Helpful Cooking Tip #2 - Practice Makes Perfect

Helpful Cooking Tip #2 - Practice Makes Perfect

I always cringe when I hear someone say, "Oh, he was born to cook," or, "He's just naturally gifted at cooking and I am not." I cringe for two reasons:

1. Completely not true- it's like looking at an NFL lineman and saying that he was "born" to play football. He popped out of his mother's womb a 350lb tank with all of the plays and situational awareness already pre-programed into his brain! No, it was probably decades of hard work that brought that gentleman to where he is now, and saying that his achievements are a function of the genetic lottery is as wrong as it is insulting. Yes, some people are born with body types incapable of being competitive NFL linemen, but those that are "lucky" enough still have to put in a tremendous amount of work to be capable of playing at that level. The same is true with cooks. Behind every picture perfect cake or casserole is likely a graveyard of burnt or undercooked abominations whose hideous deformities ensured that the cook would never make the same mistakes again.

2. ANYONE CAN LEARN TO COOK. You know those restaurants you eat at? I bet that 1/2 the kitchen staff in the back can't speak English and literally learned to cook that food that you so love in a day or two- and not because they are international cooking savants. The back end of a kitchen is closer to an assembly line than a culinary artist's studio. Cooking isn't a quarter as complex as most people think it is. Stop lying to yourself and get proactive. Go on Amazon.com, pick a style or regional cuisine or even a generic cookbook that is highly rated, and either pick it up from your local bookstore or order it online. Then read it until you understand why the author is telling you to do the things his/her recipes tell you to do. Think critically about the food you do eat, and copy anything you like.

No one is the perfect cook right out the gates. You are going to have some disasters- I certainly have. You are going to burn things, over and under cook things, under and over season, and have things that you thought were cooked perfectly come out awful.

LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES SO YOU DON'T REPEAT THEM.

If you need to set timers, do it. Don't let anyone embarrass you if you use short cuts or simplistic recipes. Find out and do what works best for you, (but that isn't an excuse to act stupidly or to ever give up on what you want) and don't let anyone guilt you into thinking otherwise. Just imagine, Phil Mickelson or Tiger Woods were both probably jeered about their golf abilities by different people at multiple points in their life (though probably with less frequency or impact in their recent years). I can assure you that when you start whipping out dishes that people would happily pay $15 per/portion, no one is going to have anything to laugh at. It's literally just a function of the right education and proper amount of experience.

Read and watch as much media on cooking as you can. You'll find that cooking isn't alchemy or magic, that good food is guided by a couple of basic principles and techniques. The more you cook, the more you will see these similarities across the dishes that you make, and the better you will be able to improvise. Just laugh and learn from your mistakes (and have a good delivery/take out option ready just in case). Overtime, your relative balance of successes to failures should swing in your favor, and the more you cook, the better cook you will become. More importantly, you will be comfortable in the kitchen, and no longer intimidated by cooking.