seem to understand any of the basic kitchen skills I took for granted.

Although you've mentioned your girlfriend is too stressed/busy to cook, consider finding a time where she's actually free, and ask her to walk you through cooking a meal. Like she can demonstrate something and then you finish up, or she can be the one reading the recipe to you, and you just ask if you are unfamiliar with a term/concept or need help executing a task. That is good because then you'll also sort of learn to do it "her way" and she won't come in later to be like "why the heck are you chopping onions like this?? ahhh" (exaggeration there, but still.) Some people are very particular about kitchen things...

Definitely also recommend Good Eats and other cooking shows. There was a YouTube guy named something like "Bachelor Chef" that was really good and entertaining, and geared toward simple recipes for bachelors (or in your case, younger men with a limited skillset in the kitchen). Videos are good because then you just follow what they do and you begin to know what things look like (the difference between a chop, mince, and julienne, for example).

It might be helpful to pick up a cooking dictionary/glossary. My "cooking bible" is "Joy of Cooking" which has a pretty comprehensive index and list of terms, plus basic recipes for almost everything imaginable. Even in the age of the internet, a few hard-copy cookbooks are nice to have as a quick reference, especially if you don't have an ability or desire to bring your computer into the kitchen.

But anyway, just familiarizing yourself with a lot of the terms that appear in a recipe (such as sauté) and knowing basic measurement techniques and conversions (3 teaspoons to a Tablespoon). Oh yeah, and abbreviations for measurements, although most of them are fairly logical.

But really, just go out there and do it. Start small and/or semi-homemade; someone else mentioned doctoring a pasta sauce - that's a great start. Then begin to branch out, adding more and more different ingredients. Also start to develop your palate - be able to taste a sauce and figure out what flavors it needs to be better (if it's too bland, maybe it needs salt? But maybe it actually needs a little sweetness to balance the tartness of another ingredient). That's an invaluable skill as a home cook, because you can actually make a dish you love instead of someone else making something you sort of like, but would have changed.

Cooking is a real learn by doing hobby. I'd pick up a basics cookbook that focuses on technique and methods but within a culinary context--one of the things that bothers me about the /r/cooking circlejerk about Kenji/Alton/McGee etc. is the over-reliance on science as an explanation for cooking but i really think that it should be focus on culinary outcomes rather than process. Science as the sole basis for authority is like, one of reddit's biggest blindspots (DAE le STEM etc.) and a science-focused approach will teach you "how" to do something but it'll lose the over the over-arching "why" by getting bogged down in the molecules and shit. Plus the circlejerk about Good Eats and Serious eats is insufferable.

I like america's test kitchen because they use science as a basis for why they do what they do but they don't belabor it. I haven't cooked from it much but i imagine the cooking for two book will give you a good set of recipes without having an excessive amount of leftovers. Keeping things small when you're starting out is actually pretty important, and while I know that it's tempting to double recipes to get the most out of the ingredients you buy and use your time efficiently (after all, throwing out half of your can of tomato paste feels so wasteful when you only need a tablespoon or two) but it's better to keep yourself focused on the recipe as written. Most of the stuff can be re-used if you store it correctly (that tomato paste can be scooped into tablespoons and frozen, e.g.), and oftentimes doubling or tripling a recipe will end up backfiring and you'll be eating shitty leftovers for a week or even worse throwing it all out because you fucked it up and it sucked (speaking from personal experience here). You might end up with half an onion or something or half a bag of carrots left but that's ok. Cook what you like to eat or what recipes look good. A lot of the time people will say focus on techniques but if you keep things varied and stay curious you'll expose yourself to most of the important ones. As just one addendum, try and eat more vegetables than meat, because it's easy to zero in on making umpteenth variations of the same set of meat-based dishes (they provide more immediate reward) but i've actually found much more pleasure in coaxing awesome flavors out of produce (again speaking from experience).

I think taking an authoritative-sciencey approach as your core base of understanding and comfort in the kitchen is fine, but expanding from there towards an understanding of different, regional/international cuisines either classically (examples being Julia Child, Marcella Hazan) or more contemporarily (Rick Bayless, Fuscia Dunlop, Martin Tan, Zuni cafe, Mario Batali, Keller's Ad-Hoc, Maangchi), checking out more chef-driven methods that express a particularly unique perspective or have a distinct voice (April Bloomfield, Yotam Ottolenghi, Lucky Peach, Fergus Henderson); the fun of this is that by taking a perspective based approach, it allows you to draw inspiration from wherever without judgement, even someone like Guy Fieri might be able to contribute interesting ideas with regards to American comfort food. You can also expand by exploring different cooking techniques (smoking, sous vide, baking, fermenting, offal cooking) or even expand your knowledge on beverages like exploring craft beer/wine/cocktails. Also maybe challenging yourself with a more cheffy restaurant-book like the Bar Tartine books, or Sean brock's Heritage or Andy Richter's Pok Pok or the new Del Posto book. Keeping up with developments in the food world, either with magazines (Lucky Peach, Cook's Illustrated, Bon Appetite) or websites (Food52, Serious Eats that isn't just the food lab) is also a good way to inject fresh perspectives into your cooking.

Also under-recommended is to taste more of what other people are cooking. Order a dish at a restaurant that you've never tried because it looks interesting. Actively analyze what you eat when you go out and try and pick up on flavor combinations that are interesting or exciting. Maybe spend money on a fancy tasting menu place to see what professional kitchens are doing.

If there are red flags I'm doing in these pictures, please let me know.

edit:

1st batch: Craft-A-Brew APA Kit

2nd batch: Northern Brewer's 1 Gallon Bavarian Hefe Kit

3rd batch: DrinkinSurfer's Milk Oatmeal Stout Recipe @HBT

If I could start over I would go straight to the 3-gallon batches. I hovered around them but I think it's the perfect batch size for beginners -- 1) Most people have a stockpot lying around the kitchen big enough to hold three gallons, 2) The batches are small enough so you don't have to drink two cases of bad brew, but big enough so if you enjoy it [which I'm thoroughly enjoying my first APA], you'll have plenty to taste and rate the evolution of the flavors over various weeks of priming and give out to family friends who are interested to try out what you made, 3) I ordered 3 Gallon Better Bottles for several reasons including worrying about shattering a glass carboy as a newbie. They also qualify for free shipping on MoreBeer's website with purchases above a certain price. 4) Even though I brewed a 5 gallon batch, and since I'm brewing solo, I'm already not looking forward to bottling the whole batch at once so I plan on breaking up bottling between two days.

For resources, I lurk this sub like a crazy stalker. The Daily Q&A is full of information both crucial and minute. I listen to James Spencer's Basic Brewing Radio podcast and practically substituted it for all music recently. It's family friendly and entertaining [I heard the other podcasts aren't so much]. I read Charles Papazian's Complete Joy of Homebrewing, 2nd ed. and For the Love of Hops by Stan Hieronymus to get a better understanding of the hops varieties and characteristics. I plan on reading John Palmer's How to Brew and Ray Daniels Designing Great Beers in the future, as well as Brew Like a Monk. Also, the HomeBrewTalk stickies in the forums provide good picture tutorials for several different styles of brewing.

I got into homebrewing so I can brew the, then, only beer style I liked: Imperial Stouts. But as I learned more about the balance and flavors of beer I surprised myself by branching out to enjoying other beers [even the odd IPA every so often]. My narrow scope of beer has broadened more vast that I ever would've imagined it. My brother got me this beer tasting tool kit used for blind taste tests so I try to keep good records and actively taste and appreciate craft beers. I even keep a couple in my wallet for tasting beers on draft.

I really wish I had an immersion wort chiller, a bigger boil kettle, a mash tun, and a propane burner. Those few equipment pieces hinder me from exploring more advanced style of homebrew. I intend to upgrade to all-grain but making the switch is really expensive. I'm still in the look-to-see-what-I-have-lying-around-the-house phase equipment-wise.

Which leads me to: don't be scared to spend money while DIY-ing. Many of you have probably seen my (and many others', most likely) shitty stir plate. DIY should be a balance of doing things on the cheap, but still making it work and function well. There's no point in DIYing if you're not going to be happy with it and just end up buying the commercial equivalent anyway. That's where I am right now.. I'm currently trying to salvage a cooler [no-spigot] I found in my garage and turn it into a mash tun instead of just buying a new cooler with a plastic, removable spigot. I'm certain it would make DIY easier but slightly more expensive.

But the suckiest thing for me about homebrewing is that I don't have a car so getting local, fresh ingredients and supporting my LHBSs is a piece of PITA bread.

Sure, I’d be happy to share.

I’ve only selected courses for semesters 1 & 2 for now. If there’s interest, I can update my list later on.

To give some context, my intention is to specialize in International Trade at the level of small to medium sized business. So while these first couple semesters are pretty standard business fundamentals, in semester 4 you’ll notice I start to choose courses based on developing specific skill sets that are applicable to my objectives.

I’ve ignored several courses which would be important for someone looking to get a complete and well rounded business education, but don’t seem critical for my goals.

Some courses I’ve skipped: Ethics (lol), Information Systems, Project Management, Calculus, Econometrics, Corporate Finance, Political Economics, Cyber Security, Human Resources.

Okay, on to the curriculum...


---

Academic Foundations (Optional Prep Courses)

I am about to embark on a lengthy 1-2yr education so for me it makes sense to brush up on academics skills as force multipliers for my efforts later on. This section is totally optional though and not part of any business school curriculum.

Academic Foundations - Memory & Effective Learning

Courses:

• Learning How to Learn @ UC San Diego or…
  
  
• Mindshift @ McMaster University
  
  Books:
  
  
• The Memory Book - Harry Lorayne, Jerry Lucas
  
  
• The Four Hour Chef - Tim Ferriss
  
  
• How to Read a Book - Mortimer Adler
  
  Other Resources:
  
  
• Anki (spaced repetition software)
  
  

  Academic Foundations - Productivity
  

  
  Books
  
  

• Getting Things Done - David Allen
  
  Other Resources:
  
  
• Pomodoro Technique
  
• How To Read A Book In A Single Day (short article w/ actionable speed reading tips)
  
  

  Academic Foundations - Writing
  

  Book
  
  

• Elements Of Style - Strunk & White
  
  ---
  
  

  Semester 1
  

  
  

  Business 101
  

• Business Foundations @ UBC
  
  

  Math - Algebra
  

• Kahn Academy Math Tutorials
  
• Maths Essentials for MBA Success @ Imperial College London
  
  

  Accounting
  

  
  

• Financial Accounting Made Fun @ Babson
  
• The prof has had a long and impressive career and he truly does make the subject more engaging through telling the story of a fictional business in little movies
  
  
• Alternative 1: Accounting: Principles of Financial Accounting @ IESE Business School
  
• The prof is engaging and likeable and also teaches through the story of a fictional business. I like this one too.
  
  
• Alternative 2: Introduction to Financial Accounting @ Wharton
  
• This seems to be the most comprehensive of the accounting courses but not as engaging. I figured a more comprehensive course is not going to benefit me if my enthusiasm and retention of information suffers so I skipped this one. If you are naturally smarter than me or have a longer attention span, this is probably the best introduction to accounting course for you.
  
  

  MicroEconomics
  

• [Principles of Microeconomics @ MIT] (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-01sc-principles-of-microeconomics-fall-2011/)
  
• This introductory microeconomics class is one of the most popular that MIT has made available, and is taught by Prof. Jonathan Gruber. He’s been teaching there for 20 years and is an extremely prominent economist who helped design Massachusetts’ groundbreaking health-care reform.
  
  ---
  
  

  Semester 2
  

  
  

  Marketing
  

• An Introduction To Marketing @ Wharton
  
• Taught by three of Wharton's top faculty in the marketing department, consistently ranked as the #1 marketing department in the world, this course covers three core topics in customer loyalty: branding, customer centricity, and practical, go-to-market strategies.
  
  

  MacroEconomics
  

• Principles of Macroeconomics @ MIT
  
  

  Finance
  

• Finance for Everyone: Smart Tools for Decision-Making @ MIT
  
• Not sure this course is going to be sufficient for business school but I really wanted to learn from Prof. Gautam Kaul and since his Introduction To Finance course seems to have been discontinued at Coursera I am going to roll the dice on this one. Look for something else if you want to make sure you’re prepared with a solid finance background for business.
  
  

  Math - Statistics
  

• Analytics For Decision Making @ Babson
  
• I chose Statistics instead of Calculus after watching this TED talk and reading this article
  
  ---
  
  

  Semester 3
  

  
  

  Operations Management
  

  
  

  Supply Chain Management
  

  
  

  International Business
  

  
  

  Game Theory
  

• Game Theory @ Yale
  
  

  Strategic Thinking/Decision Making
  

• Effective Problem-Solving and Decision-Making @ UC Irvine
  
  ---
  
  

  Semester 4
  

  E-commerce
  

  
  

  Product Design
  

  
  

  Opportunities in Developing Economies
  

  
  

  Management/Leadership
  

  
  ---
  
  

  Semester 5
  

  Negotiations
  

  
  

  Entrepreneurship
  

  
  

  Global Supply Chain Management
  

  
  

  Pricing
  

  
  

  International Business Law
  

  
  

I'm a very visual learner, so I got good by watching Julia Child. She regularly peppers her shows with advice about how to get good at something, and how to customise a recipe when things go wrong, or when you want to switch things up a bit. She's got a decidedly French leaning, but French food is a very good place to start anyway. The full set of DVDs of The French Chef can get had for about $50 from ebay.

There's an episode where she was featuring four recipes for potatoes. She was trying to make a potato cake type of thing. She'd added plenty of butter to the pan, and threw in the boiled lightly crushed potatoes. She didn't let it set for a very long time, but tried to flip the whole thing over in one piece. Half of it ended up on the stove. Without skipping a beat, she scooped it off the stove, threw it back in the pan, and said the iconic line "When you're alone in the kitchen, who's going to see?" She then proceeded to dump it into a dish, throw in a load of cream and a few cubes of cheese, and instructed you to let it hang out under the broiler so that it gets bubbly and crisped up. She mentioned that you shouldn't ever apologise for how something came out, and just carry on as if that new thing is what you'd intended all along.

Whenever she had the ability to do so, she'd show you how to do something from scratch, including how to filet a fish, how to separate out a whole chicken, and how to break down larger steaks into serving sized portions. And, because you're watching her do it all for you, you get an idea of what it is you're looking for, step by step.

Another great resource (although their recipes are white, and tend towards the bland) is America's Test Kitchen's TV Show cookbook. On the show itself, they don't go into technique very much, but they certainly do so in the book. There are large, colourful pictures about how each step of the cooking process should look, and hundreds of recipes to try out. They thoroughly test out each recipe repeatedly, using tools that the average home cook will have access to, and taste test the results. It's an excellent resource to have on hand. You can generally find it used for about $20.

If you're curious to try out baking your own bread, I cannot highly recommend enough Bread by Eric Treuille.

https://www.amazon.com/Bread-Eric-Treuille/dp/1409352722/

It has HUGE full colour photos of the final product, and lots of foundational advice about the art of baking bread. They discuss various flours, how to combine them into an existing recipe, and the effects they have on the final loaf. It's one that I turn to whenever I have a craving for home made bread, and it's never lead me wrong.

If you want SOLID advice about how to quickly build up your cooking repertoire, Mike Ruhlman's Ratio is your best bet.

https://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/dp/1416571728/

He realised that most basic recipes can be broken down into ratios, so that if you need to scale up or scale down, you can do so very quickly. His technique to teach you how to get comfortable with ratios is very good.

Another EXCELLENT place to start learning to build your own recipes is Julia's Kitchen Wisdom.

https://www.amazon.com/Julias-Kitchen-Wisdom-Essential-Techniques/dp/0375711856/

She gives some basic techniques on foundational recipes, and then tells you how to tweak the recipes to work with whatever you've got on hand. It's less a by the books recipe compendium, and more of a philosophical understanding of how recipes work, and what flavours should go together.

Speaking of flavour. Get The Flavour Bible by Karen Page.

https://www.amazon.com/Flavor-Bible-Essential-Creativity-Imaginative/dp/0316118400/

There are hundreds of ingredients, and the things that go well with them. Instead of giving you a recipe, it gives you ideas of things to combine together, so that they go together in delicious ways.

If you are going to get a ruler, go ahead and get a kitchen ruler:

https://www.amazon.com/Mercer-Culinary-Rules-Mini/dp/B00DT1XYDM/

It's small, but it has a TON of great information on it. Very useful to gauge whether or not you're hitting your marks for whatever size you're aiming for.

A book I can't recommend enough (though with some caveats) is Nourishing Traditions. It gives you something of a baseline to begin to understand some facts about what actually is good for you and gives you loads of ideas on how to eat in a healthy, economizing way (the author is pretty consistent about having uses for nearly everything you make -- and the byproducts). It's also kind of fun making some of the ingredients that get used in a plethora of dishes you'll make.

It also gives you the ability to start to parse some of the folk wisdom you've heard all your life -- stuff that a scientifically-minded peson (rather rightfully without any additional knowledge) dismisses as old, magical thinking. But stuff which upon examination sometimes makes enormous sense as "wisdom" received through generations and generations of iterative testing (and relatively stable environments conducive to -- say -- figuring out practical ways to get iodine into your diet when you live in a mountaineous region, far from the sea).

My main caveat about the book, though, is that she cites seemingly literally every study she can find that supports her basic premise (that you should eat "whole" foods prepared with specific care instructions and only from a certain class of foods). I think the premise is sound but that some of the studies she cites (and so some of her evidence) is not. The variable nature of statistical science (see regression toward the mean) assures us that some statistically significant results are aberations. In my mind, some of what she cites is certainly an aberation. Oh, and she's really, really excited about some stuff that science has seemingly proved to be total BS, by now (e.g. MSG as a neurotoxin).

Like I said, though: In my mind, her basic notion of what is healthy is right. And even when she's wrong ("MSG is neurotoxic"), she's often right (MSG is a good marker for heavily synthetic and unnutritious food, on an ingredient list)

A good companion to that is Mark's Daily Apple, which is a Primal/Paleo eating/lifestyle site, but which I think has a lot of worthwhile information whether or not you decide to go on a "Primal" diet. At the least, you'll begin to understand what actually is in some of the food you eat and be able to make more informed decisions about it.

This article about bread gives you some clues as to what you should be eating, as well, IMO.

I think ultimately that diet is something people simply have to spend time learning about in the modern world -- that in traditional societies, people (generally or often) lived in stable situations and could, through slight variation and trial and error, oftentimes chance upon some very health habits. We simply don't live in a place and time in which received knowledge is sufficient (or even easily passed on) and in which coherent rules of thumb fail can even emerge -- unless we understand some of the science (principles) behind them.

> You make me think of the French who are known for snacking all day on small portions of very rich foods, and somehow are not fat, instead are healthy.

Oh, and as another example of perhaps skewed cultural values, we in the West or America (or whatever it is) often think of skinniness as necessary and sufficient condition for considering someone healthy. What that is, though, is a rather superficial aspect of health and one whose sole focus on belies some rather backwards thinking. Here, we're more focused on tricking people into thinking we're healthy (on that visceral, biological level that judging people as attractive entails) than on actually being healthy. I think that being fit and reasonably not-too-fat are logical outcomes of living healthfully but that if your focus is on the outward manifestations of health rather than actually being healthy, you're doing it wrong.

Sorry. Wall o'text.

This is going to be the opposite of what you want to hear. But, you asked for it and I respect that. I think that there's no substitute for going about this old school and traditionally. The good news is that you can mostly do this for yourself, by yourself.

If you're disinclined (due to time or for another reason) to enroll in a culinary program get yourself either The Professional Chef or Martha Stewart's Cooking School

I know what you're thinking, "Martha Stewart? What am I? A housewife from Iowa?" Fuck that. I've been fortunate to have met and worked with Martha Stewart she's smart enough to know what she doesn't know and that particular book was actually written by a CIA alum and very closely follows the first year or so that you'd get in a program like that. It starts with knife work and then moves on to stocks and sauces. This particular book has actually been criticized as being too advance for people who have no idea what they're doing so, despite appearances, it may be perfect for you. If you want to feel more pro and go a little deeper, get the CIA text but know that it's more or less the same info and frankly, the pictures in the MSO book are really great. Plus, it looks like Amazon has them used for $6 bucks.

These resources will show you HOW to do what you want and they follow a specific, traditional track for a reason. Each thing that you learn builds on the next. You learn how to use your knife. Then, you practice your knife work while you make stocks. Then, you start to learn sauces in which to use your stocks. Etc. Etc. Etc. Almost like building flavors... It's all part of the discipline and you'll take that attention to detail into the kitchen with you and THAT'S what makes great food.

Then, get either Culinary Artistry or The Flavor Bible (Both by Page and Dornenburg. Also consider Ruhlman's Ratio (a colleague of mine won "Chopped" because she memorized all the dessert ratios in that book) and Segnit's Flavor Thesaurus. These will give you the "where" on building flavors and help you to start to express yourself creatively as you start to get your mechanics and fundamentals down.

Now, I know you want the fancy science stuff so that you can throw around smarty pants things about pH and phase transitions and heat transfer. So...go get Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking THAT is the bible. When the people who run the Ferran Adria class at Harvard have a question, it's not Myhrvold that they call up, it's Harold McGee. While Modernist Cuisine always has a long, exciting complicated solution to a problem I didn't even know I had, when I really want to know what the fuck is going on, I consult McGee and you will too, once you dig in.

Another one to consider which does a great job is the America's Test Kitchen Science of Good Cooking this will give you the fundamental "why's" or what's happening in practical situations and provides useful examples to see it for yourself.

Honestly, if someone came to me and asked if they should get MC or McGee and The Science of Good Cooking and could only pick one and never have the other, I'd recommend the McGee / ATK combo everyday of the week and twice on Tuesdays.

Good luck, dude. Go tear it up!

Use MyFitnessPal as others have suggested. Keep a paper journal (Moleskine or one of those .99 composition notebooks, whatever) if that helps; whichever you can commit to better.

Eat CONSCIOUSLY. Most people eat so many grams of sugar and carbs without thinking about it that just knowing roughly how much you're eating can help to curb that nasty habit.

Eat things that are more fulfilling and nutrient dense - vegetables are your best friend, even if you have to slather them in cheese/butter to get yourself to enjoy them at first.

Cutting down on sugar will be immensely beneficial. It's an addiction. Treat it like an addiction. Consuming sugars and carbs trigger reactions in our brains very similar to consuming drugs. It's scary. Once you break your addiction to sugar/carbs you'll start finding that you no longer have a taste for things that are loaded with either of those things.

Read books like The 4 Hour Chef and The 4 Hour Body.

Do yourself a favor and keep reading this subredditt as well as places like /r/progresspics ; know that YOU ARE NOT ALONE. It's not going to be an easy journey, but you can absolutely do it. It took you many years to get to this point, and it's not too late to live a healthy life where walking long distances isn't a daunting task. You'll be able to run and play with your son.

Speaking of your son, try your best to instill good habits in him. Fast food is bad. If you don't have the time to cook dinner, choose healthier "fast food" options like Chipotle WITHOUT THE SHELL, Boston Market WITHOUT the stuffing, sweet potatoes, cornbread, desserts. Encourage him to go outside and play, join a sports team, and not allow him to get on a path to obesity and bad health.

Desserts should be for special occasions only - however, you don't have to constantly tell yourself no. If you're absolutely craving something and find yourself thinking about nothing else, go ahead and have a bite of something sweet. Portion control and self restraint are key here.

Do not buy unhealthy foods. If it's in your house, you're going to eat it at some point.

Don't buy into the "low fat = good for you" marketing. Fat is fine. It's those carbs and sugars that are your enemy when consumed in excess.

You're so overweight right now that you could find the pounds melting off at a very quick rate if you change your habits.

If you can't commit to eating cleanly 100%, that's okay. Start out with easy stuff like no soft drinks - if you want, drink diet soda instead to make it easier. The chemicals in there aren't ideal but they're a hell of a lot better than the loads of sugar in regular soda.

I could go on and on. It's a wonderful thing that you're reaching out for help. Remember that you're never alone. If you need some help with motivation or advice, there are people here that will always be around.

Also, last but certainly not least - see a doctor. I'm not a doctor so the advice I've given you is not to be taken as such. I know it may be difficult, but it's important that you know where you stand as far as your heart etc. are concerned. You don't want to over strain yourself or injure yourself from exercising beyond your body's current limits.

Keep with it.

You can do this.

When I started out, I relied most of the Fannie Farmer cookbook, to be honest, but something like The Joy of Cooking, Bittman's How To Cook Everything or Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food would be good, too. Joy is classic, simple recipes with clear instructions, aimed at beginners. Brown is excellent at explaining the science behind why reciepes work the way they do. Bittman emphasizes showing a technique, then showing lots of simple variations, allowing you to learn a skill and then apply it to different ingredients.

You might also take a look at Rhulman's Ratio --- for a certain sort of personaility, that book can be like a lightbulb going off. It's all about the common principles that underlay many sorts of recipes. Some people find it too abstract, especially if they're just starting (most actual recipes break his rules a little, one way or another), but if you're more of an abstract logical thinker it can be quite helpful.

But cooking in general can be quite diffucult to pick up from books --- techniques that are quite simple to demonstrate can be super difficult to describe. Youtube/the internet can be your friend, here --- Jacques Pepin, America's Test Kitchen, and Good Eats are all good at demonstrating and explaining technique. Check out the Food Wishes youtube channel, too --- Chef John is a former culinary instructor, and he demostrates a lot of classic techniques in the reciepes he does.

At the end of the day though, cooking's like Carnigie Hall. Think of stuff you like to eat, find a recipe for that stuff, and just go for it. If you start off making things you know and like, then it will be easier to tell if you're getting it right as you go along, and that I think is the most crucial and most difficult part of becoming a skilled cook --- being able to tell when something's ready vs. when it needs 5 more minutes, being able to tell if the batter looks right before you cook it, if something needs more seasoning and if so what kind. All that's mostly a karate kid, wax on, wax off thing --- you just got to keep making stuff in order to have the experience to tell when something's right.

You're right I did :)
I'm going to address this in three parts: home cooking, time saving, and content of meals

In terms of home cooking, I am an ardent advocate of whole foods with little to no processing. You can nearly guarantee that the children will be eating pretty healthy. Check out [Brazil's new food guidelines] (https://ca.shine.yahoo.com/blogs/shine-on/brazil-food-guide-takes-practical-approach-fighting-obesity-152211906.html), which emphasize home cooking and eating together - you're halfway there!

Obviously, home cooking takes time, but nutrition is SUCH an important part of children's lives and habits for their future that I don't think you should compromise. Check out things like once a month cooking and google 'cooking in bulk' to save you time. Something like a vegetable heavy lasagne can meet all your nutritional requirements in one fell swoop. Other tricks, like a 'prep day', example 1 example 2, can also save you time and stress when you're with the kiddos. Great things to prepare ahead of time that last: spiced nuts, homemade gummies, jerky, or fruit leather. I loved the rice cooker idea above, and you can kill several birds with one stone and get a [6-in-1] (http://www.hippressurecooking.com/pressure-cooker-review-instant-pot-6-in-1-electric-very-good/) so that you can cook meat faster as well, and do some slow cooking (you can make a great beef vegetable barley soup, served with a slice of bread and milk, and you're done). Things like a bread maker are great fun at daycare - my kids used to help me make a cinnamon bread, and when they woke up from their nap the smell would permeate the daycare. It was so pleasant and homey. I also find that the more kids help in making things, the more willing they are to eat it.

I took this course last year and it changed the way I cook and ate. Its referred to as the traditional food movement and if you're interested, check out the [Weston A. Price foundation] (http://www.westonaprice.org/about-the-foundation/about-the-foundation) and [Sally Fallon's] (http://www.amazon.ca/Nourishing-Traditions-Challenges-Politically-Dictocrats/dp/0967089735) book for more info - SO COOL.

In terms of the content of your meals, walk the permitter of your grocery store. That's where you live; meat, cheese, produce, and whole grains. Grains, nuts and seeds are easier to digest and more nutritious when soaked/sprouted.

Hope some of this helps. I love talking about children's nutrition and how it impacts their lives and education. Sorry to get all carried away.

I'm going to give a little balance to what /u/brock_lee said.

It is very easy to make good beer. It is really hard to make great beer. Doing a partial volume boil with extract and some steeping grains, using top-off water to chill it and then tossing in some dry yeast and setting it in a closet to ferment is how most of us start. Brewing that way produces good beer. The initial beer you make should make you happy.

Many of us however aren't happy with just good beer, we want to make great beer. Like the sauce example above, while making tomato sauce using paste is good enough for most people some people want to go above and beyond, selecting the right type of tomatoes, boiling them down and doing everything with more care and attention to detail.

So in the pursuit of great beer: we set up fermentation temperature control; grow our yeast with yeast starters; use RO water that we control the mineral additions to; switch over to an all-grain brewing method; put everything in to kegs to better control carbonation; use conical stainless steel fermenters; setup electronic brewery controls to better control variables during brewing; crushing our own grain to better control the sugar extraction during mashing. All of these things produce better beer so most of us still have that "one last upgrade" to make to the brewery before we are "done". So like many hobbies there is plenty of enjoyment out there for cheap and a deep dark well of effort, technique and polish out there if you decide to develop your hobby into a craft on a never ending journey for the perfect beer.

Oh, and for a great collection of recipes starting out I would recommend Brewing Classic Styles. A nice wide range of recipes that all have both extract and all-grain versions.

I'm fairly inexperienced as a homebrewer, but I can tell you where to find some good information. Most people seem to love Jamil Zainasheff's recipes. Here are some samples with links to his webcast and there are more in his book, Brewing Classic Styles, that he wrote with John Palmer, author of How to Brew (for the updated edition, you have to buy the book). How to Brew is the best book for starting out, imho, but there are some other great books, too, particularly if you move to an all grain setup and get more comfortable with brewing. There are also solid recipes in Zymurgy, the American Homebrewers Association magazine, and Brew Your Own is a pretty good magazine, too. HomeBrewTalk is a friendly, knowledgeable and active community and they're always up for sharing and helping out. There are a lot more websites out there, of course.

Anyway, I'm sure that some redditors have some good recipes to share.

Here's some good resources that I usually tell people about when they ask what can help them cook more better.

• Alton "The Man" Brown. His book, I'm Just Here For The Food, is fantastic for those of us who are just getting into cooking. He teaches you how to cook, not how to follow a recipe...because they're two totally different things. You can find Good Eats, his show, around on the web too...it's like if Bill Nye had a cooking show. Just great stuff.
  
• The Start Cooking blog has recipes, but focuses more on beginner techniques and information. When you're getting started you'll ask yourself stuff like... What kind of knives should I have? Or... How do I get that giant pit out of an avocado without getting green crap everywhere? Or even... How do I mushroom? Which is the kind of existential question I know I've asked myself a dozen times or more.
  
• Working Class Foodies - They make some really good food, have some good tips, and it's all done on the cheap. Definitely a good channel to subscribe to on the YouTubes.
  
  And as for getting comfortable with using your knives, here's my advice. Make sure you have a GOOD knife. You can go to a restaurant supply store and get good knives for cheap, if you aren't at a spot where you can part with the cash to get superknives. Having a good, sharp knife is extremely important. Getting familiar with terms and handling is important, too. And finally, just cut stuff. Buy some potatoes and get to cutting...slowly at first, but once you get more comfortable pick up the speed. Make some mashed potatoes, hashbrowns, home fries, french fries, whatever. If you get sick of potatoes, use carrots or peppers. Just get some experience under your belt and you're well on your way.
  
  Good luck!

I usually only use cookbooks that are also textbooks for culinary art students. The CIA has a textbook that is phenomenal. I used to own a textbook from the western culinary institute in Portland, which is now a cordon bleu school and I dont know what they use. Those books will teach you the basics of fine cooking. Ratio is also a great book because it gives you the tools to create your own recipes using what real culinary professionals use: ratios of basic ingredients to create the desired dish.

But the creme de la creme of culinary arts books is this crazy encyclopedia of ingredients called On food and cooking: the science and lore of the kitchen. It is invaluable. It should not be the first book you buy (if youre a newbie) but it should be your most well thumbed.

For a sauce pan what you want is something with straight sides. Sautee pans have are a good substitute, but often have bases that have too wide a diameter for perfect sauces. Fine saucepots are made of copper for even heat transfer. Stainless steel is also a good substitute. What you have there is something of a hybrid between a skillet and a saucepot. Its more like a chicken fryer or something. At the restaurant we use stainless steel skillets for absolutely everything to order: sauces, fried oysters, what have you. But when you get down to the finest you need to fine a real saucepot: 2-3 qts will do, straight sides, made of copper. teach a man to fish

I dont really know how to teach you the varied tricks and such. It is something that I pick up by listening to the varied cooks and chefs I work with. What I would advise you is to watch cooking shows and read recipes and pay a lot of attention to what they are doing. Half of the things I know I dont know why I do them, just that they produce superior results. Or, consequently I would have a hot pan thrown at me if I did not do them. And I mean these are just ridiculous nuances of cooking. I was reading The Art of French Cooking and learned that you should not mix your egg yolks and sugar too early when making creme brulee because it will produce and inferior cooking and look like it has become curdled. That is a drop in the bucket to perfect creme brulee making, but it is part of the process.

I wish I could be more help, but the best advice I could give you to become the cook you want to be is go to school. Or barring that (it is a ridiculous expense) get a job cooking. Neither of those things are very efficient, but it is the best way to learn those little things.

You don't hate healthy food, you just haven't found ways to eat healthy that you like. Look, I used to feel exactly the same. Then I got myself some cook books and learned how to cook beyond the "college" level (ie very rudimentary cooking skills).

It sounds old fashioned, but buy some cook books. Eating healthy does NOT have to mean (and shouldnt mean) eating boring, bland food. I have been eating quite a healthy balanced diet lately, but it doesn't suck and I enjoy everything I eat because I cooked it and it tastes really good. I am a pretty proficient cook now because I've learned enough from cook books that I can create something tasty on my own if I want to. But for the most part, I'd say I still follow recipes very frequently, mostly because a) I know it will turn out really well unless I royally screw up like forget an ingredient an b) I'm not that creative when it comes to meal planning - I'd prefer to flip through my cook books and pick out new recipes to try for dinner this week.

If you do take my advice and go the route of cook books, I will make a few suggestions below. You will notice that all of them are America's Test Kitchen. There's a reason I suggest mostly their books--they are totally idiot proof. Their recipes are thoroughly tested (it IS americas TEST kitchen after all...) They rarely have recipes that call for unusual or hard to find ingredients, and rarely call for unique appliances (like, most people probably do not have an immersion blender). Their recipes are very simple (I've come across a lot of books from other publishers that have incredibly drawn-out steps, or just countless steps, or a lot of unusual ingredients) and easy to follow, and they also include brief scientific explanations for something about every single recipe (example, why you would want to brown your butter when making chocolate chip cookies) which I have always found interesting, and theyre meant to help you build your knowledge in how to cook --ie its often concepts that can be applied elsewhere.

ATK/Cooks Illustrated The Science of Good Cooking

ATK Cooking School

ATK's The Make-Ahead Cook - great if youre into meal prepping

ATK Cooking for Two - great if you are alone or just cooking for yourself and significant other, and dont like having leftovers

ATK Comfort Food Makeovers - turns traditionally unhealthy foods into healthy meals

ATK Slow Cooker Revolution - if you have a crock pot, you NEED this book. I've made a ton of recipes out of here and every single one has come out great.

They have a ton of books out there, many of them for specific things (pressure cooker, paleo, gluten free, vegetarian, mexican recipes, etc.) but you may be saying, "Hmm, none of those books said "Health cooking/eating healthy/buzzwords about health" - they dont need to say that. Quite a lot of their recipes are generally healthy. I haven't encountered many things (outside the dessert chapters, that is) that I've said "oh, I don't think I ought to eat that, it's just not healthy" --but if youre a bit narrow minded in terms of what constitutes a healthy meal (and I find that is common with people who struggle to eat a healthy diet--this is because they think there's a very small amount of "healthy" foods out there) , then maybe these books arent for you. But if you mostly eat intuitively, and know that you should be getting a decent amount of vegetables and fruits in your daily diet, and a good amount of protein, and not an overwhelming amount of starch and net carbs, then youre golden. Get yourself a cook book and learn to cook. Once you eat food that's been properly seasoned and cooked, youll realize that eating asparagus doesn't have to be a boring, unpalatable experience. Brussels sprouts don't have to be awful. I used to hate brussel sprouts...until I had properly roasted sprouts. Holy shit, they are good!!! Peas can be tasty! Baked chicken breast doesn't have to taste bland and dry as hell if you learn about brining, seasoning, and proper cooking times.

TLDR - eating healthy doesnt have to mean eating bland food. You admit your cooking skills are rudimentary, so it's no surprise you are not enthused when you try to make something healthy. A lot of "healthy" foods (veggies, etc) are bland when you don't properly season them or pick the right cooking method. Get yourself a cook book or two and learn how to cook. You won't have a hard time eating something you previously thought unpalatable--like filling half your dinner plate with brussels sprouts and broccoli--when it's seasoned and properly cooked!

Sure, tons! In no particular order:

1. Pick up a book. The two best intros are How to Brew and The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. My girlfriend and I started with How to Brew. It can be a little science-y, but it was a great beginner's book that starts with the basics and gets more complicated as it goes. Basically the first chapter is enough to brew a beer, but the next few chapters help you learn how brewing works, and so on. I've never read The Joy of Homebrewing, but I've heard it's just as good, only a little less science based and more "fun and accessible." Really, either one is probably great.
   
   Also, How to Brew is based off a blog, and a lot of the book is on there. If you don't know which book you'd prefer start with A Crash Course in Brewing and decide if it's for you or if you'd like something a little more readable.
   
   
2. Google around and see if you have a local homebrew shop. Lots of them offer classes, and sometimes local breweries will have homebrew classes on groupon or living social. Often times the beer you drink is work the price of the class, and it's super helpful to see brewing done first hand. This is actually how I got into it: I used buy beer at my LHBS in Ft Lauterdale, and saw that classes were only $30 and came with beer and food. I signed up with my girlfriend - no intention to start brewing, just thought it'd be a fun Saturday - and wound up totally hooked.
   
   
3. Use the community, people love talking about brewing. If you're not sure how to make something work for you, someone's probably been there. Ask folks in your LHBS if you have one, post in /r/homebrewing, heck even just come back some time and reply to this post and I'll be more than happy to tell you what I know. I was worried because when I moved to DC I lost the outdoor space I used to brew in Florida, and couldn't get 5 gallons of beer boiling on a regular stove. I mentioned it casually to another brewer and he walked me through adapting recipes for smaller, more concentrated boils to be topped up to 5 gallons afterwards. Now I can brew on my electric apartment stove and haven't seen any loss of quality.
   
   Sorry if that's a total data dump, I just love chatting about and getting new people into brewing. If you ever give it a try, let me know how it goes!

The piece of equipment that I decided wasn’t being used enough in my kitchen is my mandolin. I got it in a 4 blade set from Oxo. In order to really delve into it, I decided to make 3 dishes which featured the mandolin. First, I decided to make these mini-potatoes Anna. These were really easy and incredibly delicious. The paper-thin potato slices were melt in your mouth bites of deliciousness. I next wanted to make some kind of chip, but didn’t want to use potatoes again. Instead, I made these baked beet chips. I liked them because I didn’t have to fry anything. They took way longer than expected to crisp up (like 30 minutes or so) but ended up tasting a lot like potato chips with a slightly earthier flavor. Finally, for my main course, I wanted to make something with zucchini noodles. I have been trying to make more vegetable dishes and this seemed like a great opportunity to try this out. I went with this zucchini lasagna recipe. I did make a number of changes to the dish, as suggested by many of the commenters. To start, I added a couple cloves of garlic into the onions. Instead of a 28 ounce can of tomatoes, I went with a 15 ounce can, and then started adding things. I added a handful of minced sun-dried tomatoes, an 8 ounce can of tomato sauce, a squeeze of tomato paste, a squeeze of chili pepper paste, and a large splash of the pasta sauce I had in my fridge. I also added some parmesan and mozzarella to the ricotta layers and topped the thing with some mozzarella. This was delicious and I will definitely be making it again in the future.


For my MetaTheme, I wanted to finally use the Boston Shaker that I have had in my bar cabinet for a couple of years now. This also let me use another piece of underused equipment, my Hawthorne Strainer. Because I was going to use the shaker as my theme equipment, I needed a cocktail that really featured the shaker. In my mind, that means a cocktail with an egg white in it (which needs a dry shake). I decided to go with a Whiskey Sour because it is one of my favorite drinks, when done well, and I somehow haven’t done it in the 93 weeks I have been making cocktails to go with my theme dishes. I had to crack out two different books for this one. I used Liquid Intelligence for the recipe but needed my Bar Book to learn the technique behind using a Boston Shaker. This was a great recipe with the right balance of sweet, sour, and smokey.

In this post, I'm going to link to examples. They are examples: I'm not necessarily recommending that specific item. (I'm pretty much doing a search on Amazon and linking to the first thing in the search results that is actually what you need.) It's just an example to let you know what you're looking for.

Yes, you will need a metal stockpot. Five gallons should be sufficient.

You will need some type of stirring apparatus. Some would recommend a large metal spoon, but I recommend using a plastic mash paddle.

I would recommend getting some type of thermometer to put on your stock pot. A candy thermometer is where I'd start, but, if this is a hobby that you'll stick with, it's probably worth investing in something better.

Also, I see that they put a hydrometer in your kit. If you want to take measurements with the hydrometer, you'll need either a turkey baster or a wine thief. I'd start with the baster.

If you need a book on homebrewing, Palmer's How to Brew is pretty much the standard, but Papazian's The Complete Joy of Homebrewing is well regarded. Palmer's book is in its third edition, but you can get the first edition of the book online for free.

Depending on the ingredients that you use, you may need common kitchen items like scissors or can openers.

You'll also need bottles. If you brew a five gallon batch (which is pretty typical… at least in the United States), you'll need about fifty-four twelve-ounce bottles. However, you can't use twist-off bottles; they're no good.

Lastly, you'll need ingredients. Different recipes call for different ingredients. My advice is to buy a kit from a local homebrew store (LHBS) or one online. Some kits make you buy the yeast separately. If so, make sure that you purchase the right strain of yeast.

Pinterest might be an easier way to find links. I know not a lot of guys use it... but there's a reason girls are obsessed with it.
Type in meal prep with your choice of adjective (cheap, easy,
vegetarian, chicken, etc) and you'll come up with tons of options.
But in the meantime, here are a few links! Chicken burrito bowls. Teriyaki Mushrooms with steamed broccoli, rice, and salmon if you're feeling fancy (I watch for sales on the frozen preseasoned fillets and just pop them in the oven the night before to avoid them sitting cooked in the fridge for too long). Greek Chicken Bowls. When I'm feeling ~decadent~ and have enough time I like to make a big batch of mushroom bourguignon to go with noodles or mashed potatoes during the week. Crockpot meals are also usually good for 2-person meal prep because the recipes are usually designed for families/parties. Throw them in at the start of your prep day, then portion them out with your meal prep basics like rice and veggies. Bonus points if one day you prep a bunch of crockpot freezer meals so that you can either have them ready for your foreseeable prep days or in the middle of the week when your fresh prep has run out. There are too many crockpot options to link up so I'll just say again, Pinterest it up! I do have a killer pot roast recipe if you want it but if you're avoiding beef it's null. Lastly, I'd recommend the cookbooks Well Fed, Flat Broke and Good and Cheap which aren't meal prep specific, but are fantastic resources for learning how to cook cheaply and deliciously. Some of their big batch or casserole recipes work well for meal prep (WFFB's tuna dill pickle casserole or potato mushroom thingie, GaC's peanut chicken come to mind). Others are just nice quick recipes to have around when you need them. Best of luck!

1. Eat (and learn about) what you enjoy
   
   If you go searching for learn-how-to-cook tutorials and get stuck making some boring ass chicken recipe but don't even like chicken, you'll make the food correctly but have trouble enjoying the results. It's homework. You won't last making food you don't like.
   
   To stay interested, follow the foods you already love.
   
   For me, it was pasta. I went nuts. My first year or so learning, I was making an insane amount of pasta and was always stoked to eat the results, even if they sucked.
   
   
   
2. Learn from someone who actually cooks.
   
   Too many recipes have one-off ingredients you'll never use again. You want to learn how you can improve your food with what you already have (i.e. Don't worry about the imported, smoked, Himalayan pink salt yet).
   
   A person who understands food will give you so much more than a checklist and directions can. Understanding trumps a recipe every time. And you'd be surprised how little you need to make great food. A good cook knows how to do this.
   
   I was really fortunate to have a roommate who's Italian grandma was an amazing cook. He knew his shit. He would coach and correct everything I was doing with my horrible attempts to make pasta. It was fun and quickly showed me how to improve--all with no recipes. It showed me you can taste as you go.
   
   
   
3. Most cookbooks are shit for learning
   
   Today there a more books telling you what to do, and less telling you why you do it. The latter is the key.
   
   These two books really opened a lot for me regarding understanding food and how to make it better:
   
   I'm Just Here For The Food: Food + Heat = Cooking
   
   Cooking (James Peterson)
   
   Honorable mention:
   
   Ratios: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking
   
   Cheers, and best of luck. Now go eat!
   
   
   Also Good Eats and Mind of A Chef are amazing shows to watch. We are so visual nowdays.

First of all, your mother was wrong for doing that and it's really common in raisedbynarcissists homes, though I'm not sure that she is a narc...because this is only one small example and could be applicable to non-narcs. That being said, it's never too late to learn how to cook. I was in the same boat as you were and was really frustrated by youtube videos because they taught things from a perspective of already knowing cooking basics and I didn't even know that much.

I'd strongly recommend this cookbook because it teaches you the basics to the basics. It actually shows you how to cut veggies properly and what brands to buy based on testing and gives it's reasoning and logic as to why. The recipes are easy to follow with lots of pictures and clear instructions and always come out as restaurant quality (for the record, I got this book in December 2018 and 2019 was the first time I ever cooked in my life) and have been able to make quite a few showstopping recipes (I started out by setting aside one day to try a new recipe, for example, I would decide ahead of time what I was making each Sunday which was when I would cook from this book as I have a full-time job and a child). So it depends on you how much time you have but honestly, one recipe a week has taught me so much about cooking in general.

I can't express how good the food is. My fully British bf loves Indian food (has all his life, of course) and we made a Chicken Tikki Masala from this book..he told me he's had this made gourmet at his favorite restaurants and that there was no way it would turn out as well for us (we were cooking together and he was trying to convince me to deviate from the actual instructions) unless he added stuff. I stood firm and told him that he had to try it their way first and to just try it before trying to change it...it ended up being so good that both of us now have a new favorite Chicken Tikki Masala recipe lol.

I'd also recommend a small scale if you don't already have one because it makes it much easier to cook meats if you actually cut them down to the right size. For example, if it say's 6-8 ounce chicken breasts, I buy chicken breasts and cut off all of the fat until it's close to 6-8 (usually closer to 8.5 but close enough). Because then when the recipe says cook 4 minutes on each side, you can literally follow that exactly and it should come out perfectly every time. Hope that helps but please let me know if you have more questions/anything else that I can help with! I linked the one we use but it's up to you, of course.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Cooking-Two-Cookbook-Everything/dp/1936493837/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=cooking+for+2&qid=1563201487&s=gateway&sr=8-3



https://www.amazon.com/Etekcity-Multifunction-Stainless-Batteries-Included/dp/B0113UZJE2/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=small+scale&qid=1563201838&s=gateway&sr=8-7

I'm no chef, just a hobbyist. Below are things I've learned over the years.

Resources
I'd recommend Americas Test Kitchen Cooking School cookbook.

Also Rouxbe Online Cooking School is really good.

Jaque Pepin is an amazing cooking teacher, absolutely wonderful. He had a PBS show for a while, search your library for the DVDs.

While I don't use that often anymore, during learning I liked the Zwilling J.A. Henckels Complete Book of Knife Skills. In fairness you can learn a lot of this from youtube.

Knife Skills

When cutting with a knife stay safe by keeping your fingers tucked away using the "Claw Technique" See Picture

Celery is a cheap vegetable which you can use for practicing knife skills.

Get a good chef's knife, santoku knife, and paring knife. I like santoku knifes for cutting potatoes, since the blade is the same thickness from top to bottom it doesn't "wedge" like a chef's knife.

Those little indents on the knife are called grantons. They make it so vegetables don't suction as easily to the blade. I like it for my Santoku knife.

You should learn to properly slice an onion. Jamie Oliver has a good video on this.

Garlic has a few technique, first breaking open the head by just smashing it with your palm.
Next removing the paper by crushing the clove with a knife then pinch one side, lift it in the air, and whack it with the knife.
Lastly chopping it, just watch [Jacque Pepin] (https://youtu.be/1y5h1pDHhzs).

If you have to peel a ton of garlic put the whole head in a mason jar and shake really hard, it will peel them all. See Video

When chopping fresh herbs roll them into a ball first. See video

Learn to cut a bell pepper

When you cut meats cut "against the grain". This will cause the meat to seam more tender when you chew.

Pan Searing

Some meats like steak should be "temped" which means leave them out on the counter for a bit before cooking. The idea is if it's warmer it needn't cook as long. Google safe times.

While a pan is heating up the metal pores open and close sporadically which can “bite” the food causing it to stick. Prevent sticking by first properly heating the pan.

Heat your pan to temp before adding oil as the heat breaks down the oil. Just wet your fingers and flick the water on the pan. If the water dances it's ready. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XokCISVqgjU](See video)

When you heat your oil wait until it just starts to smoke then throw the meat on.

Remember when you add the meat it's cold and can drastically lower the temperature of the pan. Certain metals hold heat much better. Cast iron holds heat really well, so when cooking meats a cast iron skillet can give you a better sear.

Also remember the side that goes down on heat first will get the best sear so presentation side should go down first.

Try to get your meat a consistent thickness throughout by pounding it. Uneven meat means you'll over cook the thin portion in order to get the thick portion to a safe cooking temperature. Put meat in saran wrap folded over then pound, this prevents juices from flying everywhere in you kitchen.

Pat your raw meat dry with a paper towel before putting it on heat. Water does not reach above 212 degrees, if there is water on the meat surface it has to all boil off before it can reach a higher temperature. If you dry the meat first it can get a much better sear because the heat hits fast.

Don't crowd your pan. Pan crowding brings down pan temperature and encourages steam thus preventing proper sear.

When cooking use your ears! Listen to pan sizziling to know when to control pan temperature. Intense sizzling means it’s too hot. Home cooks want a gentle sizzle. Low sizzle means more heat is needed.

Get a good meat thermometer like a thermapen and learn the different safe cooking temperatures or get a fridge magnet which tells you.

Those brown bits on the bottom of the pan are gold, it's called fond, don't throw those out, scrape them off to incorporate into the sauce.

Be sure to rest meat after cooking. This is very important, if you don't then when you cut into it the juices will rush onto plate. Resting allows the juices to redistribute throughout the meat. Just tent foil over the plate and wait 10mins or so for a steak.

Misc

Know that if meat is left out in the danger temperature zone for too long you cannot simply reheat it to a safe cooking temperature. What happens is the bacteria (which can be killed with heat) produces waste or toxins. These toxins are not affected by heat so you can't kill them.

Chicken is a dry meat in my opinion, brining is a neat trick where you put the chicken in a salt water solution. The cell walls of the meat want to keep an equilibrium of salinity so they open up to allow more water in their cells which allows the meat to seem juicier.

Remember your dry spices have a shelf life. I like to replace mine at a local spice shop every 6 months. Consider having a small herb garden if you're able it's way cheaper than buying fresh herbs all the time and pretty easy.

I love reheating meats using Sous Vide, which is where you put your meat in a vacuum sealed bag and then but it in a pot of water at the desired temp. This makes it so the meat doesn't dry out and you can't overcook it since the water temp is right. I do this a ton for smoked meats like ribs and brisket (check out a weber smokey mountain and flameboss controller)

They teach you the "easy way", and by easy way I mean using sour mix and taking shortcuts like that. There are plenty of good resources online and amazing cocktail books you can buy that have the original recipes for classic cocktails, as well as the proper way to do things behind the bar.

Learn from reputable sources and from good bartenders. If you're interested here's a couple good reads:

• [Jerry Thomas Bartender's Guide] (http://www.amazon.ca/Jerry-Thomas-Bartenders-Guide-Reprint/dp/1438241747/ref=pd_sim_b_13?ie=UTF8&refRID=0A8ZRNN8WZB4R6P9GVGN)
  
  
• [Dave Wondrich's Imbibe!] (http://www.amazon.ca/Imbibe-Professor-Featuringthe-Selection-Contributed/dp/0399532870)
  
  
• [Great book on Bitters] (http://www.amazon.ca/Bitters-Spirited-Cure-All-Cocktails-Formulas/dp/1580083595/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0A8ZRNN8WZB4R6P9GVGN)
  
  
• [Harry Craddock's Savory Cocktail Book] (http://www.amazon.ca/Savoy-Cocktail-Book-Harry-Craddock/dp/1862057729/ref=pd_sim_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=0A8ZRNN8WZB4R6P9GVGN)
  
  
• [Jeffrey Morgenthaler's Bar Book] (http://www.amazon.ca/The-Bar-Book-Elements-Technique/dp/145211384X/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=0A8ZRNN8WZB4R6P9GVGN)
  
  
• [Craft of the Cocktail] (http://www.amazon.ca/The-Craft-Cocktail-Everything-Bartender/dp/0609608754/ref=pd_sim_b_7?ie=UTF8&refRID=0A8ZRNN8WZB4R6P9GVGN)
  
  
• [Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails] (http://www.amazon.ca/Vintage-Spirits-Forgotten-Cocktails-Alamagoozlum/dp/1592535615/ref=pd_sim_b_6?ie=UTF8&refRID=0A8ZRNN8WZB4R6P9GVGN)
  
  
• [Boozehound] (http://www.amazon.ca/Boozehound-Trail-Obscure-Overrated-Spirits/dp/1580082882/ref=pd_sim_b_9?ie=UTF8&refRID=0A8ZRNN8WZB4R6P9GVGN)
  
  
• [Liquid Intelligence] (http://www.amazon.ca/Liquid-Intelligence-Dave-Arnold/dp/0393089037/ref=pd_sim_b_17?ie=UTF8&refRID=0A8ZRNN8WZB4R6P9GVGN)
  
  As far as knowledge goes, you can learn a lot from reading and studying. For me personally, I love this kind of stuff and I'm constantly trying to learn as much as I can so I could hardly say it feels like actual studying. As for technical skills, learn from people better than you. No matter how good you get, there is always someone out there you can learn from. A lot of how I work I've picked up from watching great bartenders, everything from small stuff like the way I carry a bottle to the way I move behind the bar has come from watching, learning and implementing it into how I bartend.

for nutrition, head on over to your Health Care Provider's website. They should have many helpful articles on eating right. Failing that, check out WebMD's suggestions.

I'm gonna presume it's just you (for now at least). One of the things you'll notice about a lot of recipes out there is that the serving sizes. Check out r/CookingForOne.

Also look over r/AskCulinary. It has a great FAQ (covers books, equipment and ingredients for beginners and experts alike) and Index.

Watch some Julia Child and Alton Brown videos.

for books, head over to your used bookstore and get yourself a copy of The Joy Of Cooking, Ratio and The Flavor Bible. This last one will help you a LOT with your spices.

Yes, I'm suggesting that you spend money. But the equipment (knives, cast iron, etc) and books are an investment. And you don't have to get them all at once.

Finally, it's great when you find items on sale in the produce section of your local market. But if it spoils before you use it all, it's wasted money and food. This is when your local salad bar can be a great help.

Good luck.

Edit: get yourself a rice cooker/steamer. a simple one-button model is all you really need. Always perfect rice and you can steam your veggies in the basket as well. Much healthier. Also, once you get more confident, you can look up some copycat recipes for your favorite fast food restaurant items.

I have been getting really into cooking, and expanding my repertoire of recipes and specialties. I have always been skilled at cooking but I'm trying to amp up my abilities and start mastering more complex dishes. The Newlywed Cookbook should be in everyone's bookshelf. Truly, I have not made a bad recipe from this book. 10/10 would recommend!

I have also always been on the "alternative diet/food lifestyle" train, but my mother recommended "Nourishing Traditions" to me and reading it has been great! I am learning so much more about nutrition and ancestral cooking. I highly recommend it to anyone seeking to increase their level of natural, personal wellness, and anyone interested in bone broth, home fermentation, and the like. Even if you don't subscribe to everything she says, there is still so much to learn and take away from this book!

I'm currently in Monk Mode myself. I'm probably only going for at most a 3mo. term at this (Started Dec. 1st). It sounds like you have a good plan. I'm focusing on the following things:

• Meditating: the best way to re-program your brain IMO ("Wherever you go there you are")
  
• Teaching myself Jazz piano
  
• Diet (Here's my diet)
  
• Fitness (Here's my fitness bible)
  
• Career Development (This)
  
• Productivity & Time Management (too many books to mention, OP PM me if you want this list)
  
• Not watching Porn & Masturbating less frequently (Highly recommended /r/NoFap)
  
• No Alcohol
  
  For learning to cook I highly recommend this book.
  
  For addressing approach anxiety I recommend The Rules of the Game.
  
  This is an excellent book on habit change. (OP this is how you start to break down those "masturbatory" habits)
  
  Also, Monk Mode is basically an exercise in stoicism. This book is awesome.
  
  
  Since you'll have plenty of time to read here are some other Books I recommend:
  "No More Mr. Nice Guy"
  "Models: Attracting Women Through Honesty"
  "The Talent Code"
  "Man's Search for Meaning"
  "Flow"
  
  Final thoughts OP. 6 months is definitely a worthy goal however studies show that 90 days is usually what it takes to create new habits and routines. You have to be consistent though. Just food for thought.
  
  
  (Edit: I suck at formatting)
  
  
  
  
  

I like to cook French and Asian/Indian foods the most. Here's my base list for any type of cooking: kosher salt, fresh cracked pepper, olive oil, canola oil, eggs, flour, potatoes, onions and shallots, cream, butter, bacon, cheese, rice, canned diced tomatoes, garlic bulbs, red and white wine, vinegar (rice wine or balsamic). Root vegetables can be added too, but I prefer to get them specific to the meal.
A few extras I tend to use a lot are ginger root, oyster sauce, and red cabbage. Not exactly stock-worthy to some people though.

But actually, I think this is the wrong approach. I suggest finding a good cook book, perhaps Ad Hoc at Home, and just start reading it. I did this with Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles book and it revolutionized how I think about cooking. I wish I had done it from the start to develop the thought process first, which then leads to better food preparation. When you cook a specific meal you can go to the store and look at each food separately for the meal you're preparing. When I'm at the market looking for specific ingredients and not "grocery shopping" I'm able to think about the food in a different way. Gradually, you can build up foods and spices over time, but in doing so you'll build good habits, good recipes, and a more mature approach to food in general. My approach before was very much like a shotgun blast of spices, whereas now I'm able to more precisely pinpoint the flavor profile I'm going for.

A word on spices: Buying in bulk will save you lots of money. People suggest dating them, so as to know when they're going bad, but this might be out of your scope right now. I know Central Market here in Texas has a pretty nice bulk spice section, and I imagine other whole foods places do as well.

Herbs: Fresh herbs are key. You want something to have at the ready? Fresh herbs you can get from the store. But really you should invest in a $.25 pack of basil seeds, rosemary seeds, and thyme seeds. These plants are hardy and tough to kill (maybe not so much with basil) and will make everything taste more expensive.

All the LHBS staff in my area swear by The Complete Joy of Homebrewing: Fourth Edition by Charlie Papazian.

I’d recommend it as a good read but with a few caveats. Some of the advice is a little outdated compared to methods that homebrewers are using these days, for instance, I haven’t seen a single mention of brew-in-a-bag in the advanced chapter of the book. The author also regularly plugs his other book intended for a more advanced audience. I don’t find this too egregious because the quality of the information he provides is sufficient for a beginner IMO, but if you really want to know everything the author knows/thinks about a certain topic, you essentially need two books.

There are also a few things I like about this book. First off, the history of beer and brewing is covered to an extent, and I found that to be a great read. Secondly, there are some pretty good charts and reference tables that you can use as a guide if/when you start thinking about developing your own recipes. Also, on the topic of recipes, the author provides a selection of 45 recipes to get you started (in my experience, your LHBS will also have some recipe sheets available most likely). Finally, the author also cracks dad jokes routinely, so you’ll get a chuckle every once in a while to break up the information overload.

Overall, my opinion on this book is that it’s a great entry to homebrewing, but it shouldn’t be the only resource you use.

Hi! Proportions depends on your body and your goals. Here's a typical grocery list in my house:

PROTEIN

• Chicken breast
  
• ground chicken
  
• ground turkey
  
• Tilapia
  
• Beef (weekly)
  
• Tuna
  
• 0% greek yogurt
  
• Bean pasta (Explore Cuisine has 22g Protein per serving and <$4 a box)
  
• protein powder
  
  CARB
  
  
• quinoa
  
• brown rice
  
• white rice (moderation)
  
• salad
  
• beans
  
• onion/ peppers/ garlic (& other accompanying vegetables)
  
• spaghetti squash (instead of pasta, or in a tuna casserole)
  
• pasta sauce
  
• rice cakes
  
• oatmeal (1-minute & rolled)
  
• sweet potato
  
• FRUIT!
  
• Bananas (yep, deserve a separate line)
  
• FROZEN FRUIT!!
  
• frozen veggies (peas & corn mostly)
  
• bread (in moderate amounts)
  
• almond milk
  
  FATS
  
  
• eggs
  
• avocado
  
• nuts (raw)
  
• peanut butter
  
• almond butter (MAPLE ALMOND BUTTER)
  
• half & half (in your coffee)
  
• cheese (moderate amounts)
  
• olive oil
  
• coconut oil
  
• other oils
  
  RESOURCES
  
  
• skinnytaste recipes
  
• the only cookbook you'll ever need
  
• simply shredded athlete interviews (they all talk about their diet)
  
  MEAL IDEAS
  
  
• bean pasta and pasta sauce
  
• fillet of chicken (or fish) plus a carb
  
• enormous salad (beans, green onions, peppers) with chicken
  
• protein smoothie
  
• • 1/2 frozen banana (key to smoothieness)
    
• • 1 serving frozen fruit (I mix kinds for a total of 1 serving)
    
• • 1 serving rolled oats
    
• • 1 scoop protein powder
    
• • almond milk
    
• spaghetti squash tuna casserole
  
• • (I literally make this up every time I'm happy to write it out if you like)
    
• one skillet sweet potato burrito bowl (add chicken, modify the recipe however you like)
  
  TIPS
  
  
• portion and bake 3lbs of chicken & 3lbs of tilapia at once. let cool and freeze on baking sheet. Transfer when frozen solid to a freezer bag. Defrost a portion overnight.
  
• you can replace anything white with 0% greek yogurt (sour cream, mayo, whipped cream)
  
• pick up a carton of your favorite protein bars and save them for emergencies (when you couldn't shop or prep)
  
• make perusing recipe resources a regular habit to maintain inspiration
  
• you can shred chicken with an electric mixer (it's kind of amazing)
  
• make an enormous salad on Sundays, eat for 4 days
  
• sweet potato microwaves easily, just throw one in your lunch bag with your fillet and you're set
  
• chili is your best friend!
  
• so is mustard! All the kinds
  
• so are pickles (except for bread and butter pickles... the best kind)
  
• so is hot sauce!
  
• anything you make with ground beef you can make with ground chicken or ground turkey (sloppy joes, tacos, chili)
  
• keep a list of all of your favorite recipes/ meal ideas (things to try) where you can easily review it and build your shopping list. I do it all in one place here and organize my grocery list by department to make shopping happen faster.
  
  That's a lot of info, I got a little carried away. Sorry.
  
  Baby steps. Start with whatever. When you find yourself dreading your meals, spice it up. If meal prep stresses you out figure out how to make it easier (that's how I learned about shredding chicken with a mixer). When you falter (you will) figure out what went wrong and how you can improve.
  

You're gonna love it. I've never tried the gizmo to which you link, but it looks interesting. I do my fermentations the easy way, with one of these crocks. I have never worried about an airlock (for this anyway, homebrew beer is another story...).

I would recommend two books to get you started. Between the two, they've probably got a recipe for everything fermented you could ever want. Wild Fermentation and Nourishing Traditions. My local library had the Nourishing Traditions one.

I've made a couple of batches of sauerkraut and a batch of kim-chi. The sauerkraut I am enjoying this week with home-corned beef. YUM! Here's my sauerkraut "recipe":

Chop/shred about 5 heads of cabbage. Discard cores, or put 'em in the crock to ferment with the rest, your choice. As you chop a cabbage, start putting it in the crock, with a little bit of salt. Once you get a decent amount of cabbage built up in the crock, start pounding it with a mallet or your hands. Keep adding cabbage and a bit of salt as you go. Feel free to add any spices you want- suggestions include dill seeds and/or caraway seeds. As you continue adding cabbage, salt, and pounding it, liquid will be released from the cabbage. Once you've got all the cabbage in the crock that you are going to add, weigh the cabbage down somehow to keep it below the level of the brine. You can do this with a plate, but I prefer a ziploc bag full of salt-water (the salt-water is in case it leaks into your sauerkraut). More liquid will be released for the first day or two as active fermentation begins, and your crock may overflow, so plan for that. Capture the overflow if possible, and add it back in to the crock (the volume will reduce as the cabbage ferments). Check it as often as you want, sample as you go. It's ready when it tastes like sauerkraut. In my last batch, 5 heads of cabbage were packed into a 1 gallon crock, final volume of sauerkraut was about 1/2 gallon. Enjoy!

There is no specific test that could be performed. However, you might consider a consult with a pediatric gastroenterologist with respect to a monitoring program. I would suggest that an annual fecal calprotectin test, in conjunction with ensuring vitamin D sufficiency, might go a long way towards early detection, and prevention (respectively).

Note that while the "standard" for vitamin D is 30 ng/mL, we really don't know what is required to prevent autoimmune disease. 30 is enough to stave off most of the bone and dental problems, but we're really not sure where it should be for optimal human health. However, I would opine that, for those at greater risk for Crohn's, something like 40-50 (and maybe even to 60) ng/mL might be better. Consult your pediatrician; however, if they give the standard line of 400 IU/day, beware: again, that's enough to prevent rickets, but we don't know about autoimmune disease.

Note that Crohn's and other autoimmune diseases are very rare in tropical and developing countries; there is a clear north-south gradient that is suggestive of vitamin D deficiency being a problem. Inasmuch as swimsuit-level irradiation from the sun provides about 1000 IU/minute, it seems likely that our equatorial brethren are getting much more than Europeans and Americans. (Also note that showering with soap and water may be removing vitamin D from the skin; dietary supplementation- preferably with liver, eggs, cod liver oil- may help.)

Lastly, eat fermented foods. I would strongly encourage reading Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston Price, as well as the WAP Foundation's Nourishing Traditions. I can't stress this enough: Nourishing Traditions will seem like the most flake-a-zoid thing you've ever read, but they're absolutely, bang-on correct.

Anyway- if I had kids, they'd be eating a lot of fermented foods (not soy), getting lots of sunlight, playing in the mud, and getting all the fat and protein I could stuff into them, without wheat and minimizing other grains.

Good luck.

Plan 1: Grab a general purpose beginner's book like Ruhlman's 20, How to Cook Everything: the Basics, or The Four Hour Chef and get cracking.

For the record, I would start with Ruhlman since he's the most oriented towards principles, techniques, and general purpose stuff. Bittman's great, but he mostly teaches via recipe which isn't that helpful when you're just barely starting out. Ferris' book is incredible and I would wholeheartedly recommend it, but it's huge and filled with a lot of rabbit trails about learning styles, foreign languages, memorizing playing cards, and shooting 3 points. If you like watching Tim Ferris ADD on neat stuff (and I do) it's a great read, but it definitely isn't only about cooking.

Plan 2: Get this poster. Ideally here. Get the veggie if you need it. Buy the stuff, make the stuff. This won't be quite as much initial layout as buying a book, and it's not nearly as intimidating. But it's not nearly as detailed so you're going to have to do a lot more guess-and-check type stuff and be ready to throw out your mistakes, which is probably going to cost more and be more frustrating in the long run.

tl;dr - Ruhlman

Disclaimer: links are for convenience only. I receive no benefit other than sharing my favorite sources.

1. This grey shirt!
   
2. The guys on this CD cover look like falling drops of rain. Plus there's lots of water.
   
3. Japanese Green Tea Kit Kats!
   
4. My mom was so impressed with the wigs she got me that she wants one of her own.
   
5. You've probably read this classic but it's my favorite book. Even from a non-romantic literary standpoint, it's genius.
   
6. How about an MP3? No shipping lol
   
7. Terry Pratchet is probably the most hilarious writer ever and if you've ever owned a cat, or love cats, this is just amazing.
   
8. These nails. They would actually be annoying to wear but they're so cute!
   
9. Oldboy. Perfect action/revenge/mindscrew movie. It's so captivating and well done. I haven't met anyone who didn't like it.
   
10. Instant fire starter. One way to get rid of the undead is to burn them to ashes and this spiffy thing will light you a fire in a jiffy.
    
11. This sewing machine. I've always wanted to make my own clothes because there aren't enough cute US styles. Most fashions these days are more sexy than sweet. I'd make a boutique for feminine, cute, Lolita, Gyaru, and Gothic styles. But first I'd have to learn how to sew, haha.
    
12. FACK. And it sounds so good too!
    
13. Sewing Machine from before for the same reasons
    
14. ICE CREAM MAKER
    
15. Gold studs are super tiny
    
16. Vanilla Boubon Extract. Yummmm
    
17. Kitty Stealing Coins :3
    
18. Need to know how to make lunches for school, don't I?
    
19. Hime Gyaru Wig. I'm getting more and more into Japanese fashion. My goal is to look a little like this.
    
20. Majestic. Classy. Daring. Beautiful. So many uses.
    
    fear cuts deeper than swords
    
    This was so fun to do! :D

I was a sports writer for a few years. The highlight of my entire career as a sports writer was a 1 on 1 interview with John Elway, hall of fame QB of the Denver Broncos. (He's currently the team's executive vice president)

While I wasn't a "fan" of Elway or the Broncos growing up, his name kind of transcends Football, and as a teenager when he won back-to-back Super Bowls, he's basically among the top 5 - 10 players that I've ever watch play in my entire life.

He came out to play in a Pro-Am Golf Tournament in my little college town in California. I assumed that a guy who has made hundreds of millions of dollars in his life, and is widely considered a top 10 quarterback ever wouldn't have much time for people at a podunk golf tournament.

I was so wrong. He signed autographs for every man, woman or child in attendance. He gave me 5 minutes of 1 on 1 interview time, no interruptions, and he even complimented me on some of my questions. I have an audio recording of the interview on my old digital audio recorder that I refuse to delete.

Bottom line is I came out of there with more respect and admiration for John Elway than I had coming in. He actually was a stand up guy.

If I happen to win, I'd like this book. Thanks for the contest and bringing back some positive memories!

So I went and read that report you referred to (or at least, what they said in the Washington Post about it):-

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/03/the-hidden-crisis-on-college-campuses-36-percent-of-students-dont-have-enough-to-eat/?utm_term=.dd26d35d9f78

I must admit that some things do sound a little odd to me. For example, here is one passage from the Washington Post article:-

>“I’m not going hungry per se, but there are days I’m just not going to eat,” she said. “Today, I am kind of hesitant to buy food, because I have less than $100 and I need to do laundry. Do I want to do my laundry or do I want to eat today? That is the kind of question I’m dealing with.”

OK, so I'm a bit confused here. Does doing your laundry in a laundromat cost the best part of $100 in the USA?

Is food really so expensive in the USA? If I walk down to my local British equivalent of Kroger or Walmart I can easily find a 16 ounce frozen spaghetti bolognese or chicken curry with rice or shepherds pie that is going to cost me a pound (US$1.40 - and that's including tax) that I can quickly do in the microwave in four minutes without any problem.

Do these sort of things not exist in the USA? The spiritual home of fast food?

Then. I know that it can be a real pain to cook for yourself while at university - but there again I managed it living with three other guys and we didn't starve or live off take outs (apart from a Saturday night kebab [gyro for Americans] after a couple of beers).

I think that u/horse19 referred to this in another reply but it is certainly more than possible to live spending US$100-150 per month on food.

For example, there is an English food blogger, author and activist by the name of Jack Monroe (she's also done a TEDx talk here )

This is a bit about her on Amazon:-

>Jack was a cash-strapped single mum living in Southend. When she found herself with a shopping budget of just £10 a week to feed herself and her young son, she addressed the situation with immense resourcefulness, creativity and by embracing her local supermarket's 'basics' range. She created recipe after recipe of delicious, simple and upbeat meals that were outrageously cheap. Learn with Jack Monroe's A Girl Called Jack how to save money on your weekly shop whilst being less wasteful and creating inexpensive, tasty food.

https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Called-Jack-Delicious-Recipes/dp/0718178947

and this is the blog:-

https://cookingonabootstrap.com/

There is a similar author in the US that I'm aware of by the name of Leanne Brown:-

>Cheap Eats: A Cookbook For Eating Well On A Food Stamp Budget
>
>When Leanne Brown moved to New York from Canada to earn a master's in food studies at New York University, she couldn't help noticing that Americans on a tight budget were eating a lot of processed foods heavy in carbs.
>
>"It really bothered me," she says. "The 47 million people on food stamps — and that's a big chunk of the population — don't have the same choices everyone else does."
>
>Brown guessed that she could help people in SNAP, the federal government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, find ways to cook filling, nourishing and flavorful meals. So she set out to write a cookbook full of recipes anyone could make on a budget of just $4 a day.
>
>The result is Good and Cheap, which is free online and has been downloaded over 700,000 times since Brown posted it on her website in June 2014. A July 2014 Kickstarter campaign also helped her raise $145,000 to print copies for people without computer access. And on July 21, the second edition was published with 30 new recipes.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/07/27/426761037/cheap-eats-a-cookbook-for-eating-well-on-a-food-stamp-budget

It's also available on Amazon:-

https://www.amazon.com/Good-Cheap-Eat-Well-Day/dp/0761184996

Now before anyone starts saying that the recipes are likely to all be tofu and lentil burgers - no that isn't the case. I just had a quick check on her blog and one of the latest recipes was Sausage & Bean Casserole which, quite frankly, was exactly the sort of thing I lived on in university.

She claims that this recipe would feed four people at a cost of 60p (84 cents including tax) each. If this was a family of four with two children I could quite believe it but, if it were teenage guys living at university then it would probably only feed three. But there again, that still only works out at 80p (US$1.13 including tax) each.

I certainly remember that I had to be very careful indeed about what I spent my money on - are things really that significantly different nowadays? Or are students choosing Netflix over food?

I think a good way to go about crafting your own recipe is to learn a bit about what makes a particular beer style unique. There are tons of guidelines that differentiate one style of beer from another. It has a lot to do with the amount and types of malt that are used as well as the hops and yeast.

Books like Brewing Classic Styles give you a good "baseline" recipe for each beer style as well as what types of ingredients (and in what proportion) are used to create that style.

You can also use some online recipe database like Brewtoad. There are loads of recipes on there all labeled by style.

One thing that I like to do is pull up 3-4 recipes of a style that I'm shooting for and take a look at the average ratios of each type of malt and hops. Then, I kinda wing it from there based on qualities I want in my beer (higher/lower gravity, lighter/darker color, particular hop varieties, etc...)

The real answer to your question though, is to try a lot of pre-made recipes that work well. The American Homebrewer's Association has tons of great recipes, many of which have won awards. After brewing a lot and paying attention to the ingredients, you'll get a pretty good handle on things you like/dislike about different beer styles and recipes.

I haven't. I've got a bunch of science-y cookbooks.

Edit: Here is the best book I've found. It's a really heavy read, though: On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

My other favorite, go to book is America's Test Kitchen Best American Classics. I also do recipe testing for ATK - regular recipes and gluten free.

Oh, and don't forget Michael Ruhlman's Ratio:The Simple Codes Behind The Craft of Everyday Cooking. This is the most amazing book. It's short and to the point as well. You begin to understand how a simple tweak to a recipe can create an entirely different dish.


I love how a great Mindcrack thread became a cooking thread. My 2 favorite things in life.

I would always recommend people start with 'The Compleat Meadmaker, by Ken Schramm'. This has been the meadmaking bible for a very long time. You can find supplementary information about staggered nutrient additions, pH buffering compounds, new sanitizers, etc online in various articles and forum sites. Of course, understanding your ingredients can also be very good for any brewer, and water is a huge ingredient. So besides the other element series book 'Yeast' by Christ White and Jamil Zainasheff I highly recommend 'Water' by John Palmer and Colin Kaminski. For those of us making mead in Ferndale, our water is a very key ingredient which comes to us from an underground aquifer treated by the city of Ferndale, and is of very high quality (even compared with the high quality water from the City of Detroit). Understanding honey is a huge area of study. There are many classic textbooks on honey and honey-hunting by Eva Crane that are considered primary sources (but these can be prohibitively expensive for most mazers, and honestly, Ken's book does an awesome job of summarizing her contributions, as well as other historical information about meadmaking, honey, etc). I feel a basic understanding of beekeeping can be highly instructive for meadmakers, and so I recommend that you get your hands on some beginner beekeeping books, e.g. 'Beesentials' by L.J. Connor and Robert Muir and/or the 'Beekeeper's Handbook'. A solid background in wine or beer-making doesn't hurt, either, and there are multitudes of books I can recommend to you on the subject of beer specifically (this is my homebrewing background). My two absolute must-haves for beer brewing are 'Designing Great Beers' by Ray Daniels and 'Brewing Classic Styles' by John Palmer and Jamil Zainasheff. Learning to brew beer can help you if you decide you want to try your hand at braggots.

Do yourself a favor and get a copy of The Joy of Cooking. If you can't afford it, get it second hand or ask for it for xmas or something. If you find a good and/or cheap ingredient, use the glossary to look it up, and there's usually information about it. Once you have the kitchen skills to follow a recipe reasonably closely, you're golden.

Another tip, think about a food you LOVE to eat (something reasonably healthy, whose ingredients are in your budget). Look up a recipe for that, then make it any time you don't know what else to make (why not make it every day?). Keep making it until it is exactly what you want, and you've internalized the recipe; then, move on to another dish.

My advice is to get stuff to measure as you cook, measuring cups, measuring spoons, a thermometer, and a scale. Try to be accurate when you cook.

Familiarize yourself with using knives. Find out how to do basic cuts. Get a chef's knife, everything else, buy as you need them. Do take care of your knife(s), keep them fairly sharp (sharp knives are safer than dull ones). Things shouldn't take lots of force to cut (if you do, you may be doing it wrong)

Familiarize yourself with fundamental techniques: roasting, sauteing, steaming, boiling, blanching. Easy, once you know how.

Everything else (pans/gadgets/dishes), buy as you need them.

In my experience, everything goes on sale at one time or another, so being able to process any given raw material into edible food is important. The more you cook, the better you'll be.

Also, I don't know if you have time, but some cooking shows are very good at teaching cooking. I really like good eats, which is available on netflix. Never be afraid to ask somebody how to do something.

Good luck.

>Unrelated question, I read that meat should be poached with the liquid starting cold and then gradually increasing the heat so as to cook the meat evenly. However when grilling or baking an oven is required to be preheated, and I read the reason is again, so that the meat cooks evenly. Sorry if this is a dumb question, I know the medium of cooking is different but why is this contradicting?

Let's start here. You can safely ignore advice for starting things cold in any aqueous cooking method (poaching, braising, making stock, boiling vegetables) -- whether it starts hot or cold will have minor differences when it comes to when and which compounds move from your solids to your liquids, and other details like clarity of your final liquid (e.g. a broth or stock). These are fine finicky details however, and will have very little effect on the final flavor of your dish. When it comes to poaching meats, what matters it the final temperature of the meat. The closer the temperature of your poaching liquid is to that target temperature, the better -- whether it starts hot or cold when the protein goes in. The same basic principles apply for meat cookery when grilling or roasting, with the added caveat that you usually want to create a crust through the maillard reaction and caremelization, which requires high heat. Hence the very best methods are a combination of low and high heat, such as Sous Vide and Reverse Searing.

As for categorical learning, there are lots of resources!
One of my favorites is the website Serious Eats which is very science based and has plenty to learn sorted by technique or by recipe.

I personally learned with Alton Brown -- seek out the show Good Eats, or check out some of his books 123

There is no right or wrong way to learn to cook. In fact, the only real way is to just get in the kitchen and cook. Yeah, you will screw some stuff up, burn some stuff, and maybe make some truly awful food. But you will make great food as well.

I hate to say this, really I do because I don't want to be the guy who tells you to start on extract, but get yourself an equipment starter set from one of the big brewers supply places like Northern Brewer or Midwest and a kit beer for your first go round. Caribou Slobber and Dead Ringer are good Northern Brewer kits that anyone can make without fucking it up.

Now, go spend the rest of your investment money on a refractometer (measuring the SG of hot wort accurately is the shit, $25), a couple 5 gallon and 1 gallon paint strainer bags from Lowes/Home Depot (BIAB starter set, $2.48 and $3.98 depending on size at HD), and the book Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Z(fuck if I can spell his last name).

Once you've decided that; yes, you and your friend are going to be amazing brewmasters some day (I really miss the boundless optimism of my first few brews before I learned to taste the imperfections), read the book cover to cover. Pick out a style you enjoy, brew the next beer based on the recipe in the book (use the all grain recipe and use the strainer bags with Brew In A Bag techniques). Be amazed that you did this!

Next time, screw with the recipe from the book a bit and make it your own. Change the hops to something different. Use a different Specialty Malt. Use a different yeast... Little changes make huge differences so do one at a time.

Kiss your disposable income goodbye.

• Taste of Home Best Loved - A great down-to-earth cookbook with homestyle meals that mom and grandma used to make.
  
• The Silver Spoon - Originally in Italian, hundreds of awesome, authentic Italian dishes using a massive array of ingredients.
  
• Gourmet Magazine Cookbook - I got my copy at a brick and mortar bookstore many years ago, and it may be out of print now. But it is full of elevated dishes that are easily obtainable at home.
  
• Dinner for Two - For years it was just my wife and I. This was the perfect little cookbook for us. Additionally, ATK has a similar cookbook. This isn't the one we have, but one like it. It's basically their recipes scaled down for two people.
  
• Bocuse Gastronomique - It's like an awesome cooking class on paper from the master himself.
  
• Bocuse - An awesome collection of recipes from Paul Bocuse.
  
• ATK Cookbook. I probably cook more from here than any other. I used to buy the new version every year with the newest recipes, but now I have the online subscription.
  
• The Flavor Bible that someone else linked.
  
  
  I could keep going but I should stop. So many great ones out there.

Little bit of a different issue, but I would also suggest having a homebrew session with the staff before you open one day. Nothing will teach you about the process of making beer better than doing it yourself, and it really isn't hard. If you still want to accompany that lesson with literature, two great books on brewing are How to Brew by John Palmer (aka the home brewer's bible, full text is also available for free online) and The Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian

As far as general history and beer tasting knowledge, I'll back up those who have recommended Tasting Beer by Randy Mosher, and pretty much anything written by Michael Jackson. Many of Jackson's books are separated by regions, so it would be helpful to find which one applies to the area your pub/the beers your serve are from

Start by learning to cook some of the foods that you eat from restaurants or buy boxed. Modify where appropriate.

Things like burritos are very easy. Make rice, add beans and assorted vegetables. You can buy pre-mixed seasonings for your beans, or just buy them already seasoned.

Soups and stews are also really easy. These are almost impossible to screw up.

Chop up an onion, two carrots, two ribs of celery and some garlic (1-3 cloves). Saute until semi-cooked. Add chicken (or veg) broth (canned or boxed is fine. Use low sodium, you can always add more salt.) Add (chopped cooked) chicken/turkey, potatoes/rice/pasta, and two or three of the following corn, peas, spinach, tomatoes, bell peppers (any colour), broccoli, asparagus, turnip, and/or beans (green, lima, kidney, etc). Voila! Chicken vegetable soup! Just add bread for a very pleasant meal. This is great for cleaning out the fridge.

Roasting chickens is very easy and will provide several kinds of meals. You can eat the chicken for dinner, make sandwiches with the sliced meat or make chicken salad, and use the remaining meat for soup or pot pie.

Ultimately, you will want to buy a cookbook for beginners. The Joy of Cooking is a classic and highly recommended. They also have a website.

I would recommend a cookbook instead of looking up recipes on the internet. The authors will use the same style to write all of the recipes and after you make a few, you will get a feel for them. You will know how they like to begin, how salty/spicy their dishes tend to be, etc. This makes getting good results a lot easier. After you have a feel for the cooking process, you can branch out more easily to new foods, new recipes or new flavours.

I'm not a great cook, but this is exactly what fascinates me about cooking.

I came across a book a few years ago, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. Completely changed the way I look at food.

I still have problems with spices. Knowing the flavors, how they interact with each other, and the right amount to use.

As a side note: After many years of not keeping lard, I do now. It's amazing how easy making a pie crust can be, and the taste is so much better than pre-made. I'm really into savory pies at the moment. Been doing pot pies for a while, and just ventured into hand pies. And biscuits. And pancakes. So many different pancakes. Been playing with butter/lard substitution and at what point it impacts flavor.

And another side note: I used to have a good collection of old cookbooks. Not depression era, but self-published fund-raiser type cookbooks where you get all Grandmother's Old Recipes. Those are some interesting recipes. And they all turn out awesome. Unfortunately, I lost a whole box of them during my last move. I would love to replace them.

I've found concept books in combination with cookbooks to help. My favorite is Culinary Artistry by Dorenburg and Page to be the most helpful. I try to limit myself to either a single ingredient, or a pair, or even just a cuisine. The cookbooks give me recipe basics, while the concept book helps me twist them in ways that I maybe haven't tried before.

Checking for what's locally available can also be a way of narrowing down options and being creative.

Overall, I find creativity in the idea that there is freedom in limitation. Hope this helps, and good luck! I've always aspired to be in your position, I hope you find a way to make it work and enjoy it!

Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food is a great primer on the science of cooking. I read it in culinary school, and it was a great distillation of the main concepts (which cuts are of meat are good for braising, searing, roasting, etc. and how to properly perform each technique). If you end up enjoying Alton Brown's style, I would also recommend Fish on a First Name Basis for fish cookery. Lastly, Cook's Illustrated is a wonderful resource on food and cooking. The yearly online membership is only approx $25, and you get access to all previously published recipes and equipment reviews.

In terms of equipment, the knife I personally use is the Victorinox 10-inch chef knife. Japanese steel is great and all, but for the same price you could get this knife, a good electric knife sharpener, and a honing steel and still have some left over. The best knife is a sharp knife after all. I would also highly recommend a T-fal non-stick pan for a solid multi-purpose first pan.

Finally, for an herb garden, I generally try to aim for either expensive or infrequently used herbs for indoor gardening. The reasoning behind growing expensive herbs is pretty straightforward. I primarily grow infrequently used herbs to avoid wasting what I wouldn't use up when cooking (as you mentioned is oft a problem). In my region, basil, sage, thyme, tarragon, and oregano would all be good candidates to grow. Parsley, cilantro, and bay leaf tend to be cheaper at the market in my area, so I usually just purchase those.

I got started using this book Complete Joy Of Homebrewing I felt this book was super friendly as introductory material.

There is also this book How To Brew I think most people will tell you John Palmer's book is better but honestly both will contain all the information you need to get started. I am sure someone more resourceful than me will be able to direct you to some great (and free) internet resources to take a look at as well.

Edit: A quick Google search yielded This Have fun and welcome!

There is a lot of technique advice in here, which is all well and good. But these are all really basic things.
First, buy these two books:

http://www.cookingforgeeks.com/

and

http://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/dp/1416571728/ref=pd_sim_b_3


Cooking is chemistry and art. It is chemistry not just in mixing things, but in how meat is cooked, and veggies brown. Those two books present the science of cooking, basic techniques, as well as some very advanced techniques. For the reddit crowd, they're perfect.


Learn what temperatures oils smoke at. (Smoke means turn dark and start smoking... oil at this point tastes nasty and makes whatever you're cooking in it disgusting.)
Learn how much fat by weight is in butter, margarine, sour cream, cream cheese, etc. Learn how much moisture is in each. These factors affect how they affect your recipe. So if you replace them, you will have different results.


A key example of this is cookies.
A very basic cookie recipe is 1 part sugar: 2 parts fat: 3 parts flour.
So this means 1 tablespoon of sugar to two tablespoons of butter to three tablespoons of flour. Adjusting this ratio in minute ways produces dramatically different cookies.


Add a bit more fat(in poppyseeds which are 75% fat by volume, and the fat renders out in the oven...) and the cookies become creamier.

Add some more flour, and they become stiffer.

Add more sugar and they become gooey.

Change the butter to lard, and it will be like increasing the fat.


Spices are volatile and under heat, they break down. So for stuff that is cooked for a long time, add the spices at the very end of the cook time.

Understand the physics of heating things. When you apply heat from the outside in, this creates a heat gradient. The length of time you apply the heat is how the meat becomes cooked. This is how you can burn a steak and still have it be raw in the center. It takes time for that heat to move, especially in thick steaks.

Learn the science behind techniques, and you will become a better cook. For example, to make a clear carrot-based stock, don't expose it to sunlight. Or, duck confit: the fat molecules are too big to get into the meat so all you're really doing is dry-cooking the meat with an efficient heat conductor. Cartilage and connective tissue turn to gelatin under heat and moisture. Absent moisture, the connective tissue becomes brittle.

My favorite recipe I made using science I learned:
Three day roast beef or: Pulled Beef.
-Marinate the roast in a 1:3 ratio of acids and oils. Only hot spices will be absorbed by the meat at this point, like pepper or garlic. Onion is too delicate. Do this for 24 hours in the fridge.

-Braise for another 8 hours on low in low-salt beef stock. Add some wine, shallots, carrots, garlic, and other spices. I like using dry mustard at this point for an added accent to the meat.

-Let the roast cool and chill in the fridge overnight. Reserve and chill the braising stock for gravy.

-Preheat oven to 300f

-Roast the beef for about 3-4 hours or until the center is hot.

-The braising stock will now have solidified lumps of beef fat floating on top. Use these with an equal amount of flour to make a basic roux. Brown the roux on medium, and add the braising stock on high, stirring vigorously. Add as much or as little stock as you need to the gravy. The gravy will thicken as the water boils off.

-Serve with side dishes such as roasted potatoes in thyme and rosemary.

What this does is produces fully cooked and flavourful beef, which retains its shape(isn't soggy), but is never tough to chew. This is because the cartilage has become gelatin, and chilling it overnight sets the gelatin. The gelatin helps the beef hold its shape, but is significantly less chewy than the original connective tissue.
Learn how to make basic sauces. Every sauce has as its base, a roux. Roux is basically a mixture of flour and oil, and browned or not browned. Add your desired liquid (1 tablespoon of flour = 1 cup of liquid) and stir.

Dairy will form a 'scum' if you heat at too high of a temperature. This is the origin of the word 'scum'. So heat it at low temperatures, with lots of stirring.

Always sear your meat on a very hot pan before you roast or broil your meat. This produces thousands of amazingly tasting chemicals that will add some flavour to your end result.

You rest your meat because its like a vessel of water under pressure. Heat = pressure. As the pressure lets off, the juices settle and won't squirt out as soon as you cut the meat. This ensures your meat will stay moist and flavourful.

Also: FIRST POST ON REDDIT.

I know that this is an OLD thread but I just found it, and thought I'd share with you my favourite cook book of all time. It sounds like it's right up the alley of what you're after.

I like to think of myself of a fairly decent home cook, and very experimental, but I found Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking seriously fantastic.

It gives you the ratios, then explains them, and then talks about how you can change them.

I mean, once you know that 2 parts flour and 3 parts liquid (as per that chart) make bread, you can add whatever you want into it to make it just the way you want it. Change the flour, change the liquid, etc.

In the last 12 months that I've had the book I've memorised most of the ratios and now find my cooking greatly improved.

For a bachelor it might just be the perfect book because he doesn't have to think "I need 3 cups of this flour and 5 cups of this liquid", after a while he can think "I have some flour, and I have some liquid, just ratio it out and VOILA".

Hope that helps

(page 3)



Question (byobbtypo):

> Do LARPers get carried away and just end up beating the shit out of each other?
>
> Example:
> You: I hit you with a magic missile!You're dead!
> Them: Nope you missed!
> You: You're fuckin dead BITCH (throws punch)

Answer (kubit):

> We've actually had a few brawls here and there, but they're usually all talk. You can imagine with all of those endorphins that sometimes people get carried away and hilarity ensues, but this stuff is pretty frowned upon and rare. We do have a full-contact system of combat that requires verbal consent from whichever party you're going to tackle/maul for all of your aggression needs.
>
> Most of the serious fights actually happen with people who are in campsites near ours. One lady let her dogs loose and tried to get them to attack us because we were being rambunctious in the middle of the night. Shouting matches with normal people is pretty much expected.



Question (swankmotron):

> Why aren't you working on a novel?

Answer (kubit):

> Too busy LARPing and writing LARPing lore for successful careers! BAAARGH!



Question (MrSphincter):

> So lets say we're LARPing in the woods like you said. I suddenly get the impulse to massacre people (LAPRPingly of course). Does that count as a death or only during battles?

Answer (kubit):

> I'm assuming this isn't a death threat. Am I giving you too much credit here?
>
> I've stalked people for a few hours and then murdered them (LARPingly. The statute of limitations doesn't expire on murder, so) when they went to sleep and then dragged them in the forest to bleed to death. Anyone can take a death at any time.
>
> My favorite thing to do is follow people around until they let their guard down and then go to town. It's the best kind of hide-and-seek.



Question (byobbtypo):

> So you could just challenge someone and throw down right then and there? That sounds just amazing.
>
> Aaaaand, I'd probably think twice about trying to mess with a campsite full of drunk people wearing armor.....

Answer (kubit):

> Yeah. We've had gentlemanly fisticuffs break out during "formal" events that ended in black eyes, goose eggs, and worst of all, spilled home-brewed rum. We're fine with full-contact fight club brawls as long as both parties have verbally consented in front of a few witnesses. It's usually like, "I'm going to jump on your back and try to make you pass out!" "Okay!"
>
> Yeah. I'd never hurt a dog, though. If that lady came over, I'm not sure what would've happened. I daydream about it sometimes.



Question (MrSphincter):

> I've always wanted to try LARP especially the battle portion of it. Now that you mention that I can suddenly murder anyone on a whim makes the incentives far greater.
>
> Does being athletic help?

Answer (kubit):

> Yeah, it definitely does. I'm pretty out of shape myself despite not being "fat". I have athletic and allergy induced asthma, which is why I prefer to put on leather socks and stalk people as opposed to running around carrying an 80lb shield and a great sword.
>
> One of the most in shape people I know (Panacea, who posted on this thread) uses two swords and basically runs around, jumping and pummeling the shit out of everything, with great results. It helps when you can real-life dodge as opposed to using the limited number on your character sheet.
>
> I, however, cannot dodge for shit.



Question (x3rs1st):

> Wanna LARP at my place? I have boxed wine and pizza rolls.

Answer (kubit):

> No way, bro. Even hobbits can afford bagel bites.



Question (iwantitalliwantitnow):

> Nice! Glad you have so much fun. I remember some classmates and I stumbling into the middle of a LARP group while doing a class project. One of our classmates got stolen, and we had to join up with a the other team in a raid to get her back. It was fun.

Answer (kubit):

> That sounds amazingly awesome to stumble into. Did you guys use foam weapons or anything? I've done this for a birthday party! The little sister of my boyfriend at the time wanted us to do a kidnap-and-rescue module, in which I played an evil dragon queen named Onyxia. Don't judge me!



Question (mortaine):

> Are you bisexual?
>
> There's kind of an urban legend that all female larpers are bi, but I'm not sure if that's just limited to World of Darkness larpers.

Answer (kubit):

> I'm attracted to cookware, actually. Laci Green explains this phenomenon better than I ever could:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv5k9w6Hpi4



Question (MrSphincter):

> I happen to be like a hybrid. I train in boxing and Muay Thai on a daily basis yet during childhood had a lot of nerdy influences. I became that dude who happens to fix computer/tech problems but also punches/kicks people in the face since I fight. So living the fantasies of LotRlike worlds sound fucking amazing.
>
> Also I wanna go Conan ape shit crazy and hear the lamentations of their women. (With full Arnie crazy eyes look)
>
> What are the choices in weapons?

Answer (kubit):

> I totally get that. As a kid, I did competitive swimming and Iaido, but then I started playing DnD with my best friend's brother. I'm pretty lame now in comparison as far as body treatment goes, but I think my delusions of LARPing grandeur come from watching too many Kurosawa films.
>
> The women our this game don't generally lament unless their food is covered in dust, which happens a lot when fights break out during food time.
>
> There are weapon details and restrictions. Daggers, swords, longswords, polearms, hammers, axes, etc all have design specs that need to be met, but otherwise it's go crazy nuts. Also, shields and thrown weapons. There's a LOT of variety.



Question (dannyboylee):

> Have you seen The Wild Hunt?
>
> What do you think of it? Is it accurate at all?

Answer (kubit):

> Holy crap, no. I haven't seen that at all. Is it good?
>
> From the look of the trailer, yes, it's accurate. That's generally how we get new players... by kidnapping them. Although the women in our game generally prefer to play deadly things rather than princesses.



Question (Puppy_in_love):

> I greet you, milady, hoping that we can once cross blades.
> Now i have a question for ye. What kind of weapons do you use? Foam or?

Answer (kubit):

> Latex, usually. I have one of these:
>
> http://www.strongblade.com/prod/sbif-dag-corsair.html
>
> We could totally cross blades. Except that my favorite character class is assassin, so if we're crossing blades, I'm doing my job completely wrong.



Question (iwantitalliwantitnow):

> Not judging. And no foam weapons, but many war cries were had. We had interviewed them earlier, so when half of them took one of our group and ran off, we weren't too worried.

Answer (kubit):

> All I can imagine is a horde of nerds running over a hill and summarily potato-sacking one of your professionally dressed friends and disappearing back over the hill. The best imagery.



Question (MrSphincter):

> Maybe I get go use the fancy ass footwork from the training. I guess it does help that I have to dodge forces with the intention of knocking me out.
>
> The lamentation line is from a Conan the Barbarian movie btw and ooooohhh... hammers and daggers!

Answer (kubit):

> Oh yeah, I'm totally familiar with Conan. I just want you guys to know how GODDAMN TOUGH I AM. ROAAAAAR!
>
> We also make pots, pans, instruments, cups, etc. out of foam to hit each other with. Those are especially hilarious. One guy I knew made a bunch of glow-in-the-dark foam skulls to throw at people in the middle of the night.



Question (dannyboylee):

> Looks like you need to get yourself a copy of this.

Answer (kubit):

> Make that Microwave Cooking for Two. Bow chicka bow wow.



Question (Puppy_in_love):

> I am also an assasin. A duel between us is aceptable.

Answer (kubit):

> Sweet.



Question (Puppy_in_love):

> And if i am to die, let it be by your hand.

Answer (kubit):

> Double sweet.

*****

(continued below)

I get most of my recipes online, but I've been cooking for 30+ years. Usually I end up looking at 4-5 for something before I find one that looks good, especially if I'm on AllRecipes or other non-curated sites.

Most good cookbooks talk about technique as well as ingredients. (or all technique as with Pepin's "Complete Techniques" There are lots of crap cookbooks out there, but in general cookbooks by well known chefs have stood the test of time. I also lean toward PBS chefs instead of "Food network" as they're more about educating than entertaining. Cookbooks from before WWII are great too, as they were designed for people who cooked meals every day instead of being made of "convenience" food (the 50's and 60's were horrible for cooking)

My favorites:

• James Beard
  
• Mark Bittman (How to Cook Everything is a great technique reference)
  
• America's Test Kitchen
  
• Jacques Pepin (great technique stuff, and good tasty food)
  
• Julia Child
  
• Nick Stellino
  
• Martin Yan
  
• Lorna Sass (for pressure cooking)
  
  For Web sites I tend to use the following more than others:
  
  
• Serious Eats
  
• Hip Pressure Cooking
  
  For V-Blog "Food entertainment" that's still educational I like Chef John's Food Wishes.

Best advice is to take an existing recipe that is known to be a good example of the style and start there. This is why Brewing Classic Styles is such an ubiquitous book in most homebrewer's libraries. There are other sources too like the AHA Recipe Archive (although some are locked behind membership), Brewers Friend, or Beersmith. Starting with a good, known recipe helps you learn the style as well as the nuances of the brewing methods for it.

Second piece of advice: Avoid the kitchen sink problem. With big, bold beers like this it is soooo tempting to start adding "all the things" and then you end up with a muddled, murky thing. I've had a lot of Imperial Stouts that have this issue. Especially Xmas stouts with every single spice in the cabinet thrown in. (Not that any of my brews have ever had this problem, nope!) Just focus on learning the style and a couple of main flavors. I just brewed one yesterday that's targeting chocolate and cinnamon as "high points" with some minor other ingredients to play support (a pinch of vanilla for example to augment the chocolate).

Finally, don't be afraid to make less in either ABV or volume. When you have limited space (I'm in this boat as well) it's important to get rid of the "I must make 5 gallons!" mentality. Consider making a half batch at 8% ABV instead of trying to force a full batch at 12%. Big beers in a BIAB set up can be tricky to accomplish.

Have fun, be sure to post results! Cheers.

I always read your name in my head the way that Pikachu says his name. SqueakaCHOOOO. Anyway...

Hi, I'm Jac! There are two things in life that I'm really passionate about: food and animals. I would spend my day reading cookbooks, creating new recipes, and playing with animals if I could. I love music and am known for knowing the lyrics to basically every song. I like to do anything that is a creative outlet: nail art, drawing, painting (although I'm not very good at this yet), photoshop, photography, and once again - cooking/baking. The only video game I'm really into is The Sims. hahah. I also love to read and devour books when I get them. I LOVE coffee, tea, chocolate, anything purple, and glitter. I also ramble a lot... can you tell?!

This fits me the best because I'm a foodie and self-taught chef.

The Joy of Cooking is a great basic book! It has a zillion very basic recipes that you can doctor and tweak based on your preferences. I've been annotating mine with my favorite variations, and it's fantastic. It teaches you how to do both complicated recipes and very basic things, too, which is really helpful.

Not a book, but I highly recommend everything Alton Brown has ever done. He has a YouTube channel and a few books, but Good Eats is how I learned. Good Eats is a great place to start because he explains the science behind why things work the way they do. Once you know why ingredients or techniques work, you have so much more independence in the kitchen. If a recipe isn't turning out the way I'd like, I can fix it based on what I know about the science behind what's happening. He also teaches you how to do things without complicated tools or specialized equipment, so it's also helped me build my kitchen tools up with things I use all the time.

First I will say brewing extract isn't necessarily "cheating". Brewing with extract is the same thing as baking a cake with one of those mixes from the supermarket - at the end of the day you still have cake, you just didn't have to measure out all the ingredients.

That said, if you want to jump into all-grain first that's fine but I think you might have read way too much into it! It's not nearly as difficult as it sounds like you might have convinced yourself. You don't need to worry about water chemistry, washing yeast, or quantum physics to brew beer. Your best bet to start would be the online version of How To Brew. It is the 1st edition of the popular How To Brew. I would recommend picking up the book, however, since the print edition is the 3rd edition, and there have been some updates. You can also check out The Complete Joy of Homebrewing.

For your first batch you can do something simple, you don't need to worry about water chemistry or getting crazy with your yeast. If you have any more specific questions, there is a daily Q&A on this sub as well.

So most of my cookbooks are either text dense reference manuals or obnoxiously difficult like The French Laundry Cookbook, but here's a few that are relatively simple with excellent photography:

La Cocina - Cookbook from an organization in San Francisco that teaches low income people to successfully grow food businesses. Photos are incredible.

-

The Berkeley Bowl Cookbook - Excellent photos with a lot of obscure produce.

-

Ad Hoc at Home - Thomas Keller's family style recipes with wonderful photography.

-

Flour Water Salt Yeast - Focused on baking bread and making pizza, but a lot of step by step photos and some awesome pictures of the final product.

Jacques Pépin New Complete Techniques

The America's Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook: Everything You Need to Know to Become a Great Cook

The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

From here you can move on to:

Institut Paul Bocuse Gastronomique: The definitive step-by-step guide to culinary excellence

&

Larousse Gastronomique: The World's Greatest Culinary Encyclopedia, Completely Revised and Updated

These are all great resources. Also look for culinary school text books and always youtube.

The resources are out there and with everyone having a different way to learn and adopt information the variety in options is tremendous. Good luck and keep cooking. If you have any questions please reach out and if I can help I will.

My best advice to you is to get items that multitask. It will save you money and space. Use your pots to cook rice in instead of getting a rice cooker. (Rice is insanely easy to cook on the stove, just follow the instructions.) Get a nice blender that will also blend ice.. Get a decent vacuum with attachments - but you could probably find one dirt cheap at a yard sale. I'd also suggest investing in some good [Corelle] (http://www.amazon.com/Corelle-Livingware-16-Piece-Dinnerware-Service/dp/B0000DDU2O/ref=sr_1_2?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1373456893&sr=1-2&keywords=corelle+dinnerware) dishes. They are lightweight and last forever. One more thing, I'd recommend a good cookbook such as The Joy of Cooking. It'll even teach you how to boil an egg. You'll be surprised how much money you can save if you can cook the basics.

Also, talk to your roommates (I'm assuming you will have at least one roommate) and find out what they can contribute. Assuming that you are a broke college student like most everyone else (and will probably be graduating with thousands of dollars of debt) you don't want to spend a lot of money on things for your apartment - hence, the multitasking items. You'll find that you really don't need much!

America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two is a great book. The recipes are great and make two good sized portions. There is also a ton of other useful info within the book, like how to use leftover ingredients, how to best store things, recommendations, etc.

Blue Apron is surprisingly good source for recipes with only two portions. They are smaller portions that most Americans are used to. If I were really hungry, I could probably eat both portions. Some of their recipes call for one or two hard to find ingredients, which can usually be substituted.

Budget Bytes is a good source for recipes that use similar ingredients. For example, if you buy a big jar of Kalamata olives for one recipe, there are many others that will use them as well. With that said, a lot of her recipes start to taste very similar after a while.

I'm going to actively try to avoid recipe books here in my links (that said, that means you're missing out on Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails, Death & Co, Potions of the Caribbean, and The Joy of Mixology so.... YMMV)

Liquid Intelligence - IMHO must have guide on the technical aspects of bartending. This book is amazing and is the first thing I share with my coworkers that want to broaden their knowledge

The Drunken Botanist - In depth examination of the plants that go into making our favorite drinks, beers, booze, and sundry

Bitters - Has history of bitters, along with instructional on how to make your own.

Shrubs Kind of recipes but also talks about how to make shrubs and good proportions for them, which isn't super common.

Wine Folly Do you want a good intro-to-wine with good, clear reference sheets about styles and pairings? Here's your book

The Wine Bible Want to know way more than you ever thought you wanted to know about wine? This is what you want to be reading.

The Beer Bible - Same as above, but for beer instead of wine.

Holy Smoke! Its Mezcal Mezcal can be hard to pin down and I've found this one to be decent. Includes a table of things that were available in the US at time of publishing and the author's opinions on quality.

Vermouth - pretty in depth history on vermouth, focusing on its place in American cocktail Culture

Imbibe! In depth history of early cocktail culture, focusing on Jerry Thomas and the Bon Vivant's Companion

...I'm sure I could think of more, given the time. I'm trying to just delve into things currently on my shelf, and not in my wishlist.

1.Purple Crock pot.

Slow cookers are awesome. Things that come in purple are more awesome.

2.This cookbook of good & cheap meals.

Eating better is one of my goals this year. The book will total help.

3.This Zelda wallet

I need a new one and I love Zelda. It's from a site off Amazon, but it's on my wish list. Best thing, free global shipping!

4.MtG Gift box for 2014

I thought someone would get it for me for Xmas that year and I got other stuff instead. I collect them and missing it makes me sad.

5.Double up and get something for your self OP. I'm in the UK, so my items are all way under £50 including shipping.

Thanks for running the contest.

If you like reading, a couple books that I'd recommend would be The Food Lab and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. They'll help you understand a lot more about the tools and ingredients you want to use and learn how to use them. There's plenty of recipes too! These are both award winning books that I think should be in your local library too if you don't have the money to buy them! Happy cooking!

The meal prep subreddit might give you ideas too on big batch meals.

Do you think your dad might help you cook or help you learn? It could be a cool thing to do together and maybe you could help him learn somethings and give him some autonomy!

budgetbytes.com is great for relatively healthy and inexpensive food that tastes good. I've gotten some of my favorite recipes from there.

Also, Amazon is currently selling Joy of Cooking for 55% off right now. This is the mother of all cookbooks. It concentrates on giving no-nonsense, dependable recipes that you can add to and customize as you gain confidence as a cook, instructions for beginners to cooking, and information on a large number of common ingredients to help you stock your shelves. Not everything in it is healthy, but it is an AMAZING resource for anyone new to cooking. Hope that helps.

My grandma recently gave me an old Chef Paul Prudhomme cookbook from the 80's that is great. I'm a huge gumbo fan and I think there's like 5 separate recipes in there just for that, with different variations for chicken/sausage, seafood, duck, etc.

But, what I really came here to say is there's a newish book called Salt Fat Acid Heat that isn't directly tied to cajun food, but is excellent at explaining the science of food and why things are delicious. I like this instead of a cookbook that just gives you a list of ingredients and specific steps to follow, with no reasoning for why you're doing each of the steps. Here's a link: https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering/dp/1476753830... there's also a Netflix special that has the same title that's good as an appetizer to the book if you're interested.

An awesome cookbook that will pair nicely with this sub: http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Kitchen-Cooking-School-Cookbook/dp/1936493527/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451170560&sr=8-1&keywords=cooking+school

A stand mixer: http://www.amazon.com/KitchenAid-KSM150PSCU-Artisan-Pouring-Shield/dp/B004GUVD6K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451170611&sr=8-1&keywords=kitchENaid+stainless+steel+mixer

This cool measuring beaker: http://www.amazon.com/Emsa-2206-050096-Perfect-Beaker/dp/B001BDLWE8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451170682&sr=8-1&keywords=measuring+beaker

This awesome plunger things for dry and sticky ingredients: http://www.amazon.com/Plunger-Metric-Adjustable-Measuring-BigKitchen/dp/B000I1X3WS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451170718&sr=8-1&keywords=measure+dry+and+sticky+ingredients

A baking mat

A super nice Williams and Sonoma skillet with a lid

I'm super excited to try everything out!!

America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. I have the older edition, but I assume the new one is good as well. It has both basic recipes (such as different ways to cook eggs or the best way to make a baked potato) as well as typical classics (lasagna, roast turkey, steak with pan sauce, pizza, etc.).

Basically if you're looking for one cookbook that covers all common American fare, this is a great option. Also has equipment and ingredient brand recommendations. It's spiral-bound, which is great for a cookbook since you can lay it flat on the table.

America's Test Kitchen Cooking For Two. Many of the same recipes as above sized for two people. Plenty of different ones as well. A lot of focus on easier weeknight meals.

Go to the bookstore first. Check some basic cookbooks for recommendations. A good one can be found in the America's Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook, I'm sure others exist. Take notes, or if you don't have a good cookbook, buy it.

A good cookbook will not only tell you what you should have, but also why you should have it. As much as possible buy good quality gear, it works better as well as lasts longer. Keep in mind when selecting your skillets that you will want both slope and straight sides, and you will want quality stainless steel and non-stick versions, as well as a fair sized cast iron skillet.

There are several lists here with lots of useful tools. One standout that is missing in the lists is a cast iron dutch oven. I prefer enameled though Mom used the plain.

Hope this helps, congratulations on the new place!

As far as cookbooks go, I would suggest just some basic ones such as Better Homes and Gardens Cookcook which has a bunch of basic recipes that you can elaborate yourself. For a little more specific but usually simple recipes, I'd suggest The Joy of Cooking; it has a bunch of usually pretty simple recipes and goes into some details about food pairing, knives and cuts of meat...

If you have trouble understanding some of the cooking terms or just want to know more about it, my mom gave me The Cordon Bleu's Cooking Techniques which gives instructions about how to cut and prepare vegetables, fruits, meats, etc... It also has some basic recipes in there for you. I use it a lot; I know you can look up these things online but I rarely ever bring my computer to the kitchen.

As far as knives go, I would buy a couple of high end ones that you would use frequently and, if you want more, you can buy the cheap ones that have serrated edges. I do have a lot of cutting and peeling of veggies and fruits, so I have 3 paring knives. One small one for small stuff. A Tourne Knife (paring knife that is curved w/ sharp edge facing inwards). And a larger paring knife that I use for cutting most vegetables. You probably don't need a Tourne knife unless you discovered that you do a lot of peeling. When I say I bought "expensive" ones, I mean I went to like Sur La Table and bought ones that were like 10 bucks each and not the 100-200 USD ones. After that all you probably need is a chef's knife. With those you can cut/peel/trim almost anything quite easily.

Kitchen scissors can be useful for cutting off fat of pieces of meat (or skin). I found a decent pair at Costco that wasn't too expensive. But you don't really need that. So if it is out of your budget, then don't get it.

Next up is tubberware (or whatever you want to call it). Make food for multiple people (even though it is just yourself), save it and throw it in the fridge for later. I do this and bring leftovers to work everyday. It saves me money from having to go out and I tend to eat healthier so it is ok.

I tend to make every week or two, a pound of brown ground beef w/ a basic tomato based sauce in there. From there I can make chili, pasta sauce, add a little more veggies and I throw it into bell peppers (which gets thrown in the oven - yum), etc... You can probably do multiple things w/ it. But it is nice when I have a long day at work and don't really feel like doing a lot of cooking; I can just throw together some pasta.

In the winter time, I tend to make some kind of big stew on weekends. It lasts me a couple of weeks and is very tasty and hearty when it is cold out. Stews involves cheap cuts of meat as you cook them for a long time so it tenderizes them.

That is all I can really think of right now. Feel free to message me.

Essentially, there's not really a single standard definition. As far as I'm aware, La Trappe is one of the only breweries that actually refers to its own beer as a quadrupel; other terms for similar styles include Grand Cru or Belgian strong dark.

With that said, probably the best resource for learning about brewing these types of beers is Brew Like a Monk by Stan Hieronymus, which provides tons of information about recipe creation, yeast selection, fermentation temperatures (which are pretty critical for many Belgian styles), and great information about what goes in to producing Trappist beers like Rochefort, Westvleteren, or La Trappe.

Hope that helps!

1 - What's your favorite movie? Moulin Rouge


2 - Dream vacation? Tie between South Korea and Taiwan


3 - Best birthday you've ever had? My 18th, with all my friends :)


4 - Do you have any pets? I've had many, none currently :(


5 - Single, dating, married, divorced? Dating


6 - Who did you have a celebrity crush on when you were 14 years old? Orlando Bloom (Still have)


7 - What would you do with $1,000,000? Buckle up kids... First I'd fly my boyfriend and myself to Hawaii to spend a few weeks planning what we'll do with all the money. I'd give portions to family. Boyfriend and I would probably end up buying a nice place in Seattle to live in, with a car each. Pay off his college debts, work out his visa situation and all that. Hopefully I'd be able to start a big garden and greenhouse. I think we'd live peacefully, with hopefully a couple travels throughout the year. Eventually install things to lower our carbon footprint and whatnot.


8 - Your favorite memory? The first time my boyfriend visited me, when he got through customs and I ran into his arms.


9 - Favorite dessert, and why? Dark chocolate cake, chocolate icing, and coffee ice cream. I have it every year for my birthday. It's just the perfect combination of sweet and bitter.


10 - Who is your best friend? A girl named Courtney, for the past 15ish years :)


11 - What consumes most of your time? Dicking around on the internet, unfortunately. Oh and cookings!


12 - How long have you been a redditor? Technically a year but I've only been active the last month.


13 - What item on your wishlist do you want the most? This cookbook because my boyfriend and I spend way too much on groceries currently.


14 - Innie or outie belly button? Innie!


15 - What color is your underwear? :

While the classics are classic for a reason, they have a dirty little secret: they reflect the food tastes of the time in which they we written. I almost never cook anything from Mastering the Art anymore, because tastes have moved on.

Today, I would start a new cookbook collector with How to Cook Everything, any edition. 20 years ago, it would have been Joy of Cooking. 40 years ago Fannie Farmer. 60 years ago, Betty Crocker, which now doesn't even turn up on Amazon on the first search page. I own all those cookbooks - and a ton more, but Bittman is where to start now, IM (rarely)HO, because he reflects general tastes, techniques and availability of today. I wouldn't part with my Escoffier, but I read it for taste inspiration, not recipes these days.

This afternoon, I was editing my cookbook collection to make room for some more advanced books in a few areas and to eliminate some dated ones, so the topic is fresh on my mind. I will never part with some older books that have the stains and happy memories of many successful uses and some fun litigation from my book publishing days, but cooking is a dynamic art. Knowing how to develop a tin type will not make you a better digital photographer.

The complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian

I think is by far the most approachable book for any novice. Palmer's book is certainly great, but far more technical and just plain overwhelming for a beginner. Perhaps unless you have a strong science or engineering background (as I understand Palmer does) I find Palmer's book more like a textbook, and Papazian's more like a handbook.

How to Brew was my first book and it was tough, I was often confused and just powering through chapters trying not to get confused. The Joy of Homebrewing takes a much softer approach and simplifies a lot of the more advanced concepts, and is written in much more casual language.

"Relax. Don't worry. And have a homebrew."

Watch Good Eats, for a start. I think pretty much every episode is up on youtube, and S1E1 (Steak) was what got me started on cooking. The show feels pretty corny sometimes, but it's full of great information and flexible recipes.

When you're good on basic techniques, you can pretty much pick up any cookbook and make things work. I suggest Keller's Ad Hoc at Home for some mind blowing (and thoroughly explained) stuff, and Mark Bittman's How to cook Everything series for pretty much everything else.

This is my full list of books from /r/homebrewing but it includes pro level books:

New Brewers:

• How to Brew - John Palmer
  
• Brewing classic styles- Jamil Zainasheff
  
• Designing Great Beers - Ray Daniels
  
• The Complete Joy of Homebrewing - Charlie Papazian
  
  Continued Learning:
  
  
• Water - Palmer and Kaminsky
  
• Yeast - Zainicheff and White
  
• Malt - Mallet
  
• Hops - Hieronymous
  
• Experimental Brewing - Drew Beechum and Denny Conn
  
• Radical Brewing - Randy Mosher
  
• Brewing Better Beer - Gordon Strong
  
  Specialty/Advanced/Other:
  
  
• American Sour Beers - Michael Tonsmeire (/u/oldsock)
  
• Brewing with Wheat - Stan Hieronymus
  
• IPA: Brewing Techniques - Mitch Steele
  
• Farmhouse Ales - Phil Markowski
  
• Brew Like a Monk - Stan Hieronymus
  
• New Brewing Lager Beers - Gregory J. Noonan
  
• Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers- Stephen Harrod Buhner
  
• Drink: a cultural history of alcohol - Iain gately
  
• Principals of Brewing Science - George Fix
  
  Business Books:
  
  
• Brewing Up a Business - Sam Calagione
  
• Brewers association Guide to Starting Your Own Brewery - Cantwell, among others
  
• SO you want to start a brewery - Tony magee
  
• Beyond the Pale: The Story of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co - Ken Grossman
  
• Beer School: Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery Paperback –Steve Hindy & Tom Potter
  
  Technical Readings (Textbooks might be expensive):
  
  
• Brewery Operations Manual - Tom Hennessy
  
• Beer Packaging - Master Brewers Association
  
• Technology Brewing and Malting - W. Kunze, 5th Edition
  
• Malting and Brewing Science, Volume 1 - Many Authors
  
• Malting and Brewing Science, Volume 2 - Many Authors
  
• Brewing yeast and fermentation - Boulton and Quain

I realize that you've asked for something more like a textbook, but I think you should consider The Joy of Cooking. It's got recipes, but it's also a fantastic reference for everything cooking-related. It can teach you how to make stocks, soup bases, prepare shellfish, pluck and dress a bird, roll pie dough, cook in a pressure cooker, can vegetables, smoke meats and fish, etc. The recipes will tell you what page to look on for any ingredients that require extra prep. I bought mine at a used book store for $6 (it's the 1975 version, but they also had a 1997 edition for $10 that I bought my sister). If you're trying to learn how to cook but not become a professional chef, I don't know if there's anything better.

EDIT: I also have this link saved of Alton Brown listing his favorite cookbooks. Ratio is one I've been meaning to pick up. I'll also mention that for all his shouting on other shows, I like Gordon Ramsay's "Cookalong" series quite a lot, and much of it is up on YouTube.

Try a simple pasta dish...it's very hard to mess up pasta, and there are a ton of recipes online. Once you have one success under your belt, I think it will be easier to move on to other dishes. Pastas and stir frys are usually pretty simple. Salads and soups are usually pretty simple as well. I usually stick with simple because I can easily get lazy about cooking. The internet is a great resource for easy recipes and there are a ton of books that specialize in easy recipes. I think this book is a good resource for easy cooking:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Without-Book-Techniques/dp/0767902793

For using your stock this time, I'd make something simple that shows of the stock's flavor without too many overpowering flavors (i.e. no coconut milk, tomato soup, etc). Something like Alice Waters' chicken noodle soup.

Other stock advice:

Overnight is not necessarily too long, but it's also not really necessary. I give my stock 3-4 hours on the stove at a bare simmer (a bubble breaking the surface every few seconds) and it's always rich and delicious.

I avoid dried herbs - they tend to have a really strong flavor that you don't need in your stock. If it's a flavor you want for a soup later, just add it when you make the soup. A few fresh parsley sprigs are nice, though.

I like to keep stock a blank slate: just carrot, celery, onion, and bay leaves for aromatics.

I generally rely on Michael Ruhlman's Ratio for stock technique. The game changer for me was his advice to add vegetables only for the last hour or so of cooking. After that, they break down and their flavor gets muddy.

Edited to add: of course, the most important stock advice: NEVER LET IT BOIL, and NEVER STIR. Leave it alone!

Gastronomique is an incredible resource for all pretty much anything edible.

Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is also a great resource but is more like a text book than a cook book.

The Ideas in Food books are pretty good too.

I guess I've been leaning more towards "educational" type reading lately (opposed to recipe tomes). Ratio is also very good. Does reddit like Ruhlman?

If you're going to cook, you'll need some basic tools. A saute pan, a large saucepan and a smaller saucepan should be good to start, along with a mixing bowl or two, a sheet pan, a casserole dish, a washable (plastic) cutting board, a couple of wooden spoons and some tongs. You'll need a couple of knives too - an 8" chefs knife and a smaller paring knife will take care of just about every job in the kitchen. Crazy gadgets aren't necessary for a beginner (and the more experienced you get the more you'll find they probably aren't necessary at all). Most everything you need can be procured at thrift stores or tag sales if you're on a tight budget. Stay away from older Teflon non-stick pans; if you feel more comfortable with non-stick over stainless, try to get anodized instead. To prevent accidents, keep your knives sharp.

Memorize or print this out: Safe Minimum Temperatures

Definitely always have salt, pepper and olive oil on hand. You probably don't need one of those all-in-one spice racks with every herb known to man in it; you'd be surprised how little of them you end up using. Fresh herbs are nearly always better, anyway. The main dried ingredients I keep on hand now are cumin, red pepper flakes, (about 6 varieties of) chili powder, onion powder and garlic powder.

Grab a couple of cookbooks (How To Cook Anything and The Joy of Cooking are awesome and include lots of different types of cuisine) and just try something you like. Start with recipes that don't have a lot of ingredients or steps. Start with recipes you know you like. If you don't understand what they mean when they tell you to do something, Youtube is definitely your friend.

Taste often. Don't feel like you have to stick to the book 100%. If something needs more pepper, a dash of hot sauce, a pat of butter, put it in. You are the one who has to eat it, so make it yours. Remember, you can always add more of something, but it's pretty tough to add less. Don't feel bad if it doesn't come out perfectly the first time, or the second. It seems daunting at first, but if you keep at it, it gets much easier.

Edited to add: http://www.reddit.com/r/cookingforbeginners

I recommend the Joy Of Cooking. I don't know how common it is and maybe it's a cookbook your grandparents will have on a shelf, but everyone has one in my family. It pretty much has a recipe for everything inside it, and a how to. Great for those who want to learn, and those who are seasoned in the kitchen. Every time I've found a disappointing recipe on the internet, the Joy of Cooking has always given me a positive second go around.

It's also my go to for Thanksgiving. This book will teach ya how to make a pretty damn good turkey.

Yeast. Highly recommended.

Brewing With Wheat. Great book, but you'll get the most out of it if you feel comfortable taking some basic parameters and building a recipe yourself.

Radical Brewing. Lots of weird stuff, but I thought it was surprisingly strong on the basics, too.

Brewing Classic Styles. Good resource for tried and true recipes. One or two recipes for each BJCP style might be either a strength or a weakness, depending on how varied your brewing interests are.

On my bookshelf:

• How to Brew : Everything You Need To Know To Brew Beer Right The First Time by John Palmer
  
  
• Brewing Classic Styles: 80 Winning Recipes Anyone Can Brew by Jamil Zainasheff
  
  
• Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation by Zainasheff and White
  
  
• Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass by Randy Mosher
  
  
• The Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charles Papazian
  
  
• Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles by Ray Daniels
  
  
• Great Beer Guide: 500 Classic Brews by Michael Jackson
  
  
• The Brewmasters Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food by Garrett Oliver
  
  
• Beer is Proof God Loves Us: Reaching for the Soul of Beer and Brewing by Charles Bamforth
  
  
• Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World by Christopher Mark O'Brien
  
  
• A Year of Beer: 260 Seasonal Homebrew Recipes by Amahl Turczyn
  
  
• Clone Brews: Homebrew Recipes for 150 Commercial Beers by Tess and Mark Szamatulski (outdated version)
  

How about home brewing. It may take you a few times to get the hang of it, but you can make some pretty awesome belgians if you take your time. There are a few really good books out there that will give you clone recipes so you can recreate your favorites without starting from scratch. Watch out...it's a rabbit hole :)

Clone Brews
http://www.amazon.com/CloneBrews-Homebrew-Recipes-Commercial-Beers/dp/1580170773

Brewing Classic Styles
http://www.amazon.com/Brewing-Classic-Styles-Winning-Recipes/dp/0937381926

Belgian Ale
http://www.amazon.com/Belgian-Ale-Classic-Beer-Style/dp/0937381314/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344644397&sr=1-6&keywords=belgian+beer

Alton Brown's cookbooks are quite good, so I'll add my voice to those recommending them.

If you don't need color glossy photos, "The New Best Recipe" from the folks at Cook's Illustrated magazine has great recipes and thorough instructions.

When you someday move beyond the basics, I'd also throw in a plug for Michael Ruhlman's "Ratio" and Jacques Pepin's "Complete Techniques". Ruhlman's book breaks some recipes (like doughs, batters, and custards) down to their basic components and will help you understand how to modify or even improvise with some kinds of recipes, and Pepin's book has great illustrations that can help get you through some of the techniques mentioned by not described by cookbooks. Pepin's Techniques might even prove useful to you now as a reference, depending on what other cookbooks you're working with.

Not tech related but the first anniversary is considered the “paper” anniversary (technically that’s for weddings but whatever). You could look for a nice print or, going with the cooking motifs, get a copy of The Joy of Cooking (https://www.amazon.com/Joy-of-Cooking/dp/0743246268) and write a nice personalized note in it. It’s a classic and would be a good addition to any cooks kitchen.
Happy anniversary!

For the tomatoes, Alice Waters has a GREAT recipe for tomato confit (recipe from Culinary Artistry):

>Allow about two tomatoes per serving. Make a bed of basil leaves in the bottom of an ovenproof dish that will hold the tomatoes snuggly in one layer. Peel and core the tomatoes and place them core side down on the basil. Lightly salt and pepper. Pour enough extra virgin olive oil to come up halfway up the sides of the tomatoes. Bake for 1 1/2 hours in a preheated 350 degree oven, until the tomatoes are soft and lightly caramelized and have infused the oil with their perfume. Season to taste and serve spooned over cooked and drained fresh noodles.

As for the squash, sometimes I like to turn them into french fries (egg and breadcrumb them, bake them till crispy), but more often, I will braise them (lightly saute, add some stock, simmer until liquid is gone and add a little olive oil to glaze them with the reduced stock, season to taste), then serve it with the tomato confit I mentioned earlier, or some tomato jam (cut tomatoes in half, seed them, roast them on top of a bed of [insert herb of choice here] with some olive oil, salt, and pepper at 400 degrees for 10 minutes, cool to room temp, peel and remove cores, then chop in food processor just until the flesh is broken up, then salt to taste and hang in a quadruple layer of cheesecloth for like 2 hours, discard liquid, then combine with a little bit of vinegar, olive oil, and salt.), and serve with some fresh chévre and some mint leaves (ans squash blossoms if you have extras!).

Or my other favorite, which is, quarter and seed the zucchini, then cook some garlic in a pan with olive oil until golden, then turn pan to high and add the zucchini, stirring constantly to make sure it doesn't gain any color, for maybe a few minutes. Cover with a parchment paper lid, turn the heat to medium low, and cook until tender. One cooked, mash zucchini with a fork and fold in some chopped mint and squash blossoms and season to taste.

As for the Green beans, I would TOTALLY make some minestrone broth, lightly roast the beans, then pour the broth over them and serve. For my broth, I sweat some leek, zucchini, carrot, celery root, and garlic until tender, then add some tomato paste, then some white wine, potatoes, chopped tomatoes, and enough stock to at least cover and simmer for like maybe a half hour. After, I take it off heat and put in some herbs (basil and oregano?) and let it steep for like 20 minutes. Strain, then return the liquid to the pot (sans solids) and reduce till maybe half the volume, then whisk in some olive oil and lime juice.

Onions! Take those onions, and seriously just half them and braise them. Drizzle them in olive oil, salt, and pepper, and bake at 425 till golden and delicious.

Lastly, I just remembered that Daniel humm has this recipe for a tomato soda, if you are adventurous!



Soda Base

Ingredients:
-18 large heirloom tomatoes
-2 stalks diced celery
-6 tablespoons finely grated horseradish
-4 1/2 tablespoons salt
-basil leaves from 2 large bunches
-leaves of 9 sprigs lemon thyme
-1 1/2 jalapeño chiles, stemmed and seeded.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Core the tomatoes and, with a paring knife, score the bottoms with an X. Blanch in the boiling water for 10 to 15 seconds, then transfer to an ice bath. Once they are cool, peel them and cut them into quarters. Puree tomatoes with the rest of the ingredients in a blender. Line a colander with a quadruple layer of cheesecloth. Hang the tomatoes in the cheesecloth overnight in the refrigerator, saving the liquid in a bowl underneath. Discard solids. You should have 3-4 cups of soda base.

To finish:

-1/4 cup simple syrup (boil sugar and water in a 1:1 ratio until sugar dissolves)
-1/4 cup lemon juice
-ice
-basil sprigs

Combine 3 cups of the soda base with the simple syrup. Add the lemon juice and stir to combine. Transfer to a seltzer bottle and charge with a CO2 cartridge. Fill 4 glasses with ice and dispense the soda into the glasses. Garnish with basil.

Holy smokes! I almost didn't send my Dunkelweizen in, because I didn't think it was very good.

Here are all the details about the two winners, in case anyone is curious (I can also post this somewhere else, too):

• It was my first time making both styles (Saison and Dunkelweizen)
  
• I did 10 liter (2.6 gal) brew-in-a-bag batches, both with dry yeast
  
• Both recipes were from Brewing Classic Styles, but I subbed and tweaked ingredients based on what I had available.
  
• I used Bru'n Water for my water adjustments (Martin's actually in my homebrew club), and did my grain and hop calculations by hand.
  
  Anyway, the recipes:
  
  Walla Walla, Wallonia (Saison)
  
  Fermentables:
  
  
• 80% Avangard Pilsner
  
• 8% Table Sugar
  
• 6% Briess White Wheat
  
• 6% Avangard Light Munich
  
• 1% Dingeman Cara 45
  
  Hops/Boil:
  
  
• 60: 27 IBU German Tradition
  
• 20: Irish Moss
  
• 20: Yeast Nutrient
  
• 0: 0.75 oz German Tradition (for 5 gal)
  
• Dry: 0.75 oz German Tradition (for 5 gal)
  
  90 min mash at 147F
  
  60 min boil
  
  Yeast: Danstar Belle Saison
  
  Water Profile: Bru'n Water Yellow Balanced
  
  Der Onkel (Dunkelweizen)
  
  Fermentables:
  
  
• 54% Briess White Wheat
  
• 24% Avangard Light Munich
  
• 16% Avangard Pilsner
  
• 3% Dingeman Special B
  
• 3% Briess Crystal 40
  
• 1% Weyermann Carafa II Special
  
  Hops/Boil:
  
  
• 60: 16 IBU German Tradition
  
• 20: Irish Moss
  
• 20: Yeast Nutrient
  
  60 min mash at 152F
  
  60 min boil
  
  Yeast: Safbrew WB-06
  
  Water Profile: Bru'n Water Brown Full
  
  
  If anyone has any questions, let me know. What a great competition!
  
  Jimmy

$250 certainly is not a huge food budget. Depending on how you feel about cooking, you can certainly work with it.

I recommend you look around at various food and cooking subreddits that take budget into consideration. We're talking EatCheapAndHealthy, not FoodPorn. Look at appealing and approachable recipes for common ingredients. If you cook those sorts of recipes, those common ingredients will be staples in your fridge & cabinets.

A few ideas:

• /r/EatCheapAndHealthy/top/
  
• /r/7dollardinners/top/
  
• /r/budgetfood/top/
  
• /r/collegecooking/top/
  
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/336mmw/how_can_i_eat_clean_and_healthy_on_a_limited/
  
  On a related tangent, these are some sources that massively improved my cooking abilities. They might be useful to you, since you mention staying out of the kitchen.
  
  
• How to Cook Without a Book covers basic techniques followed by several recipe variations using the technique. There's a chapter on vegetable puree soups talking about rough volumes and techniques, followed by potato leek soup, broccoli cheese soup, and several others. It lets me stare at the fridge for a minute or two, then start grabbing our random ingredients to throw together. If you're cooking with staples instead of cooking to a recipe, this is a vital skill.
  
• Good Eats by Alton Brown, some of which are on Netflix. They're great 20 minute shows on a wide variety of topics that get into the science behind cooking at a high level. Really helpful for understanding the reasons behind recipe steps.
  
• Serious Eats is my current go-to cooking and recipe site. Any time I want to make a specific thing, I check to see if they covered it first.

This is great advice. One of the best instructional "cookbooks" in my opinion, is Ruhlman's Twenty. I hesitate to call ot a cookbook, as it is more like a cooking manual. It covers 20 essential principles and ingredients that everyone should know. For example, there is a whole chapter on just salt and how to use it properly. Each chapter also has a bunch of recipes which then utilize the concepts taught in that chapter. On top of all that, the pictures are great. The instructional photos are not glamoir shots. They show how the food should actually look while you're cooking it, and include examples of what it will look like if you do it wrong (overcook, undercook, not stirred properly, etc.)

I bought it for my wife (who was already a great cook,) and her cooking improved across the board. I've never been a great cook, but this book helped me build a foundation that made me confident about how to use eggs and onions, as well as roast the perfect chicken everytime.

I recommemd the book to anyone.

Depending on how long it is from when you leave home until when you eat you could just bring something you don't mind eating at room temp.

My old office only had 2 microwaves for over 100 people, probably over 150. The office before that had 2-4 and for a few months none. Needless to say there was always a wait at lunch time. I just started eating my food room temp.

Obviously not everything tastes as good at room temp. I've had good luck with Japanese bento style meals; rice, veg, a bit of meat. Just bento cookbook is a good resource. She has tips for making ahead and freezing parts of the meals as well.

If you have time to cook something quick or heat up some soup a good lunch jar will keep it warm until it's time to eat. It great for pasta and sauce.

For a heartier meal and/or more variety mr bento can't be beat. The stuff at the bottom stays warmest. Again it requires some prep time in the morning though

So I'm gonna go ahead an assume you were gifted this bento book, which is amazing. I have it too, I love it. If you DON'T have it (which I'd be surprised about), then you need it!

As far as ideas and recipes, you definitely need those Rubber Cupcake Liners, which are absolutey fantastic for sperating items in your bento. Additionally they are good for making cupcakes to take with you, OR, you can make these egg muffins for breakfast or lunch in them. This is my breakfast right now, it's genius. Plus I should have used liners for them, the pan was a bitch to clean out.

Also, I highly suggest you check out this website if you haven't yet. Her entire website is just making bento boxes, and things related to bento boxes. What I linked you too specifically is all of her recipes she uses, some of which is just genius.

I love bento boxes because it's something I'm a big advocate for: little portions of lots of things. Instead of just a sandwich, you can have a quarter of a sandwich, some carrots, a tiny chocolate bar, and a bit of pasta salad. It's genius.

I actually already have a more traditional bento box, but I find it's not very condusive to taking to work. The one I have on my Miscellaneous wishlist is one has a built in freezer pack (so I don't have to bring a cooler and ice pack), and lots of rearrangeable individual compartments, which is good since my meals change every day.

I hope that wasn't too rambly! I didn't mean to go on that much =P

So I've finally decided to get serious about my beer brewing after making a half dozen or so more-or-less successful batches in my basement over the past 3 or 4 years. (Partial mash style for now, all-grain will come later.)

I picked up this book which seems to be a fantastic resource; I knew what all the steps were, but that book really cleared up why each step is necessary. And now I finally know what the actual difference between an ale and a lager is!

So now I'm planning on converting my propane-fueled outside burner to natural gas and to pick up a used chest freezer so that I can use it as a fermenting fridge. This is turning into an expensive hobby... but that should be the last of the capital equipment expenses (except for that really, really sweet looking conical fermenter).

Mark my words: I will master Pilsner.

Ultimately, I'd really like to compete in Beau's Oktoberfest homebrew competition. The winner gets to make a batch of their recipe at a commercial scale at Beau's facility and then they'll actually sell it in store alongside their own!

Hey there,

I think the best place to start is just by doing/practicing. The 4-hour Chef by Tim Ferris might be helpful for learning various cooking techniques. Also, if you're celiac, then looking up various paleo cookbooks would be helpful as well, because paleo is inherently gluten-free. I personally really like Well Fed and The Paleo Approach Cookbook. You can also find a ton of great paleo recipes online for free - look up The Paleo Mom and the Paleo Parents websites.

Cookie Crisps just have more air per serving than the Quaker Oatmeal Squares.

Any nutrition books with the words "Intro" and "Basic" will suffice. Here is an interesting read that's not only cheap but easy to follow.

I would suggest reading books like that from Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Rules like hahaboohoo said) or watching his documentary Food Inc.. A few others worth reading are Marion Nestle's Food Politics and Marie-Monique Robin's The World According to Monsanto. An Associate Prof at Stanford University's Prevention Research Center, Christopher Gardner, PhD, found that students taking a "Food & Society" course (n=28) wound up eating better (more vegetables and less full-fat dairy was considered good) than students taking more biologically-related courses (n=72). From reading this insightful piece of research and books like In Defense of Food, I'd suggest being cognizant and learning more about the environmental & social impacts of food as a way to eat healthier rather than focusing on nutrients that reductionist science compels us to do.

How I started was an extract kit and simple brewing kit that included a couple of buckets, 5 gallon carboy, cleaning brushes and cleaning and sanitizing solutions. Plus some air locks and other stuff you need. It was like $75 or at most $100. Kinda like this kit but without the kettle and it had a glass carboy. That kit is better than the one I had but the same brand. I had a turkey frying kit my brother had bought me like six years earlier but I had never used so I used the kettle and propane burner for brewing instead. Worked pretty well for a while. I did like six or seven extract batches batches my first couple years. Then I moved to all grain and built a mash tun from an igloo drink cooler and using a stainless steel braided line like this but I made my braid into a circle to avoid crushing it with the weight of the grain. For two years after I moved to all grain I just brewed recipes from Brewing Classic Styles twice a month till I felt like I had my process down before messing with doing my own recipes or doing more difficult styles. Hope some of that helps you get a start.

How to Brew is pretty widely excepted as the must have piece of reading material. There is an online version, but it is pretty outdated. Definitely spend a few bucks and buy the most recent edition. It is totally worth it. Other than that I think Brewing Classic Styles is great to have around as well regardless of skill level.

Start with recipes that you get from reputable sources. Get a cookbook like Joy of Cooking or spend some time on the food network. The Joy of Cooking can be a pretty daunting book. I find that watching videos can be very helpful if you're not confident because you actually see a person do what you're going to do - the ambiguity of language isn't there. I find Alton Brown to be one of the best in terms of clarity, but his recipes aren't always the healthiest. And if you do encounter a term that you don't know, look it up. Google will bring you to explanations and/or videos for pretty much any term that you find.

The hardest part of cooking for me (still) is when recipes say things like "cook until done." I always try to find recipes that state approximate cooking temperature and time, and I advise you do the same until you get the hang of it. And once I figure out a cooking time for a recipe that doesn't include it, I write it in (I re-type successful recipes in Word and keep them all in a folder on my computer).

Also, record what you do, whether it works or not. I'm a chemist, so this is a habit for me. I record recipes that I try and what went right and what went wrong. If I cooked over high heat for 10 minutes and the outside got burned while the inside didn't cook, I note that and note that I should try a lower temperature next time. Practice makes perfect.

You are asking an excellent question.

Extract is good starting point; most of us started with that and made very drinkable beer. It is nice as all of the variables are taken care of for you - all you need to do is boil the extract, add the yeast, and make sure kept everything sanitary. If you follow the directions, you will have a beer at the end of it.
It is my belief that most people will encourage that route as it is a nice way to ease into homebrewing.

The downside of extract kits, especially in Canada, is that they can be pretty darn pricey. My LHBS (local home brew store) sells the Brewer's Best 5 gallon extract kits for between $80-90 a pop (probably cheaper other places - don't get me started on my LHBS...) whereas I can throw together a similar 5 gallon all-grain brew for around $20-40 depending on what I am making.

Most brewers will transition from a few extract brews to all-grain, or at least to the BIAB (Brew in a Bag style) all-grain brewing. And, most people will then need to purchase a larger kettle, somewhere in the realm of 8-10 gallons is often suggested.

I would have no qualms about someone jumping straight into all-grain brewing right away. Most of us get there anyways, and really it is not all that difficult after you get the hang of it.
Pick up a copy of John Palmer's How to Brew and Brewing Classic Styles and you will be set with a good resource on brewing and quality, tested recipes. A bit reading, this sub, and YouTube will make a good homebrewer out of you. Also, Homebrew Talk is a great resource for all things beer making.

Others want to just dabble in some beer making before spending that kind of cash on a set-up to discover that they actually don't like doing it or don't have the time/space/patience for brewing.

So, my personal recommendation is, if you are up to the task of taking on all-grain brewing sooner than later but want to do a few extract brews first, is to buy a kit that doesn't have a kettle and instead purchase an 8-10 gallon kettle separately. It will handle extract brews and all-grain. Everything else that comes with the basic kit you will use whether you are an extract brewer or an all-grain brewer so you don't lose anything, and are actually ahead if you do go all-grain.

I usually tell people to check out How to Cook Without a Book. It has some recipes, but it's more about giving readers a better understanding of techniques, how to put something together from what you already have on hand, and what things you should just keep around at all times because of their usefulness. As opposed to a lot of books I've seen that give a list of things to buy which will then need to be prepped with tools you might not have.

edit: If you got money to spend and really dig the art and science of cooking there is also Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. At just under $550 USD it's the most expensive and most beautiful cookbook I've ever seen.

I'm going to go another route and recommend How to Cook Without a Book because it helped me finally get into cooking. It's geared towards the home cook and teaches you easy recipe 'blueprints', and gives you examples of how you can adjust them to create a variety of dishes. There is nothing too fancy or advanced here, but it gives an insight into how these dishes work and how you can play with them.

For example, one chapter is just about frittatas. First it teaches the basics of how to make one, and then has a bunch of different frittata recipes (bacon & onions, zucchini & mozzarella, spinach & sausage, potatoes & artichoke hearts, etc) with notes on how to adjust the recipe to incorporate the various fillings. Another chapter I still reference often is the one on a roast chicken dinner. Again it outlines the basics first, and then gives you recipes for breaded dijon, rosemary lemon, BBQ, and tandoori chicken all cooked using the same technique.

I know it's not exactly what you're asking for, but it really helped me build enough confidence in my cooking so that I could start improvising more in the kitchen and take on more advanced techniques.

Also, youtube helped a lot.

Cooking isn't as fussy as people try to make it seem. Baking (especially high end baking) is fussy. Not so much with making meals. Take food add heat, never forget salt. That's one of the most important things about cooking, always remember to taste while you do it and add a dash of salt. Salt brings out the flavor of food. [This] (http://www.amazon.com/Walt-Disneys-Mickey-Mouse-Cookbook/dp/0307168123) was my first cookbook. Got it when I was like 6 or 7 and then graduated to The Joy of Cooking. One of the Great things about kid's cookbooks is that the recipes are designed to be cheap and easy. The instructions are very easy to follow, and the pictures have cartoon characters. How fun is that?

Good and Cheap: (Note: This is also available for free download in PDF format on the author's website. I know many folks who have downloaded it and printed it out for offline use.)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0761184996/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_EVLLDbRBSQMBH

Depression Era Recipes:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0934860556/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_9OLLDbTKCP8B4

Clara's Kitchen:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312608276/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_MPLLDbWM71RM9

More-with-Less World Community Cookbook:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/083619263X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_nQLLDbF12CDHM


Finally, a word on creating your own cookbook binder: Bookmark the recipes you've tried and loved (using Pinterest is okay for this, too), print them out, and either laminate the pages, or use clear sheet protector sleeves to keep them fom getting cruddy with repeated use. Pick out a binder you like or have handy, create labeled categories using tab dividers, then sort your recipes into said categories as you put them into the binder. Voila! Your own collection of recipes you know and trust. 😁

Brewing Classic Styles is very good. It has extract and All Grain recipes for every BJCP style, the style guidelines as well as giving a quick run down of how to tweak the recipes while staying in those guidelines. If you're looking to adhere to specific styles, this is a great place to start, but it is pretty set on the styles.
 

As /u/Mazku pointed out, John Palmer's How to Brew is the standard. If you are a science major, honestly I can't think of a better place to look. The link I provided is to the free edition Palmer offers and it isn't a trial, it's packed with in depth information. There are newer editions available for purchase, but free is for me.

I'd say one of the first steps is to avoid turning the heat all the way on high on the burner - especially if you have Teflon pans.

For starters, just learn how to pan fry basic ingredients like potatoes and onions. Next, get some spices (or even spice mixes) and use your nose to guide that flavor. I know this might be really general, but most of cooking is just repeating basic steps.

A great cookbook is The Joy of Cooking. Don't be afraid of its size - it's a nice place that can help you learn how what you need to know about making food. It even has the rules for place-setting a table!

Does he have a nice insulated mug/water bottle for when he is doing the outdoor stuff? A personal colored or engraved Hydroflask would be a nice gift to keep water cold or coffee/tea hot!

You could also get him a recipe book. These two are on my Christmas list, the first one has SO MANY recipes for everything you can think of and more, fun to get new meal inspiration. The bottom has a Netflix show, but is the basics of cooking and how to boost flavor with amazing illustrations.

You and your FH can write personal messages in the front cover to thank him.

America’s Test Kitchen Complete Cookbook

Salt Fat Acid Heat

My top suggestion would be "How to brew" By John Palmer or "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing" By Charlie Papazian and read before buying anything. You will get a strong understanding of the process and be able to make sure it's something you will want to do before dropping $100 dollars on getting started.

If you want to jump in with smaller batches (1 Gallons) I would suggest buying one of Brooklyn Brew Shops kits or another small batch kit. The process is pretty much the same just in smaller portions. If you decide from there you want to go bigger you always can and then you have a better grasp on the process and what will be needed to make better beer.

I haven’t seen it yet but The Complete Joy of Homebrewing Fourth Edition: Fully Revised and Updated https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062215752/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_XiQoDbVWK4YK0 is worth a read.

Also like everyone else was saying, just take it one step at a time. Just enjoy it. And start kegging ASAP because bottling sucks.

I’d say try not to make too many changes to your brewery all at once, so you can stay familiar with how long different things normally take, and it limits the hiccups you might have. Obviously there’s going to be pretty big steps, like going all grain.

You should check out the book "Brewing Classic Styles - 80 Award winning recipes" by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer.

All the recipes are extract with an all grain option. I made the Blonde Ale from there to give to my friends, as that is an easy to like style for people not very familiar with craft beers. They all approved :)

Amazon Link

Here is the recipe for the Blonde Ale

Well if his only restrictions are no red meat or alcohol, he's got a lot of options! But if he can only eat chicken, fish and vegetables, then he's going to be a lot more restricted.

I'd look into paleo, or Whole30 (paleo, but also no dairy, grains, sugars or alcohol) diets and just ignore recipes with red meat - a friend on chemo has had a lot of reduction in chemo symptoms that she attributes to Whole30, recommended by her oncologist.

I like the blog Nom Nom Paleo and she has a cookbook too. Here's her list of Whole30 recipes to give you an idea of what that's like:
http://nomnompaleo.com/post/42057515329/the-round-up-30-days-of-whole30-recipes

And here's the recipe index, you can see you can avoid the ones with red meat, or alternatively just focus on the ones made with chicken and fish: http://nomnompaleo.com/recipeindex

In general, though, if he has some basic techniques under his belt he'll be able to make lots of meals that meet the restrictions his doctor has recommended - my favourites for that are:

How to cook without a book

How to cook everything

Appetite

All the very best to your dad and hope he gets well soon!

If you want to learn the answers to these questions (or have an on-hand classic reference at any given time) I recommend The Joy of Cooking. It explains the result of the particular techniques and why it is important to prepare things a certain way. Often I find that there are perfectly delicious recipes that skip these techniques and work fine, but it is a good explanation of the classic way of doing everything. It is a great reference for cooking and baking.

https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science/dp/0393081087

https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Kitchen-Cooking-School-Cookbook/dp/1936493527/

Both are incredibly clear, well-illustrated and written, and provide not only instruction on basic cooking techniques, and help a novice cook select the equipment necessary for a successful kitchen. SeriousEats.com and AmericasTestKitchen.com are great resources as well if you're not keen on buying a cookbook.

Alton Brown's Good Eats is also a great how-to resource presented in a friendly, informative and entertaining format.

Finally, I like to recommend You Suck At Cooking to people who say they can't cook. Yes, the videos are mainly comedy skits involving ridiculous things being done to produce, but there are actually some really good nuggets of information skillfully hidden in the chaos of what's going on. It barely qualifies as instructional, but it certainly is entertaining and involves food.

Also you know, thinking about this, here's my best advice for you:

Try to move away from the idea of needing "recipes" and think about cooking more holistically. You don't really need a recipe for a roasted chicken. You need a chicken and an oven and a basic idea of time/temp. After that it's all in what you like? Coat it with olive oil? Sure. Add lemon pepper? Sure. Use BBQ rub? Why not! Stuff the inside with an onion and some rosemary? Go for it. Use butter rather than olive oil? Absolutely.

So much of cooking is not about adhering to recipes but understanding the basics of how to cook and then applying your own tastes.

A fantastic book, if you're really interested in learning how to cook w/out having to rely on recipes all the time is this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Ruhlmans-Twenty-Techniques-Recipes-Manifesto/dp/0811876438

The book takes 20 cooking techniques - things like braising, frying, baking, sauteeing, and explains how and when you would use them. He does provide recipes in each category, but overall you learn how to apply the techniques to just about anything and it really opens your understanding of how to cook ANYTHING.

It is really, really, really hard to cook efficiently for one.

Some people do meal prep and eat the same thing day after day.

I gave up and use a service that delivers me a cooler full of dinners (not frozen) every week. Freshly would be the national equivalent, but I found their portion sizes to be too small and they use a lot of packaging. I leave a few nights empty so I can go out to dinner on a date if needed.

Even paying someone else to cook for me, the cost per meal is less than what I was spending at the grocery store after waste was accounted for.

I also don't have a dishwasher so I hate involved recipes. If you have a dishwasher, you might have luck with preportioned cooking kits like Blue Apron and the like.

If you don't want to do any of this and still want to shop at the store, I find salads to be the best way to go for scaling things up/down.

Bonus link to the world's loneliest cookbook because I love the cover: https://www.amazon.com/Microwave-Cooking-One-Marie-Smith/dp/1565546660/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=microwave+cooking+for+one&qid=1566792626&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Kind of tradition in my family - when my mom got her first place my grandmother got her the Betty Crocker Cookbook. She got one for me, and I got one for my oldest when she moved out.

Now that my mom lives with me, I have inherited all of her cookbooks. The most-used one is the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook followed by the Joy of Cooking.

One of my personal favorites is the Taste of Home Simple and Delicious Cookbook. It has stuff that is easy to fix on nights when I don't have much time to spend in the kitchen. Honorable mention also goes to Desperation Dinners - another great one for quick and easy but tasty meals.

Most things I cook come from the internet, but I still love looking through my cookbooks to get ideas, plan meals for the week, and make a grocery list.

It might be just a different sensibility but I find cooking from principles and ratios far more useful than any cookbook. For example the salt fat acid heat approach is more like teaching you to fish while a recipe is giving you fish. Ratio cooking and baking is the same idea except you can apply it to the more exact practices of baking (or even home job chemistry really). When you know that pound cake is 1:1:1 flour:fat:sugar you can pretty much substitute anything you have around into that ratio and make something tasty. (i should say as a caveat i haven't read these books; they just express an approach to cooking that I take)

Mostly these kinds of books give you the principles to tap into the craft, creativity and artistry of cooking while recipes are specific. It's sort of like the difference between agile and cascade project management styles.

It's a classic, but there is probably no cookbook I turn to more than The Joy of Cooking. It just seems to have everything. All of the recipes are pretty simple and easy to riff off of, and it'll give you a great baseline for just about anything.

It looks like you have plenty of awesome ideas here. I am going to make a recommendation of a really excellent book for deciding what flavors pair well together and how to balance a flavor pallette: Culinary Artistry. It's a terrific resource for people who are trying to move away from recipe-based cooking and into creating their own dishes. It's reasonably accessible-- some of the sample menus are a bit 'out there' but the fundamentals are strong. You might enjoy it!

Ratio by Michael Ruhlman (https://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/dp/1416571728) - My absolute favorite at home cook book, hits everything you're looking for I think. Has baking and cooking recipes

Baking by Hand (https://www.amazon.ca/Baking-Hand-Artisanal-Pastries-Without/dp/1624140009/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468117705&sr=1-1&keywords=baking+by+hand) - More technically complicated, but still great. One of my go to books when I'm looking to learn something new. Mostly breads, but some pastries too

How to Cook Everything (Vegetarian) by Mark Bittman (https://www.amazon.ca/How-Cook-Everything-Vegetarian-Meatless/dp/0764524836/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468117750&sr=1-1&keywords=how+to+cook+everything+vegetarian) - this is the dark horse, you'd be surprised how much he includes in these books. Pizza dough recipe is the bomb.

You can't go wrong with two books, both of which are readily available on Amazon.

I'd start out with the New Complete Joy of Homebrewing, and then move on to Designing Great Beers.

After that, I would recommend joining a local homebrew club, and there will be a big community to support you. And if you need yeast, come on down to Sixpoint with a clean mason jar and we can hook you up.

Let us know how it goes!

Here's my advice to a beginner from a recent beginner.
A lot of people start with a small batch kit like Mr. Beer or Brooklyn Brew Shop that they got as a gift or bought on a whim. However, if I were going to recommend a 1-gal starter kit, I'd probably go with something like the one from Northern Brewer. Or you can get a 5-gal setup for just a little bit more and you get a lot more beer for you money, and it's really not that much more work. However, it was nice learning the process on a 1-gal batch, because it's a lot more manageable and you can easily do it on your stove with a pot you already have. Also, if you stick with it, and upgrade to bigger batches, you will still be able to find good uses for your old 1-gal equipment.

Whether you decide to test the waters with a small batch or jump right into a 5-gal batch, I would do an extract w/ specialty grain kit for your first brew. All grain is not that much harder, especially with small batches, but for your first few brews it's nice to just learn the process without having too many variables to worry about.

Also, buy a copy of The Complete Joy of Homebrewing or How to Brew or both and read the first chapter or so and you will have a good idea of what you're in for.

I have never used a real cookbook, but I watched this mini series on Netflix called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and it was fantastic. Highly recommend it. I just looked up some cookbooks on amazon for you and saw the book there with stellar reviews. It has 100 recipes and also teaches you some fundamentals of cooking and how the ingredients work together. Sorry I don’t know any other books to recommend, I grew up on the internet!

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking https://www.amazon.com/dp/1476753830/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_65lyCbDD3YSJB

Don't worry about exact measurements. Except for baking, that matters. But if you don't like salt, add less. If you really like lemon on your fish, and it only calls for a little, fuck them. Learning how to cook chicken is a good start, so is pasta or a stir fry. Fish is also pretty easy, except a lot of people cook it way too long. Grab a decent cookbook. I REALLY recommend Joy Of Cooking ( https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Cooking-Irma-S-Rombauer/dp/0743246268 ), I don't really need another book. It covers basically everything, from how to set a table and choose the right kitchen equipment to all out fancy shit that you'll never need, and explains everything ELI5 style.

Edit: Oh, and YouTube is an AMAZING resource (and not the celebrity chef videos, although Ramsay does some useful ones). Even if you get overwhelmed by a recipe, it'll click once you see a video of a real person doing it. Plus, they usually respond to comments, and often the question is already asked and answered (a huge one is "what can I substitute for this").

The great thing about cooking is that there is no template! Do what tastes good to you! That said, there are plenty of cookbooks for beginners that will give you basic ideas. This book by Michael Rhulman will give you several recipes for each of 20 basic cooking techniques. It's a great base to start from.

On wine, I completely jettisoned the idea that whites are for some things and reds are for others. You should drink what you like is the bottom line and be less concerned about pairings. If you like reds then just have a light bodied red, like a Burgundy, with chicken or fish and save the big Boudreaux for your steak. Likewise, there's no reason you can't have a nice oaky Chardonnay with a tomato based pasta, etc.

The first cookbook I ever owned was this one: America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. (I have the 2016, version, though.) It has a great many recipes from different cuisines and will teach you technique while it's guiding you through it. I didn't find it intimidating and pretty much everything I've made from there was delicious.

The only caveat I'd make is that not all the meals are the same size. And sometimes you don't want to cook 6 servings. In which case I'd recommend The ATK Cookbook for Two. I gave it to my father last Christmas. He has a lot of cooking experience and he picked it up and immediately learned new things and enjoyed the results.

Brewed a sweet stout from the Brewing Classic Styles book.

• 10 lbs Pale Malt UK
  
• 1 lb Black Patent Malt
  
• 3/4 lb Crystal 90L
  
• 1/2 lb Chocolate Malt
  
• 1 lb lactose
  
• 1.5 oz. Kent Goldings Hops
  
• WLP005 - British Ale Yeast - Substituted this in place for WLP006 which wasn't available at my LHBS
  
  Tasted it prior to going into the fermenter, tastes pretty sweet already, nice coffee / chocolate notes. Hopefully it comes out well. Woke up this morning and found my carboy covered in krausen, quickly cleaned it up and got a blow-off tube inserted.
  
  My plan is to take a gallon of it and try to make a coconut milk stout in a small secondary.

If you are making your boyfriend lunch every day, you need to take a look at bento boxes! It's a Japanese lunchbox. Usually it has rice, fresh veggies, eggs, noodles, chicken, sausages, or anything else you can imagine! I've even made sushi, dumplings and soup. I haven't made any in a couple years, but I used to make them for my wife. They are very healthy and filling and don't need heating.

They make special boxes if you want. However, a couple Tupperware containers will work fine. If you really get into it, you might find a thermos lunch jar.

You can try this book from Amazon. It's a good intro from an American perspective.

http://www.justbento.com/

http://www.aibento.net/

http://lunchinabox.net/recipes/

This is a really good read - these are the opening lines of the book’s introduction:

> Anyone can cook anything and make it delicious.

> Whether you’ve never picked up a knife or you’re an accomplished chef, there are only four basic factors that determine how good your food will taste: salt, which enhances flavor; fat, which amplifies flavor and makes appealing textures possible; acid, which brightens and balances; and heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food. Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat are the four cardinal directions of cooking, and this book shows how to use them to find your way in any kitchen.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat

I'm not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but I enjoyed Ratio:
http://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/dp/1416571728

It doesn't really focus on flavors, but it does explain why certain ingredients are used in specific ratios to create certain types of food, e.g. bread, cookies, stocks, sauces, custards. I really enjoyed it.

Here's what you really want:

How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman: pretty much everything you'd like to do as a normal home cook will be in here. Debone a chicken, choose the best meat, veggies, fruits, how to cook every vegetable, fruit or meat you're likely to use, in different ways, with variations. Breakfasts, dinners, deserts, technique, theory. It'll cover about everything you'd want to learn.

If you want to go a bit further into theory:

Ruhlman's Twenty: twenty topics for the home cook to study and learn, with applicable recipes. The basics every interested cook ought to know. Think, Salt, Water, Onion, Acid, Egg, Butter, Dough, Batter, Sugar, Sauce, Vinaigrette, Soup, Sauté, Roast, Braise, Poach, Grill, Fry, Chill.

That'll get you pretty far, I reckon.

Dude, that's fantastic news. This comment immediately got me subscribed for updates.

Some other source recommendations off the top of my head...

Tiki drinks:

• Just about anything Jeff Berry has put together for tiki drinks. I would argue that Mr. Berry is as responsible for the modern resurgence of tiki cocktails (and their re-elevation to being carefully crafted, quality drinks) as anyone in the industry.
  
• Martin Cate's Smuggler's Cove
  
  General cocktails:
  
  
• Dave Wondrich's Punch and Imbibe - note that you may have to do a bit of reading to arrive at the recipes, as these (and several of the other books I'm about to mention) spend a good bit of time on history and/or technique in addition to "just" containing recipes.
  
• Dale Degroff's Craft of the Cocktail
  
• Jeffrey Morgenthaler's The Bar Book
  
• Gary Regan's The Joy of Mixology
  
• Kevin Liu's Craft Cocktails at Home
  
• The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual
  
• Dave Arnold's Liquid Intelligence
  
• Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails
  
  
  ...that's... not a bad list to get started. Good luck! I'll be interested to follow along with development.

I bought my Joy of Cooking as a poor college student. It is now 26 years old, and it will be handy to the kitchen for the rest of our days. Terrific book.

Alton Brown's your man, via TV, the web and the first book, especially. I'm Just Here For The Food is a better teaching book than Joy, though nothing beats Joy's comprehensiveness.

And, IMHO, Julia Child is the woman, though I'd recommend her The Way To Cook as the one book to get, if you have to pick one. We actually carry it with us when we travel for Thanksgiving. I was going to leave our copy at the in-laws, but my wife didn't want to part with it, even though I was going to order another one. Mrs. Child considered it her magnum opus, and she designed it carefully to teach someone how to cook.

What everyone says about 'just try it' and 'tweak your recipes' is true. Practice is where it's at, but informed practice will get you where you want to go much more quickly.

Happy cooking and Bon Appetit!

If you haven't cooked much, I would recommend picking up Alton Brown's book 'I'm just here for the food' It covers cooking from a science and chemistry perspective, and understanding why something happens makes you a better cook. It also helps keep you from developing bad habits, or working on erroneous information (like
browning meat 'seals in juices'.) Also some very good recipes.

Link: I'm Just Here for the Food: Version 2.0 https://www.amazon.com/dp/158479559X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_g-7eAbXGFVZ5R

For the 'what do I need part' you can get enough equipment to get started from a thrift store, and cast iron skillets are cheap. A skillet/ saute pan, stock pot, mixing bowl and baking sheet will cover most things. For spices I would at least stock garlic, pepper, kosher salt. Lawry's can work in a pinch although I otherwise avoid spice mixes. If you're making Christmas treats, you're probably going to want cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, clove, vanilla, maybe allspice/ mace depending on the recipe. Buying those and the rest of your groceries at Aldi or Trader Joe's is more economical if there is one nearby. International food stores/ Indian groceries sometimes have much better prices on spices as well.

My go to for the holidays is the Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe, it's all over the internet. Favorite cookies anywhere when they're fresh out of the oven :)

A lot of the comments are focused on learning simple techniques and skills, and having a basic understanding of processes. Check out this book by Michael Ruhlman.

From the blurb: " Twenty distills Ruhlman's decades of cooking, writing, and working with the world's greatest chefs into twenty essential ideas from ingredients to processes to attitude that are guaranteed to make every cook more accomplished. Whether cooking a multi-course meal, the juiciest roast chicken, or just some really good scrambled eggs, Ruhlman reveals how a cook's success boils down to the same twenty concepts."

Good to hear that, C. Do you just want a bunch of references you can bury yourself in for the next few months, or do you also want some practical advice/shared experience that you can take on faith until you catch up with the theory, so you could start right away?

If the latter, it might help if you provide some specifics - what area you reside in, do you have a house or an apartment, how large is your family, are your kids picky eaters, would others in your family take you seriously, what do you eat, what you don't eat, any health issues you might want to share, etc. I will try to see what resources you might have available around you.

Also, for background - are you familiar with evolutionary considerations as far as nutrition is concerned? Why do you think the soils may be depleted, what do you think are the most nutritious parts of an animal?

This book is a must - not only does it have a lot of healthy recipies, it gives background on why certain methods of preparation must be used, the biochemistry of the processes, etc.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0967089735

May get those as well right away to qualify for free shipping.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1890612340
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0929173252

I am a bit pressed for time now - need to replace a family dog, not to mention general burden of large family. So I will likely write piece by piece and then we could put everything together.

http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Cooking-75th-Anniversary-Edition/dp/0743246268


That is pretty much the bible of recipe books. That book is an excellent resource and a great place to start, has pictures on how to cut certain things, and is just a wealth of knowledge for almost anything you need to know. Take your time and read how to use the book before you jump in. Many recipes rely on others, but the book is well written and cross referenced. Should be the best place to start.

> microwave cooking for one

If anyone can't find it at Goodwill, it's available on Amazon.

Other great microwave cooking books:

250 Best Meals in a Mug: Delicious Homemade Microwave Meals in Minutes

125 Best Microwave Oven Recipes

A Man, a Can, a Microwave: 50 Tasty Meals You Can Nuke in No Time

I like Ad Hoc At Home for relatively simple food done very well. It will help teach you to respect good ingredients while opening your eyes to some interesting flavor combinations.

I also have On Food and Cooking, which is dense but will teach you about food so that when you do pick up a "super fancy" recipe you may have a chance of actually understanding what the chef is doing and why.

And, of course, there's Ruhlman's Twenty, which is also very informative but is much more accessible than On Food and Cooking.

I bought a book for my roommate last year at xmas and she loves it. It's great if you are on a budget. Most of the recipes are vegetarian and everything is cheap. Oh, and also they are a delicious.

Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4 A Day
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0761184996/ref=od_aui_detailpages05?ie=UTF8&psc=1

> Get a good "for beginners" cook book, cook frequently and don't be afraid to experiment. Youtube is also super helpful.

Agreed. This is a great beginner/intermediate cookbook, and you can get a used copy on Amazon for a penny plus shipping.

the number of cook books over 500 pages, made before 2000 is innumerable BUT we can probably narrow it down to the few books that are super common. First thing that comes to mind is "Joy of Cooking" which is extremely common. Joy of Cooking


although if you were before 2000 the cover probably looked more like this : Joy of Cooking 1997

did i get it?

The Complete Joy of Homebrewing is good. I would say just do it. Get a good kit and try and find someone to guide you along. Then keep reading all you can about brewing. Blogs, books, go to a homebrew store. Don't be afraid to ask for advice. Brewers are like guys with big dicks; they love to show off.

First off, for all the "screw the recipe" folks, let me recommend Ratio - I love the book, and it helped quite a bit with my desire to not worry about what the recipe says.

I love cooking and baking, and often do it as stress relief, or just to take up time. It has long been one of my obsessions, and I suspect part of the reason why is because it's so difficult to get a competent level in all areas of cooking. Each new dish is another skill that needs mastering, and so it has held my interest for a long time.

I'll follow a recipe the first time I make something. After that, I go by memory, or feel.

Best thing you can do right now is come up with as detailed as possible budget for your future. Set up a Mint account, read some articles on basic personal budgeting, and be realistic about your lifestyle. I like to recommend the 50/30/20 as a jumping off point. Try and also get a realistic estimate on your take home pay. (65k-retirement contributions-healtchare-taxes)/12 is a decent estimate until you see your 1st paycheck.


As far as ways to save, there a ton of little things you can do. Major thing I did was use Good & Cheap to drastically cut down on my food expenses. I was spending way too much on eating out, and it was unhealthy both physically and financially. You should also look at public transportation. Taking a train or bus to work will reduce fuel costs, and is also a nice way to get some reading or music in before and after work. If you do drive, drive cheaply. You don't need a brand new car right away. Whatever can get you around safely is all that you'll need. Build wealth, not debt

So because no one else mentioned any resources for recipes yet I will suggest this book. Its "Cooking for Two" but it is extremely helpful for food budgeting and saving, as well as recipes. I think you could easily make one of the recipes and have leftovers to eat the next day or for lunch or something. It has helped me SO much and I've only had it for about 2 weeks or so. I was overbuying and overcooking and wasting so much food. The recipes are simple enough that a novice cook would be able to follow easily and a more experienced wouldn't find to boring.

Another thing I would suggest would be planning meals out. I make a schedule and do my best to stick to it. Obviously life happens but knowing how much food you have and what you need to cook helps immensely with stopping food waste. Which will be important for a food budget.

I LOVE the book Culinary Artistry for this exact reason. A big portion of it is a compilation of pairings and components, both for specific cuisines (Italian, Indian, English, etc etc) as well as ingredients. So if you look up Limes, it'll give a list of items that it pairs well with, an well as which cuisines. A great cross-reference for when you want to branch out and try coming up with something on your own!

Alton brown is amazing. Pretty much everything of any practical application that I learned in 3 years of Culinary school he managed to Cram into 2 pretty easy to read books. I highly recommend them to anybody looking for the Why of cooking instead of just the how.

Ninja Edit: Books Here.

First buy this book.
I'm so old I have the second edition from when I started homebrewing back in the early 90's.

Start saving your bottles. Tell all your friends to start saving their bottles too. Just accept that brewing is a craft and you'll get better with experience. But also that you may never make a beer a good as the best beers you can buy. Have fun!

I'm a fan of Alton Brown's I'm Just Here For the Food.

Only book I know that covers everything from the very basics of starting cooking to advanced techniques. I also love that he doesn't tell you what to do, but the why; the science behind cooking.

Very easy to read and tons of great info.

• Bought "Brewing Classic Styles ..." at the suggestion of many of you fine folks here. I've only had it for a couple of days, but I'm glad I listened to you. Straightforward, cuts to the chase and does a pretty darn good job of pointing you in the right direction if you want to nail a BJCP style.
  
• Bought and received an actual SS faucet which will sit alongside the picnic tap that's been serving my beer for months.
  
• Received other brew gear that had been lacking in my setup (Why did I go without an autosiphon for so long?!)
  
• Brewed up a simple APA (that's, according to the aforementioned book borders on an ARA) as my second of two "brew and brew and brew it till it's badass" beers (the other's a porter).

I don't have exactly what you're looking for, but there are some pretty great bento books that let you make and freeze sides that you can mix and match with fresh or other frozen things to make a balanced, quick lunch in the morning. The two I have are Effortless Bento and The Just Bento Cookbook.

​

I know that's not exactly what you mean, but it's the closest resource that I use.

I LOVE Joy of Cooking. I have made every single recipe in the cookies section (from my 1985ish edition).

I also recommend Jacques Pepin New Complete Techniques. Some of it is challenging, but some of it is just..."oh, so that's how you do that!!"

And...a crock pot. I made at least 1 meal a week in my crock pot. Super easy and cheap!

I suggest you try going vegan. Try it for two weeks and see how you feel. If all is well, try again for another two weeks and keep going if you are finding yourself healthy. Keep re-assessing every month or so to see if your new diet is providing you health while also helping your conscience. You may have the type of digestive system that thrives on a plant-based diet.

One thing that the pro-vegan movement believes is that ALL digestive systems work the same. That you "just need to get used to it" (eating vegan). I'm not 100% up on the microbiome research, but I bet (if they haven't already) that they will start pointing out who is best suited to switch to vegan and who is best to stick to animal protein.

I've known lots of vegans who basically starved themselves over time. Their value system/ethics was so powerful, that they overrided their body's needs. And they were not absorbing/digesting the nutrition from their vegan diet enough to fully thrive. They got sick more easily, felt weak, tired all the time, lost unhealthy amounts of weight, etc. Not right away, mind you, but over the course of 5-20 years. Those who switched back to including some animal protein in their diet felt a renewal of vitality and gained a bit of weight.

I *do* believe that eating vegan is possible. I just think it takes a certain constitution for it to work. If people find out more about how their own particular digestive system works, they could make healthier decisions for themselves.

The issue of animal cruelty in our food system is a very real and valid one. If you decide to improve the quality and ethics of your meat, seek out a small farmer who raises, slaughters and butchers the animals ethically (yes, this is possible) and you will find a difference. One difference of course will be in the price, it will be much more expensive. As recent as 100 years ago, meat used to be very expensive. People tended to raise their own animals or simply didn't eat a lot of meat. It has become (through industrial farming practices) extremely cheap and sadly largely at the cost of the well-being of the animals involved. Don't eat this stuff if you can avoid it. To keep the cost down, simply eat less meat and supplement with plant protein (I suggest a "real food" like tempeh, which is not a frankenfood like much of the plant protein convenience foods.) I don't mean only eating 2-3oz of animal protein a day, but wolfing down an 18oz steak is generally way way overboard.

Perhaps 90% of animals products sold in grocery stores will then be off your menu, because they were derived from industrial-style farming/ranching, which tends to be where most of the cruelty happens. Meat labeled as "organic" or "pastured" is not perfect, but it does tend to provide better living conditions for the animals. Organic is a regulated word, so you're better off with that. Pastured can mean whatever what someone thinks it means -- however, if it truly is pastured, then it will be better meat than most organic. If you want some inspiration for why pastured meat is better, a popular book on the subject is, Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon.

Microbrewed Adventures by Charlie P. is a great read. The idea is basically he pairs homebrew recipes to stories about his adventures discovering new beers.
Edit: Also, it's a great companion to his more famous The Complete Joy of Homebrewing

All Hail the Lobster!!

But for realsies, you are super cool

Thanks for the contest!


This book on brewing would be awesome.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Cooking-Two-Cookbook/dp/1936493837/

My husband and I have a lot of cookbooks, but this one is probably our go-to. Along with great recipes (America's Test Kitchen recipes are virtually foolproof), it's got a great section about shopping for two and storage solutions.

For strength training, Easy Strength by Pavel and Dan John. There is something in there for anybody.

For cardio training, it's not a book, but Lyle McDonald's series on methods of endurance training, also pretty much anything by Joe Friel.

For diet, Ruhlman's Twenty. It's not about nutrition, but it can teach you all the techniques you need to cook your own healthy (and on occasion not so healthy) foods so that you won't be tempted to go off the reservation and order a double deluxe pizza and chili fries when you don't know what else to eat.

Edit: For something very sport specific, there's also Jiu-Jitsu University by Saulo Ribiero and Kevin Howell. It's pretty much the beginning BJJ bible.

Culinary Artistry - This book contains a long list of ingredients and the flavor combinations that work well with each ingredient. It also gives the season in which the ingredient is best. It's really great for getting recipe/menu inspiration or for just figuring out what to do with random stuff in your fridge. It also has some recipes, menus and stories from various famous chefs.

Seriously? Fuck ramen.

Learning how to cook will serve you well for the rest of your life. Better nutrition, less money, better taste, and everybody loves good food.

Get a copy of The Joy of Cooking for a compendium of awesome and some Alton, Brown, Books, to learn what equipment you need and how to cook.

(Commas to annoy Nazi's and show there are multiple links)

As an avid cook and collector of cookbooks, I have three recommendations -

1. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat
   
2. The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez Alt
   
3. The Flavor Bible
   
   The first two will teach you the essentials of cooking. How salt, fat, acid, and heat work together to make delicious food. J Kenji Lopez Alt has a popular serious eats blog and his book will teach you everything you need to know about cooking perfect meat, eggs, burgers, etc.
   
   Once you learn all of the basics from those books, use the Flavor Bible to be creative.

If you really want to learn the ins and outs of taking recipes to the next level, I strongly recommend the book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat. I've been a pretty serious home cook for about fifteen years, but this book has really opened my eyes to how easy it can be to get amazing, flavorful results with some fairly basic techniques.