I think one of the things that has brought me a lot of joy this year has just been trying many different recipes and realizing that my cooking ability is actually not as bad as I thought it was.
I think if I am going to give just one tip for someone who is starting to cook, I would say: just look it up!!
This seems like very weird advice to give to someone, but it is advice that I would give to my earlier self. When I first had to cook for myself, I would just look up recipes online and expect them to show me everything about cooking. And even though recipes are great, they have to be succinct so they don't become too long, and that's why they don't explain the details of the basic skills. Now this wasn't so great for me in the beginning because I had no skills whatsoever. I was starting from level zero. But what I should have realized is that there are so many great resources online that show you all of the basics! Sometimes, I read a recipe and it says "skin and dice the butternut squash", and then I'm just like okay... I'll try to do it on my own. And I try to guess whether it is better to cut it lengthwise or widthwise? Do I skin then dice or do I dice then skin? But I've realized when I just go to google and look it up, I see this beautifully filmed video of someone demonstrating the best way to skin and dice a butternut squash. These just make life so much easier:)
Anyway, I will stop boring you with my ranting. The point of this post is that I'm going to start this series called food diaries, where I just document recipes that I have tried and liked, and I will link to all of them.
Hope you guys enjoy and if you want to let me know when you have tried some of these recipes that would be great :D