Pasta sauce: The jarred stuff is loaded with salt. Get 2 cans of diced tomatoes (I get sodium-free petite diced) and one 6oz can of tomato paste. Dump them in a pan to heat up and add black pepper, basil, oregano, and whatever other spices you want to taste. It’s nearly as easy and tastes way better.

Omelet: I tried finding the minute long video that taught me this a few years back but it’s now lost to the sea of how to omelet videos out there. Crack the egg(s) into a bowl and nothing else. Blend them with a fork or whisk. Heat the pan on the stove to 3, 4 max. Lower is better. Then throw enough butter on to melt across the pan, maybe a tbsp. Cover the surface with the melted butter, then dump the egg blend on top. You should use enough eggs to just barely cover the pan about a half centimeter thick. Let it cook all the way through, it can take a bit on the low heat, but it’s worth it. As it finishes cooking through throw some shredded cheese, spinach, or whatever on top. Fold it over however you like. I really wish I could find that video because it’s a lot easier to see than to read.

basic cooking is easy. To me the hardest part is seasoning but you can always get pre made season mixes although its still a bit hard to determine how much to put in. that is a bit of an art. some things to like pasta can be a bit hard to get perfect. Most people I know their pasta tastes better than mine. baking is super easy. just measure mix and make at the temp listed for the time listed. just make sure to preheat. rice cookers are the best easy meal makers. I stink at cooking but I can do a whole lot.

If you can, get an air fryer and an instant pot. Two of the most useful kitchen appliances. If you’re interested in asian dishes, all you need is soy sauce, mirin, fish sauce, and sesame oil as the most basic ingredients. Have those in your pantry and you can make a ton of dishes.

Pasta is a great dish to get started, because you can expand upon it in tiny steps that also teaches you other cooking basics. Such as how to:

• cook up ground beef/turkey/pork (“brown”)
• sautee onions (“caramelize”)
• sautee vegetables of choice (peppers, mushrooms, kale, spinach, summer squash, eggplant, etc)
• mince garlic

Each time you make pasta, additionally cook one of the above add-ins to experiment with. Cook it in a separate pot/pan, then mix with the sauce once complete (if you pour the sauce directly into the meat/vegetable’s pot/pan, that’s known as “deglazing,” as it picks up all the yummy brown stuff stuck to the bottom of the pan, and also makes the pot/pan easier to clean later!)

Also, and this is a biggie, if you never had anyone teach you how to cook (it’s unclear from your post if you did), you missed out on a lot of critical kitchen safety instructions, such as how to not cut yourself on knives and other bladed kitchen equipment, how to not start accidental fires on the stovetop or in the oven (and what to do if one happens anyway), food-borne illness prevention, etc. Unfortunately I don’t have any specific resources for you, but please look into kitchen safety before diving in too deep! Don’t let it scare you off though; remember billions of people have been cooking around the world for thousands of years, and while there are dangers, basic safety precautions go a long way (also the modern kitchen makes cooking safer than ever).

My top three resources for cooking:

Alton Brown. I’ve been a fan of his for over 20 years at this point. He used to make cooking shows for the Food Network, but has been making YouTube videos that are, IMO, his best work yet. He’s like the Bill Nye of cooking. Each episode is a deep dive into a topic, with explanations of the science and history behind the steps of the recipe.

J. Kenji López-Alt. He’s behind Serious Eats and has a YouTube channel. Serious Eats in particular prefaces their recipes not with filler stories like some sites, but detailed explanations of the decisions they made for the recipe, and often different options you can take. When I want to cook something new, I will usually look for a bunch of recipes from different sources to get a feel for what they have in common and how they differ. If there’s an article on Serious Eats, especially by Kenji, I can probably just stop there.

Brian Lagerstrom. These are the most conventional cooking videos on the list, but he’s also THE most directly practical cook on this list. By that I mean, there have been more occasions where I’ve seen him make a recipe, decided to try it out, and actually done it fairly soon after with success. The recipes are very well-explained, and sometimes even shows you why you should do things a certain way by showing you what happens if you don’t. Every food presenter will workshop recipes, but it’s rare that they show you the failed versions to teach you something!

All of these are great for explaining the process of cooking. It’s one thing to just copy a recipe, but understanding the why behind it is so much more useful to teaching you how to cook in general. That helps you build overall skills, and develop the ability to modify recipes, improvise, and maybe even develop your own recipes.

I’ll also second Chef John and Babish. When I go looking for a specific recipe, they’re names I look out for and know have good information. I also quite like Adam Ragusea, but he is the reason I installed SponsorBlock. (He’s gotten much better, but there was a particularly annoying period where he was REALLY chasing ad dollars. Can’t really blame him, he has a family and wanted to make a career of the channel, and did.)

Best of luck! Cooking can be fun, and such a good skill to have. :)

I recommend investing in a nicer rice cooker. The cheaper ones always burn the bottom. Them use some boxed broth or stock instead of water. You can throw in a can of chicken and add cheese at the end and you have easy chicken and rice.

Chef John (FoodWishes) and Alton Brown on youtube are good resources. Chef John makes a lot of relatively simple homey-meals. Things you could take to a picnic, or serve at thanksgiving: potatoes au gratin, casseroles, that sort of thing. His oleo-saccharum lemonade is a winner. Alton brown is more of a food nerd. He often makes nostalgic things and always tries to elevate whatever he cooks to perfection.

I recommend starting with soup. It’s extraordinarily versatile and you can make large batches if you’ve got food storage (or hell, sometimes I just stick the whole pot in the fridge and dip in the ladle as-needed. does tie up the pot though.). Soup is an excellent way to use up many leftovers; fried rice is a good ‘refrigerator magnet’ too.

Fellow non-cook that sometimes dabbles here: my favorite easy food prep is a pack of ramen, then add a whole bunch of stuff I like. I cook this according to the directions on the packet, but while it’s boiling I’ll add a teaspoon of my favorite hot sauce, some smoked tofu, maybe some kimchi, corn, beans, and/or whatever I’m in the mood for.

Boneless skinless chicken thighs in the air fryer. Season with salt, pepper, onion and garlic powder, smoked paprika. Preheat to 380°, cook for 10 minutes flat side down, flip and cook for 4-5minutes. Chop it up and you’ve got protein for burritos (or bowls), pasta or rice. Swap out the salt and pepper for Slap Yo Mama for a bit of heat. Swap the smoked paprika for oregano and rosemary for pasta. Or not. It is so universal, and 1 hours work can net you protein for 4 days.

Don’t be afraid to cut corners or make easy “cheat” dishes when you start out. Not everything has to be from scratch or top quality or take you all day to make. I’ve made recipes as hard as beef wellington and I’ve made microwave bean nachos and both hit in the right context. There’s a lot of pomposity in cooking and it’s good in its place, but at the end of the day its just something we do for fun. Don’t forget to have fun when you cook!

My favorite Youtuber is Binging with Babish, others will probably mention him; he is getting very popular in recent years. He is a lot of fun, wholesome, down to earth and the man can cook.

My favorite cookbook is The Flavor Matrix by James Briscione; it talks abot food synergy, pairings and a bit of food science. Overall a good intermediate read.

My favorite recipe is Babish’s level 10 cookies, which is my favorite dessert of all time.

My favorite dish is Bucatini Carbonara, a Central Italian pasta dish made with eggs, cheese, and pancetta or guanciale. Authentic carbonara is a true delight, but (don’t tell the Italians) you can make an easy version with bacon and onions that is pretty dang good.

A few suggestions. My first is to keep what you are doing about fancying up store bought items. It’s so easy to elevate a store bought sauce with some herbs, spices or a few cooked items like sausage or mushrooms. Go crazy with whatever you think will taste good. Add way more herbs and spices then a recipe suggests to see what it tastes like. From here you can spend more time to find what is “worth it” to cook “from scratch”. Unless you are a professional kitchen there’s always items you will make and those you buy.

Second if you want to learn the science and technique of cooking (which you might not want to) there’s one cookbook you need. Salt, Fat, Acid Heat will talk about what you need in each dish. There’s also a netflix series about it if you want a preview. Have fun and eat!!!

Cook for your friends. Few things bring people together like food.

Start with one or two close friends. They’ll be tickled pink. Repeat every week or so.
Try your food experiments out on them.
Chanced are they’ll get into it too.

That feedback can be great motivation and it lets people know to buy you cooking gear for holidays.

If you ever start watching YouTube tutorials around cooking, there’s a reason Binging With Banish is a huge name.

Between ingredient cost, recipe difficulty, taste and the product actually coming out right, I’ve always found him super reliable.

But a huge part of cooking doesn’t come from recipes, it comes from experimentation. Learning how to make a simple pasta sauce from tinned tomatoes and other things is a useful step, because 90% of the ingredients last a while, so you only need to buy a few cheap bits, and can control the flavour yourself to find out what you like.

It’s worth noting that eating at home can still easily become accidentally expensive. Pasta and pasta sauce is a reliable way to keep prices low when cooking, but once you’re cooking with 20 ingredients, it can creep up quickly, although most of these can last weeks, if not months, so you only need to buy them once in a while.

A couple of pieces of advice:

Treat recipes as lists of techniques

When you look at recipes, don’t just look at them as ‘instructions to make [insert meal here]’. Look at them as ways to prepare and cook [insert ingredient here] as well. Here is an ‘easy’ recipe for Ragù alla Bolognese (it’s a pretty crap Bolognese recipe to be honest, but it works for this example because it’s so simple). And, of course, it tells you how to make a very basic Bolognese sauce.

But it also tells you how to make a flavor base for a sauce using onion and garlic. It tells you how to get more flavour from the ground beef by browning it. It tells you how to enrich your sauce with red wine, and that you should let that simmer until the alcohol has mostly evaporated. It gives you some things you can add to a sauce to get more flavor: Worcestershire sauce, bay leaves, and thyme. It tells you that you can get a richer, deeper flavor by simmering for a long time. Each of these techniques is transferable to other dishes.

You could, very easily, use the same recipe, but drop the wine, the Worcestershire, and the herbs. Add some cumin, paprika, chilli powder at the start, and beans towards the end, and garnish with chopped coriander/cilantro to make a simple chilli.

Or, ditch the wine, swap the Worcestershire and herbs for some ginger, cumin and garam masala, add peas at the end, and make a simple Keema Mutar curry.

The core of all three of those dishes (from three different continents!) is: Soften onion and garlic. Brown mince. Add tomatoes and cuisine-appropriate spices/herbs. Simmer. Add quick cooking veggies near the end.

If you treat recipes like this you learn techniques not just meals. Once you have a few techniques learned you’ll have the confidence to improvise because you know the fundamentals will work.

Mise en Place

When you’re feeling brave and trying something complex, or something you’ve never cooked before, try mise en place. This is the cheffy name for ‘getting everything ready’. One of the most stressful bits of cooking a new recipe is when you get to, eg: “Step 8. Add the fish sauce”, and you need to scroll back up the screen (if you’re using a website or an app) to look at how much fish sauce you need, then find the fish sauce, then find a measuring spoon, then scrolling back up again because you’ve already forgotten how much fish sauce you need, etc.

Instead, you work your way through the list of ingredients and measure everything out before you start any cooking. If the recipe lists chopped onion, get that onion, chop it, stick it in a bowl ready for when it’s needed. If multiple veggies are added at the same time, prepare them and put them in the same bowl. Where I live, takeaway Chinese food comes in little plastic tubs. I have a dozen or so of these that I use for this purpose. They’re free, stackable, washable, and a good size for most ingredients.

This has three huge benefits. Firstly, you double check you have everything you need before you start cooking (and have time to google ‘alternative to tomatillos’ or whatever, or get someone to run to the store to pick up what you need). Secondly it’s a lot easier to do all your veggie prep in one go, then meat prep in one go, and so on. And thirdly, it makes following the recipe so much more relaxed and easy because everything is ready to go and - if you’ve checked the recipe in advance as well - in the right order for when you need them. There’s not much more stress in the kitchen than suddenly realising that you need to add an ingredient now that will take five or ten minutes to clean and prepare! Doing your mise en place makes the cooking feel almost like cheating it becomes so easy.

Bonus advice

Keep your chopping boards segregated! I have one that I only use, and always use, for raw meat. I never use any of the others for raw meat, only veggies, cooked meats, etc. You do not want to prepare a salad on the same chopping board you used to cut up your raw chicken.

First, get a food processor if you don’t have one. It’s insane how much you can do with one of those. Second, If you can get lentils, yellow lentil soup is tasty and dead easy to make. You can use the food professor for this instead of a blender, and I put carrots (small one or half a big one for three servings) in mine with the onions but you don’t have to do that. Add hot sauce/pepper to taste and eat with flatbread. Third, better too little spice than too much, but generally make sure to taste your food throughout every step of the process so you can adjust as needed. Basically everything (except sweets) will taste terrible without salt so keep that in mind before assuming you messed up. Also don’t forget to eat protein; pasta and sauce isn’t a full meal. Finally, most recipes you’ll find on the internet don’t need all the spices listed; salt and black pepper will get you 90% of the way there.

Edit: Oh also if you have a good relationship with someone who cooks ask them to teach you. Nothing beats hands-on experience here.