So it’s real.

trial and error

Staying motivated here requires a positive mindset. It requires the person to say ‘it’s okay if this one isn’t good, I will learn from it and the next one will be better, and I will keep improving until I am good’.

That mindset is often not present. For someone without that positive mindset, the process is grueling- each step, each burned or bad dish becomes an F on their report card that kills their GPA, not a fun experience that needs more experimentation.

You bring a lot of good variations on this.

• Chili: Add beans (kidney, black, red, a combo), add a 50 cent spice packet from the dollar store, and a can of diced tomatoes. Add some water, and let it simmer.

• Spaghetti Sauce: Add a jar of sauce from the store. Simmer for a while. Add other spices to taste. Or not.

• Goulash: Add pasta (not spaghetti), and diced tomatoes, and some spices. Add a little liquid. Maybe sprinkle mozzarella cheese over the top. Bake it COVERED in the oven for a while. Take the top off near the end to let the cheese get brown, and the liquid to steam off.

• Meatloaf: Take your raw beef/pork mixture, and mix it by hand with a bunch of herbs like chives, parsley, Italian herbs, garlic, salt pepper. Mix in Bread crumbs, or even torn up chunks of stale bread. Form it into one big loaf in a loaf pan, or get small individual sized loaf pans. You can even use muffin pans. Bake them at 350°F until they’re done.

• Use it to make burrito bowls, like at Chipotle. You know what you like, and you know how to make it, you’ve seen them do it a million times. You just have to learn to make rice.

• Tacos: You know how to make tacos.

6 super easy, super cheap recipes to make ground beef way better. Experiment with them, add veggies, different spices, wine, Worcestershire sauce, BBQ sauce, etc. What’s in the fridge?

You can even substitute ground turkey or ground chicken, or non-meat options. Make your buddies buy the ingredients, and you’ll cook it, and cycle through these and a few variations and experiments. You get free food, and they get good food. Make them clean up, too.

And if you meet a good woman, she’ll be super impressed that you can actually cook.

the gun part of cooking: the uncertainty of not knowing if this time will be great, meh or a horror.

You have a strange idea of fun. I’m personally into the part where I get better at it each time.

I’ve been cooking for years (at home) and I still learn new thing and scree the meal sometimes. But there is the fun part of cooking: the uncertainty of not knowing if this time will be great, meh or a horror.

On one hand, you’re right- someone who is motivated to learn can easily pick up cooking.

On the other hand, it’s not just ‘follow a recipe’. There’s a lot of sub skills that someone who CAN cook can easily take for granted.

Let’s say your recipe calls for one chopped onion. So the prospective cook goes to the grocery store… but there’s lots of onions. There’s white and yellow and sweet and there’s little ones and big ones. Which one to get?
And then you have to chop it. Do you peel it first? How much to peel? Discard the ends or center or use them? What’s the best way to chop it? How big of pieces do you want to end up with?

None of these are DIFFICULT things to find or learn. But ‘follow a recipe’ isn’t just a one step operation for a newbie cook, there’s a lot of other stuff that has to be learned along the way.

In that regard we do our kids (pretty much all of them) a disservice- our schools teach kids that learning is a boring and unpleasant activity that involves hard mental work with little practical reward and thus should be avoided when possible. And we grade their efforts- failures are punished as disgraces, not treated as opportunities to learn. So I don’t entirely blame the dude who grows up out of that and doesn’t feel super motivated to dive into something new.

I also blame schools for not teaching basic cooking and financial literacy to kids. I was given a semester or two of ‘home economics’, the only things I learned in that class were 1. the difference between a spatula and a pancake turner, and 2. that we’d be yelled at if we didn’t dry the sink basin (even though it was about to get wet again). That curriculum needs a serious rethink.

Self policing is way more prevalent than the food police.

In this particular case we have people basically using the same idea of the billionaire wardrobe as nutrition advice. The same thing every day. No variation. Just shove the same thing in every day because cravings and nutrition blindspots don’t matter. Just shove it into the food hole. Same stuff day after day. It’s a form of self policing.