Early Cooking

I got into cooking cause I was drunk and hungry

god damn I love ribs

>How did you guys get into cooking?
I needed to eat. You can't drive when you're 6 or 7 years old. My mom was tired from her full time job and going to law school at the same time. My parents were divorced. So I'm like mom is it ok if I cook? She was like yeah go ahead. So I cooked. Started with breakfast since that was the time of day my mom was most tired, and I was most anxious to eat something and get the day going. But once I got comfortable with that I got into other meals.

>>8590582

id fuck your mums tired arse

>>8590582
I also started with breakfast, simple stuff like eggs, pancakes, french toast. Not because my parents didn't cook, but they were awful at it. They'd cook sunny-side up eggs until the entire yolk was solid to be "safe" and always used instant just add water recipes. The first time I ate eggs at a restaurant I was amazed that eggs weren't naturally the dried yellow curd of Satan's asshole.

>>8590571
My parents were raging alcoholics. So everything tasted like salt. When I moved out, I decided that I wanted to taste all the things I hadn't tried before. I was 18 before I tried broccoli and green beans...

>>8590627
how are you even alive if you didn't eat a vegetable before 18

>>8590635 Well.. Not really sure. I had some, but they were usually boiled mush. Or onions, she used a lot of that.
They hate my cooking, everything is too crunchy or not salted enough.

i watched my mom cook when i was young
as a boy i started out with zatarans gumbo packages, no meat. i would mix in garlic powder and think i was top gun. eventually i mixed sausage and shrimp into the gumbo. then i got a girlfriend who showed me how to make roux. so one day i made my own scratch gumbo. it was an ambitious recipe but i enjoyed every step of it. i felt creative even though i was following a recipe. i got laid from cooking for girls. i learned what works and how far one can deviate from a recipe. i can now read a recipe once and throw it together from memory/feeling.
also i'm frugal so cooking satisfies my budgetary demands

>>8590571
i lived in a group house with 11 other guys. Part of living there meant participating in an organized system of meals
>House meals served M,T, W and Th.
>Open to house members and their guests.
>usually around 15-20 people
>Cooking was done by rotation in pairs
>Once a week or so you were Chef, once a week or so you were a sous.
>once every few weeks were you designated as a shopper
>Submit a menu and an ingredient list to the shopper. Shopper buys all ingredients for everyones menu for the week.
>On the night you are designated to cook as Chef our sous, you head to the fully-equipped commercial kitchen around 5 and cook your ass off for a couple hours, serve dinner for 15 or 20, then clean.
>seems like a long night, but the other nights you bring your guests to a fantastic meal and when you're done you push away from a dirty plate and retire to the living room and enjoy some scotch.
>pretty fucking awesome
>one of the many systems that allowed poorfag just out of college guys to live in a million dollar brownstone in a fancy part of Washington, DC

>>8590728
polish by any chance?
I got into cooking by being a weeb I've always been interested in what other people ate on a daily basis. Coming from a small town with no foreign food I had to make everything myself. Turns out I enjoy the process more than eating.

>>8590571
From my argentine grandma. Literally lives to cook and eat. I just have some issues with her recipes, but that's mostly argentine customs, like using onions, garlic, and pepper as a base for a bolognese instead of a mirepoix. Her sauce is also way more tomato saucy than focusing on the meat. Her baking game is on point though.

>>8590971
Nope. Danish.
Ah, fair enough, do you make weeb food then? I just discovered entirely new world. Besides at that time I was studying to become an OT. So I needed to know about the process of cooking. Which only made me even more interested.

I got really tired of living out of oatmeal. Learned how to cook myself.

>>8591026
ahhh,
well I made weeb food at first (donburis, sukiyaki and what not). There's always something so novel about exploring another culture's cuisine. I think it made up for my initial lack of enthusiasm. I can see the danish being bored with food it's always liverwurst and shades of brown things.

>>8590571
>It's not the best cookbook
Maybe not, but your aunt chose very fucking well. ATK's sensibilities might not be all that adventurous (some of their recipes lean too far in the direction of a church potluck for my taste) but their recipes are bulletproof. Do exactly what they tell you and you will get something delicious. That's a really good start for the novice cook.

Go buy your aunt a nice bottle of wine.

>>8590571
I couldn't afford to go out to eat so to impress girls I learned to cook fancy meals for a fraction of the price of a restaurant. It was very 'rewarding'

>>8591053
Danish food is a mix at times. Can recommend flæskesteg/ribbensteg. These days I cook a lot of different food,with my clients/patients.
Never done weeb food. I don't think I can get the ingredients in this tiny town.

>>8591148
I'm also a pork fan.
well there's a lot you can order with air mail. Char siu hook roasted pork (cantonese cusine) is mostly dry/non-perishable stuff. Only thing that's fresh besides the pork shoulder/butt is the shallots also not hard to find. Asians love their cooking wines so if you ever want to make that stuff the importance of that is only second to ingredient quality.

>>8590571
I got into cooking because my mother was a good cook, but a fussy eater, so I grew up with pretty limited experience of food. Our family moved from the suburbs to the city when I was a teen and suddenly I got my mind blown by tasting foods from all over the world. When I got out on my own I wanted to have all those flavors without the cost of going out to eat. This meant wandering around the immigrant neighborhoods and learning how to cook the stuff in their markets. Two decades later and I'm still doing that.