You may want to think about a progression plan. Since you’re already putting together pasta and sauce you have a great base to start expanding from.

Stage 1: Start by just fine-tuning that recipe. Add a little salt, boil the pasta for a minute less, adjust the amount of sauce. Stick with the version that tastes the best to you. Consider writing that down.

Stage 2: Add pre-made ingredients. Parmesan cheese is obvious. Try different cheeses.

Stage 3: Prep your own additions. Fry up some meat or vegetable, chop it up, and toss it in your sauce. Try other additions.

Stage 4: DIY sauce. Pick your favorite sauce and imitate it.

Advanced: DIY pasta. 3 ingredients; eggs, flour, salt. The hard part is rolling it. If you don’t have a pasta maker, you need a rolling pin and you’re getting a workout.

Yooooo this community slaps, what is going on? Literally every post a useful piece of advice. You rock!

Congrats! Cooking can be very rewarding. I have a few pieces of advice; they may only be useful to you later, but when the time comes that they’ll be helpful, they’ll still be here.

• Online recipes always skimp on the sauce. Don’t be afraid to 1.5x or even 2x the amount you make if the recipe doesn’t make enough. Spices (except salt) are also a fun place to experiment with adding a little extra amount.
• Premade stuff is fine, even now that I don’t strictly follow recipes I use plenty of jarred sauces, spice mixes sometimes, refrigerated chicken slices (it’s more expensive, but I don’t like raw chicken), frozen/canned ingredients, etc. If you want to make something ambitious but don’t have time to do something long, hard, or complex, premade stuff that’s not too expensive can let you make recipes that are otherwise out of your reach.
• Most cooking reuses the same skills you’ll learn as you make other recipes. Cooking pasta for spaghetti teaches you how to make it for most pasta dishes. Chopping veggies is a skill transferable to like every recipe ever. Rice is easier than you may think and unlocks a whole category of delicious foods. Just keep at it and before long you’ll know way more than you expect just from doing similar steps in previous recipes. Knowing these common patterns in the ingredients and techniques used to cook different recipes is how people eventually learn how to improvise, which is always fun.
• Cooking is art, baking is science. Throwing in extra ingredients in a dinner recipe is a great way to express your personal tastes. Messing with ratios in a baking recipe is much more dangerous.

Most importantly, I hope you have fun and enjoy the fruits of your labor!

It’s nice to see people taking an interest into new stuff, especially their food! Not every meal can (nor should) be a gourmet meal, but there are many easy and cheap options. I see many suggestions regarding rice and stews, both great base options, but might I recommend soups! I also highly recommend getting a hand blender to easily make good and nice-tasting soups (or smoothies in the summer :) ).

I’ll even throw in an easy recipe:

• 1kg tomatoes
• 1 zucchini/courgette
• 1 bell pepper or sweet pepper
• 2 onions
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1L of bouillon (water + bouillon cubes is the easiest)
• cooking oil (pref. olive oil) Optional additional spices:
• basil
• oregano
• sage
• thyme

Dice the onions and mince the garlic (or chop it finely). Cut the tomatoes, zucchini, and pepper into small pieces. Bake the onions, garlic, and bell pepper in some cooking oil on low-medium heat until the onions start to brown. Add the tomatoes and zucchini. Put the lid on the pot and leave for 5-10 minutes. If the tomatoes are soft and the skin starts to come loose, they’re good for the next step. Add the bouillon and any other optional spices and bring to a simmer. Boil for at least 30 minutes, but longer is perfectly fine. Blend the soup - be aware that it’s hot, so wear long sleeves and oven mitts. Serve immediately or keep it for a day to let the flavours set.

This is a great base soup that you can tweak as much as you like. Want a sweeter soup? Swap the pepper for some carrots or pumpkin! Want a more acidic and fresh taste? Add some white wine vinegar. You can also add some chickpeas or meatballs and vermicelli after blending if you want a more filling soup. Be sure to boil the soup for some time after blending in that case.

Soup is the garbage disposal for your fridge. As long as it’s not actively rotting, throw it in a pot and boil in for two hours, it will taste pretty good. The more different things you add, the better it tastes.

Any time you eat meat, keep the scraps/fat bits/bones, stick them in a container in your freezer. Toss that in the soup pot.

You might be tempted to go buy a bunch of equipment but you can get really far with the basics once you’ve learned good technique:

• a decent paring knife and 10" chef’s knife (Victorinox fibrox are decent quality and not too expensive as knives go)
• an end grain wood cutting board
• a medium sauce pan
• one or two sheet pans
• one 8" or 10" stainless steel skillet
• a spatula and some wooden spoons
• a pair of tongs
• stackable measuring cups and spoons

That will get you very far. If you find you’re enjoying cooking and want to improve your kit, you can add things as you need them (whisk, masher, boning knife, stock pot, etc.). Try to avoid buying unitaskers. You can mince garlic with a knife, so unless you’re mincing a ton of garlic, a garlic press is probably not a good investment because it only does one thing.

There are a ton of video tutorials for learning knife skills online but if you want something printed, Henkels has a Complete Book of Knife Skills that I’ve found very useful.

You’ll want to keep your knives sharp. You can learn to do it yourself with a double sided 400/1000 water stone and a video tutorial. A ceramic pull through sharpener will do in a pinch but they’re pretty hard on the knives. Metal pull through sharpeners will destroy the edges of your knives, so don’t buy one of those. Also don’t use anything motorized because the heat can damage the heat treat and wreck your knife.

You will read on the Internet that cast iron is the One True Material for skillets and frying pans. People who say this are in a cult. Cast iron pans are great for searing because they retain a lot of heat but stainless clad aluminum will give you better control and more even heating, Teflon will give you better non-stick performance, etc. Personally, I reach for my stainless steel skillet most often, which is why I recommended it above. You may also read that you should never wash cast iron with soap because it will ruin the seasoning. This is bunk. The seasoning is chemically bonded to the surface and you can’t scrub it away unless you’re physically removing material with hard abrasives or caustic chemicals. Soap and a scrubby will not hurt your pan. Do thoroughly dry anything cast iron after you wash it, as it will rust if you don’t.

There is probably a restaurant supply in your area and they are probably open to the public. That’s a great place to get things like skillets, sheet pans, racks, ramekins, tongs, etc.

Pick up (or borrow from the library) a cookbook that teaches cooking technique through recipes. These are some of my favourites:

• Ruhlmann’s Twenty - Michael Ruhlmann
• The Food Lab - J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
• Salt Fat Acid Heat - Samin Nosrat

Honestly most home cooking is not very hard. You do need to be taught a few basic concepts, like how to chop vegetables, what different cooking methods like frying/sautéing/baking/roasting/etc refer to, but once you have the basic concepts down, you can do the majority of recipes you find online.

For learning the basics, there are quite a few cookbooks aimed at complete beginners. I was staying with a friend and rifling through her cookbooks—she had one aimed at students that spent time explaining all the basic cooking concepts at the start of the book before you get to the recipes.

Where the skill comes in is stopping following recipes and being able to come up with a dish that tastes good. It takes a while to learn good flavour combinations, when’s the right time to add an ingredient, how exactly to cook each ingredient, etc. But I would say a beginner can follow the majority of recipes I see shared around online. Just look for recipes that sound like something you actually want to eat. Read the instructions to check they don’t sound too hard, and then go for it. Good luck, and enjoy your cooking journey!

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!!!