You have enough food knowledge and decision-making skills to create a positive experience towards cooking. It is not about making complicated recipes with a multitude of ingredients and procedures or using difficult-to-handle food options or equipment. Instead, it’s about finding a handful of simple time-effective recipes that can be practiced on a daily basis. It’s about exploring food choices, accepting that failures are a part of life, and realizing that with practice comes success.
Acknowledge the emotional baggage you may carry when you come to the kitchen, mostly connected to past experiences when cooking did not turn out as you had planned. Identifying any negative feelings related to cooking and reflecting on their source can provide a beginning basis for moving forward and starting with a fresh attitude. Go all the way back to your childhood cooking memories if needed.
While there are rules to recipes, part of the creativity and fun of cooking is to adjust recipes to your taste and ability level. Set the focus on making sense of the activity itself and of course eating. The process of progressing through recipe steps and experimenting is just as important as the food that comes out of it. Deliberately build in opportunities for success by trying out simple recipes beforehand and minimize the potential for hassle when doing them.
Move to meaningful experiences, building skills that you can REPeat and use day by day. Make cooking and food choices a valued part of your home. And please don’t forget: Keep it messy.