#basic cooking

Miko: What? Why?

Raf: You... Can cook?

Miko: ... No, I'm not putting up with this shit.

Miko: Cooking is a BASIC LIFE SKILL.

Cooking

I'm going to assume you know absolutely nothing about cooking, and you're just looking for basic survival meals. There are videos online but it can be overwhelming to watch them without knowing the basics!

One of the first thing people usually learn is to make eggs; this is how you do it:

You find a pan, some eggs, and turn on the stove. You only turn the part of the stove on that you're intending to use. New stoves can be turned on by a click of a button that tells you which heat circle you're about to activate, old gas stoves sometimes need a little lighter, in order for the gas to catch fire! Don't worry; the fire will only be enough to heat up your meal. Once you've successfully turned the heat on, you put a pan on this heated area, and you leave it there for a minute or so, because you want the pan to be hot before you start putting food on it. That way the food will stick less to it too. You pour in about a spoonful of oil, if the pan is heated enough, the oil will easily spill around, then crack an egg directly into that oil, carefully not to splash oil on yourself. You can crack as many eggs as you want in there, depending on how hungry you are. The easiest way to crack it is to do it against a surface, and you're trying to keep any shell from getting into the pan – if you get some shell in, you can fish it out using some utensils.

If your pan has a lid, you can close it to allow the egg to be surrounded with heat on all sides. Some people like to add in a little water to steam the top of the egg, when they close the lid! The water will evaporate (if you add it, you don't have to). You'll see it's done very quickly, when the eggwhite is all in white color, and it gets a little brown on the bottom, you can check with a fork if it's brown yet! You turn the stove off, put the eggs on a plate. You salt it at your preference, and you have a meal.

Pancakes are the second thing I ever learned, it goes like this:

You need a bowl big enough for the pancake mix, a pan that is flat at the bottom, a whisk (or a fork if you have no whisk), a knife or some long flat utensil that can flip pancakes. One or two eggs, milk (can do with water too), flour, sugar, salt. American version uses baking soda or baking powder, in my country we do without that and will sometimes add mineral water. Baking soda and baking powder just make them puff up and make the little air bubbles inside of them, so you can decide if you want flat pancakes or puffed up ones!

You crack the eggs into the bowl, add milk (you add however much you want the mixture to have, there's no hard limits), add a spoon of sugar, pinch of salt, and you mix this up with a whisk or a fork, and then add flour bit by bit, until the mixture becomes a bit thick. It's still supposed to be liquid, you're supposed to be able to pour it out easily, but the consistency is supposed to be thick enough to not be runny, if you drop some on a plate, it should not spill around. If this is confusing, you can try making it with different consistencies and see which one you like best and which one works best for you!

Once you have your pancake batter, you can turn on the stove, put your flat pan on it, and wait for it to heat up, you want it hot before you start. Put about a spoon of oil on the pan, pick it up and angle it around, so the oil covers the entire bottom of the pan – if the oil is hot, it should spill around the pan easily! Then you can grab either a big spoon, or a telugu, or you can just pour directly from the bowl, the pancake batter. If you've added baking soda or baking powder, you want small little puffed-up pancakes, so you add them in little circles and wait for them to be cooked on one side. If you want flat pancakes, you add the mixture to the middle, then grab the pan and angle it around so the batter spills over the entire pan, so it covers the entire bottom of it, like you did with the oil.

It's cooked on one side when it's no longer looking liquid on the top, usually within one minute. At that point you grab your knife, or whatever utensil you have that can flip pancakes, you push it under the pancake, see if the entire pancake is unstuck to the pan, if there's bits sticking, you unstick that first! If you can easily separate the pancake, you try to flip it. Later when you have more confidence, you can flip them just by grabbing the pan, shaking it to unstick, and then snapping it so the pancake snaps up, turns in the air and falls down – it's what I usually do, but you need to be careful to not have a lot of oil under it in that case.

If you mess up the flipping, don't worry, it's still edible even if not cooked perfectly on both sides, it also happens to everyone on the planet, I mess this up regularly, you didn't do anything wrong, pancakes are fickle and don't listen to reason or logic, you can still eat it, it's all good.

Once it's been cooking on the other side for half a minute or so (usually takes less time to cook the other side), you can slide it onto a plate, then cook the rest of your pancakes (usually the first looks the worst and the second one is better), and then you can put whatever toppings you want. We usually use jam, or cocoa, it can work with just sugar, or maple syrup, or honey, or fruit (berries), or some melted chocolate. You can eat it as-is if you don't have anything. In any case you've made something nice tasting that has some protein from the eggs, milk and flour, and you're not going to be hungry after eating them.

Vegetables

I'm going to assume you don't know anything about vegetables, and what you need to know is that there's 2 main differences between veggies: cooking time, and whether they let water out, or soak water in. You can cook any vegetable in water, salt it, and it will become edible, it's not complicated, it's healthy no matter how you do it. If you want to mix different vegetables, you need to know what their cooking time is, so you could add them at different times in your soup/stir fry/whatever you're doing.

All of the legumes (beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils, soy beans) will take water in when they're cooked, they usually are soaked about 8 hours before cooking (lentils and fresh peas don't need the soak) and then cooked for about an hour. Soaking just means you put them in a bowl, cover them so there's twice as much water in there as beans, and then just leave that for 8 hours. Afterwards you throw away that water, put them in a pot, pour new fresh water over them, put this on heat until it boils, then reduce the heat so it's not bubbling so violently, it can be a very gentle bubbling, cover it and let it cook for about an hour. Then you can take one out with a spoon, check if it's soft and nice tasting, and if it is, you're done! You can now use your cooked beans for a meal.

Fresh peas you can just cook for 10 minutes and they're done, lentils can take up to half an hour, chickpeas can be an hour and a half of cooking time, you can adjust this to how these taste to you. After you've done your basic cooking of them, you can eat them in a salad (you just add some oil, salt, vinegar, spices and whatever other veggies you have, and you got a salad), or you can additionally bake them, cook them in a pan, use them for other recipes. You can NOT eat these raw, you need to cook them until soft, if you attempt to eat raw legumes, you will get poisoned.

Vegetables like cabbage and asparagus also likes to take in some water, so be sure to never let them cook just on oil for long, they get softer and nicer with some water.

Vegetables that let water out while cooking are: Zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, beets; this means that if you put them in a pan with some oil, the mix will get soggy quickly, they will let out their own juices, which you sometimes might want! Also they will let more juice out more quickly, if you salt them, salt helps take juices out.

Vegetables that don't take water in or out, meaning they can be cooked just on oil and the mix will stay the same: onions, leek, potatoes, green beans, garlic, carrots, pumpkin. You can put any of these in a hot oiled pan, cook them, and you will get a nice stir-fry, that won't get soggy. You can also add the peppers, zuchinni, or any water-letting vegetable in, and then cook it until all the water evaporates, that works as well! This is then a sautee, meaning you're cooking the vegetables in their own juices, which is delicious.

Greens like spinach and swiss chard are usually added to stir-fry mix last because they are done cooking very fast. Okay let's look at some of the cook times (these are in water, oil cooks them all faster):

Cooking times for vegetables

Potatoes: 20 minutes if in big pieces, 10 if cut really small. Cannot be eaten raw, poisonous when raw.

Carrots: Can be eaten raw, you can cook them for any time you want, they'll get soft after 10 minutes, in soups they can be cooked for long time to let the flavor out.

Zucchini: takes only 5 minutes to get soft and start letting water out, you can cook anytime in a soup, it's not poisonous when raw either.

Peppers: will get soft after 5 minutes, can be eaten raw and are full of vitamins.

Pumpkins: 5-10 minutes to get soft, can be cooked in soups for longer.

Onion and leek: 5 minutes, gets soft very quickly, you can cook in soup for any amount of time, this is the main flavor of many meals! Onions and leeks are added to meals specifically to make them flavourful, and so is garlic.

Green beans: 20 minutes, don't eat raw.

Peas: 20 minutes if fresh, longer if they're dry and soaked.

Spinach, swiss chard, other greens: they're done in an instant almost, a minute of cooking is enough.

Broccoli, cauliflower: 5-10 minutes, depends on how small they're cut.

How to make a vegetable soup:

You'll need onions, and other vegetables of your choice, you can decide which ones mix well for you. Where I live it's traditionally onions, parsley, celery, carrots for the base, and then it can be leeks, potatoes, peas, green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, zuchinni, peppers, even just one or a few of these ingredients will make an okay soup, you can mix and match them to your liking or according to what you have. The main flavor of the soup usually comes from onions, or garlic if you want to make garlic-tasting soup.

You cut your vegetables first, and the size doesn't really matter, you cut them how you want to eat them, it won't specifically affect the quality, can make the cooking time less if you cut them really small.

You turn on the stove, put a pot on it, let it heat up for a minute or two. Then you add a spoon or two of oil, and you add your onions. You let onions cook for a few minutes while stirring them, this is your main flavor, and the longer you can stir them without them getting burned, the better the soup will taste. When they start browning, you can add other flavor enhancers, like garlic if you have some, salt and spices, and if you're doing potatoes or green beans or leeks, I would add those in sooner too, because oil enhances their flavor. Once these have some good flavor profile, you can add the rest of your cut veggies, and pour water until all of your vegetables are covered. Then you let the water come to boil, reduce the heat, and let it cook until the longest-cooking vegetable is fully cooked.

Soups made of only vegetables are not super filling, so people will usually add some pasta-like stuff in it, I will make a little mixture out of flour, water and salt, with soft consistency, and then add spoonfuls of that in the soup – this is done in the last 5 minutes of cooking, because this only needs a few minutes to cook. That will make your soup more filling!

It's also normal to add some kind of meat to your soup from the start, to enhance flavor and add more nutrients, I can't really write about this because I actually don't consume meat so I am not smart about it, but I know stuff like pieces of meat, or pieces of bone are added to soup, and then soups are cooked much longer in order for the nutrients and the flavor to combine.

If you're feeling super lazy you can just add bunch of vegetables and pasta and whatever to a pot, add water, boil, and it will still be a soup, even if you don't pay attention to how flavours combine and if cooking time is not aligned, this will still turn into something edible if you add salt and you won't be hungry or lacking in nutrients. So if my detailed description sounds intimidating, you can do it in whatever way. Just adding water and heat and salt to vegetables, makes them edible, and you can eat that and be done. It doesn't need to be perfect.

If you want to make a specialized soup, like mushroom soup, tomato soup, pea soup, it's basically the same thing with putting some onions on oil, but then you just add this one thing you want your soup from, like you'll just add tomatoes, garlic and some spices to the onions if you want tomato soup. For mushroom, you just add mushrooms and whatever spice you want, and later you can blend it with together if you want a creamy soup. For peas, you just add peas on top of onions, add water, cook that, smash or blend it to make it creamy. Those are super easy soups, and onions are a base flavor for all of them. And you can even do it without onions and it's fine, they'll still have an okay taste.

Sauces: are very similar to soups, except you add some flour on the oil, mix that to make a roux and then add water to make it thick! You choose whether you want a tomato sauce, mushroom sauce, or whatever else, and you make it a thicker consistency than a soup, and with more concentrated flavor (less water).

Mashed foods: you cook your vegetable in water, cut to any size you want, once the cooking time is over and your vegetable is super soft, you pour the water our (you can reuse it for soups later), add salt, you can add some butter or milk if you like it more creamy, and you mash it with a masher or a fork, until it's all mashed! You can do this with many vegetables, you can make mashed potatoes, pumpkins, zucchini, carrots, peas. You can even mix two veggies, I love mashed potatoes with zucchini mix.

Fried foods: I don't do this a lot, so I am not the best to explain it, but the basics of this is that hot oil cooks the food much quicker, draws out much more flavor, and makes it delicious! It also adds a decent amount of calories so it's great for when you need a lot of energy quickly. I know people like to smash pieces of meat, cut it or grind it into small pieces, then mix it with cut up onion, garlic, spices and herbs, add some flour, and then form it into nice little patties, which they can fry on oil, and it makes for a good sandwich pattie. You can also make this type of pattie out of vegetables, if you mix some cooked beans, soy, lentils, potatoes, cabbage savoy, kale, really anything with some flour, garlic, spices and salt, and form it into a pattie, you can put it on hot oil and make a little burger pattie, or mix it with some mashed potatoes to create a meal.

I'm unable to make detailed instructions for meat as I don't consume it, but I know it's important to cook it thoroughly, and make sure it's never raw in the middle, because it could give you diseases otherwise. I won't go into making bread because this post is already too long, but if you want me to write it out in detail, let me know!

If you want to make more specialized meals, you can find instructions and recipes anywhere, knowing the basics will make it easier to understand any recipe out there. I myself am not good at baking so I won't go into that!

Ingredients (for 1 person, with left overs):

1 bundle of buckwheat noodles (or other noodles of your choice)

1 Tablespoon Oil

1 chunk of tempeh, tofu, or your choice of quick cooking hunk of protein

1-2 carrots, chopped or shredded

About 1/4 a decent head of cabbage, sliced

2 green onions, chopped

For Sauce:

About 1 Tablespoon Garlic powder

About 1 Tablespoon Ginger powder

Black pepper to taste (I mean, everything in the sauce is to taste, adjust as wanted)

About 1 Tablespoon Toasted sesame oil if you have it

About 2 tablespoons Soy sauce

About 1 Tablespoon of your choice

About 1/4 cup of peanut butter (or sun butter or tahini)

Directions:

Start by reading the directions to cook the noodles, and setting a pot to boil while you do other stuff

Heat a pan with a high heat oil like canola, sunflower, or maybe olive. It's ready when you drop a drop of water on it and it dances instead of spattering. Cook sliced protein of choice until lightly browned, probably about 2 to 4 minutes each side.

(The water is probably ready for noodles at this point)

Dump those shredded carrots in, cook another couple minutes until they start to brown.

Add the cabbage and stir occasionally until it starts to brown on the edges. Remove from heat, add the green onions so you don't forget them.

Mix together the sauce ingredients, to taste. I recommend adding the dry spices, then the oil if you have it and mushing it up so the spices don't clump when you add the water-based ingredients.

Add water until the sauce is the consistency you want it.

The noodles are probably done at this point, so drain them, and toss everything together.

East what you want, but the rest in the fridge for later.

Basic cooking and cleaning

Comprehension

Learning a language

ASL

Patience

Swimming

This post tells you how to prepare one easy, good meal. It's not necessarily nutritionally complete, but it has protein (meat), carbs and vegetables. It assumes almost nothing about your cooking skills, except to recognise the foodstuffs. It consists of foods which, even if you don't quite cook them right, won't do you any harm (and honestly, you could probably eat them all raw). It is not suitable for vegetarians; I'll cover some vegetarian food in a later post, because it is, on average, more difficult.

The whole meal will take about 4 hours to prepare, but much of that time is leaving the food to cook. You'll be busy for the first half hour and the last 45 inutes, more or less.

(I think roast beef, potatoes and vegetables are one of the most cottagecore meals out there, beaten only by pies. We'll come to pies in a future post, too.)

You will need the following equipment: A stovetop or hob with at least two rings (heating areas) An oven A roasting tin, baking tray, or oven-proof dish Some tinfoil (aluminum foil) Two saucepans or pots (steel if using an induction stove) A chopping board A meat-cutting board (which might also be the chopping board, washed carefully after use) A medium-large knife (which I call the "big knife" in places) A vegetable peeler or smaller knife Access to a sink, or at least a tap A timer of some kind (an alarm clock, a timer or alarm on your phone, or the like) A large fork (this is for holding the meat still to cut it; you might be able to hold it with your hand instead) Ideally, a potato masher, but an ordinary fork will do. Sufficient plates, forks, and knives for people to eat with

You will need the following ingredients:

A beef roast (this is a large piece of beef; there are many kinds. Literally any of them will do for this) of about 1kg (2.2lbs) or more. If you get it without wrapping, ask the seller to weigh it for you. Otherwise, make a note of the weight. Some potatoes Some carrots Some broccoli Some butter Some milk Some salt Some black pepper (pre-ground, or ground at the time of use from a pepper mill)

There are no pre-written amounts for anything but the meat, and even that is an approximation.

Heat the oven to 150C (300F, gas mark 2). If it's a fan oven (you can look in and see the fan at the back), set it to 130C (265F) instead. Make sure there's nothing except the wire shelves in the oven before you heat it. Place the beef in your roasting tin, baking tray, or dish, and shake some salt and black pepper over it - about twice as much salt as you'd put on a plate of fries, and enough pepper to be visible on the surface of the beef. Add about 200dl (a cup) of water to the container, so that it pools around the beef. Cover the beef loosely with tinfoil, making sure the edges go inside the container, not outside. Once the oven is hot enough (usually this is indicated by a light going out), put the beef in its container in the oven, and set a timer or alarm for 3 hours.

Now, peel the potatoes. This can be done with a smaller knife or a vegetable peeler. Be careful not to cut yourself; you can go slowly. There is absolutely no rush at this stage. The peeling does not have to be pretty - we're going to mash these potatoes - so don't worry about that either. Cut the potatoes into very approximately golf ball sized pieces. Take the bigger of your two pots or saucepans, put the cut potatoes in, and pour in enough water to cover them, plus about 1cm (half an inch) more. Leave these aside; they're now ready to cook, but we won't do so until later.

If your broccoli is one large piece, cut out the stem in the middle with whichever knife suits you. Alternately, cut off the smaller "floret" branches one by one - what you want is a number of the smaller branches, the finger-thick ones. If your broccoli comes as florets (sometimes frozen), you don't need to do this. Indeed, if your broccoli is frozen, leave it in the freezer for now. Otherwise, put the florets to one side.

Next, take the carrots, chop off the top and bottom (about 5mm/a quarter inch from the end for the thicker top end, and about 1cm/half an inch from the end for the narrower bottom end). Peel the carrots with the vegetable peeler or knifer, holding the carrots with one hand and cutting away from that hand with the other. Once you have all the rough outer skin off, chop them into coin-like horizontal pieces, each about 5mm/a quarter of an inch thick. Set them aside as well.

You now get to go do something else until the alarm goes off.

When the alarm goes off, open the oven and CAREFULLY take the tinfoil off the beef (use oven gloves or a dry towel to protect your hand reaching in). Close up the oven and set an alarm for 30 minutes.

Now, put your pot of potatoes and water on the stove top/hob, and set that ring to the highest it can go. When it comes to a full boil (when the water is bubbling madly and there's a lot of steam rising), turn it down so that it remains just barely boiling (simmering).

Now, take the other saucepan/pot, and put it on the other ring. Half fill it with water, and set it to the highest setting, so it comes to the boil. Once it does that, put in your chopped carrots - be careful not to splash yourself - and turn the pot down like you did with the potatoes. Add some salt to the water - a small handful is what I use here.

It's now time to check if the potatoes are done. They probably won't be, but it's useful to practice. Take two forks, and stick one of them into a potato in the boiling water. CAREFULLY. If it goes in and comes out easily, the potatos are cooked. If you have to push it in hard, and/or the potato lifts out of the water when you try to pull the fork out, they are not yet cooked. If they are not yet cooked, use the second fork to hold the potato while you pull the first one out, and put it back in the boiling water.

You now want to wait a few minutes, and your timer is in use. You can set a second timer for 4 or 5 minutes, or you could sing yourself a song (most rock songs, solo included, come in around 3 minutes; prog rock and Bauhaus can be way longer). Or you can just watch a clock for a few minutes, although I find my attention drifts. Hold on, it's not that long.

Once 4-5 minutes have passed, check your potatoes again. If they're done, take them off the heat, and carefully pour the water off them. Remember to turn off the ring on the stove/hob. Some of the potatoes will try to roll out of the saucepan; hold them back with the larger knife (or some other implement; it doesn't matter what as long as they don't escape). Put them aside for a few moments. If they're not done, try them again in a few minutes, and then take them off. It might take a few goes; that's ok.

Now add the broccoli to the pot of boiling carrots. You COULD do them in a second pot, and sometimes I do, but this saves on washing up, and makes sure that everything cooks in about the right time.

Your 30 minute alarm will go off soon. Turn off the oven, and CAREFULLY, using oven gloves or a towel, take the roasting dish with the beef in it out, and set it aside to "rest" for a bit. Meat straight out of the oven is difficult to cut; it'll be much easier in 15 minutes or so.

Meantime, back to the potatoes. Take your masher, or fork, or whatever you can find to crush them into crumbs and pulp. Once they're fairly well-mashed, add some butter and some milk. You want a good bit of butter - a golf ball sized chunk is good, I feel, and just a little milk, a couple of spoons full. Mash the butter and milk into the potatoes until they're smooth, adding more milk in small amounts if you need to. If your butter is salted (it will say on the packet), you're fine, otherwise you'll want to add a little salt. Taste a little bit before you add a lot.

When you're finished the potato mash, take the carrot-and-broccoli pot off the heat, turn off the ring, and pour off the water, again holding back the vegetables with the knife or whatever you used for the potatoes. When they're drained, put in a little butter, let it melt on them, and stir it around.

It's now time to cut the beef. This does not have to be pretty! Hold the chunk of meat down on your cutting board (or the chopping board you used for the vegetables), ideally with a towel under the board so it doesn't slip around. Use the big fork or your hand (possibly with some kitchen paper or a small towel or something) to hold it still, and cut off slices with the big knife. They can be as thin as you like, and can manage, but about 1cm (half an inch) thick is fairly easy.

Everything is now ready. Put some mashed potatoes, some vegetables, and some slices of beef on each plate, and tuck in. Ideally, someone else should do the washing up.

Ingredients for two people:

1.5 cups sushi rice

1.5 c water

Salt & rice vinegar to taste

2 servings of quick cooking protein source of choice, I used tofu

Soy sauce, dried ginger, black pepper, to taste

1 cucumber

1/4 bunch cilantro or other herb

1/2 left over sweet quick pickles from the Asian market

1 T toasted sesame

Directions:

Put the rice in the rice cooker with the water and cook it.

Heat your protein of choice until it's browned on all sides/safe to eat, then add the soy sauce and spices and cook another minute

Slice the cucumbers & cilantro

Rice will probably be done now, add salt and vinegar to taste.