If you’ve only just become independent, there’s a chance that you’ve never had the chance to give cooking a try. A lot of people after moving out spend some time relying on premade food, or delivery – and that’s no good for your health or your cooking skills. There’s no time like the present to work on your cooking skills, and it’s important that you take it step-by-step. Overchallenging yourself can be stressful in the kitchen, and you’ll only end up wasting ingredients if something goes wrong with your recipe.
Meat and poultry
One of the first things you should be aware of when cooking is how to prepare meat so that it’s safe to eat. Some meats like chicken are very dangerous to eat when they’re undercooked, so you have to be careful when you prepare meals that include them. Our bodies can’t properly process these foods, so we end up with food poisoning as a result of consuming undercooked meat.
It’s not overly challenging, but you’ve got to learn how to check that it’s cooked through, and you can do this manually through cutting it open – or with cooking equipment that beginners might not have.
Your cookware
If you’re going to cook anything, you need to make sure the tools you have are enough. You need at least one pan to fry things in, and one pot for boiling things. If you don’t have these, there are cheap ones you can pick up at home stores, supermarkets, and so on. You’ll also need at least one decent knife to chop up your ingredients, it would be better to have more than one to avoid contaminating your veg with raw meat. And then finally you need a chopping board to prepare these on.
An easy recipe
If you’re new to cooking, you don’t want to start with something complex. Failure can be crushing, especially when it means you’re going without dinner for the day. Start with something easy, like how to cook brats, and you can ensure your first cooking experiences are pleasant for you. Once you’ve learned the basics it will be easier to work on more complex recipes, but until then take it easy and enjoy the simpler meals.
Generally, as long as you follow the recipe it can’t go wrong, but there are a lot more steps in complex recipes – allowing more for you to make mistakes.
Cooking safety
As there are a lot of things that can go wrong in the kitchen, it’s important that you understand how to avoid serious hazards. A pan can easily catch fire if left unattended, and if you don’t put it out properly – that fire can get much worse. For example, if it’s an oil fire in the pan, your first thought might be to put it out with water. Water will cause the fire to get even worse and possibly even spread. Pan fires in general are much better handled by covering the pan with the pan lid and smothering it.
