How/where did you learn to cook?

[shify]

My mom did home cooked meals four days a week growing up, Monday to Thursday. Pretty good but not outstanding but always watched her and always helped her bake for holidays and such. Dad only made omelets on the weekend and nothing else (ham and cheese omelets in particular). My mom refused to cook anything besides dinner, so during the summers or any school break, if I wanted a hot meal, it was on me.

Probably started with grilled cheese and learning by observing at the local diner or snack bar at the town pool during the summer plus whatever I picked up from being with my mom. Then it was just figuring stuff out and trial and error. That baseline knowledge allowed me to follow a recipe and execute it and generally figure things out. From there just general interest in food and living in NYC and experiencing all sort of cuisines and tastes and it just snowballed from there.

[Clawbear57]

I learned to cook when I moved out of the house. I started with using box meals. While I was working as the banquet manager in hotels I would go to the kitchen,and watch the chef and sometimes helping the chef cooking on the line for the restaurant. Then I started cooking and working with spices..I started trying to smoking about 1-1/2 years ago. Now I'm learning to cook inside and out.

[Skip]

My Wife taught me a lot of the basic things about cooking and from there I did a lot of trial and error. Now I tell her that most of my cooks are experiments. I've enjoyed cooking outside for a long time and came to realize that I needed to hone my skills a lot. AR.com and all of you have helped me up my game to where it is today...hopefully much better than when I started. Since I retired 8 years ago I do most of the cooking and bread baking.

[Polarbear777]

Learned to cook a few things that were ok growing up. That was back when you had to make sure it was dead and cook everything to at least 180.
I didn’t learn how to make good until Alton Brown original good eats series and books. Smoking was meathead book later.

[xaugievike]

started enjoying the grill when I was in college....I did make my fair share of Kingsford matchlight-flavored burgers early on.

Really caught the bug a few years later when we started going to NASCAR races and I was in awe of the flavors I could smell all around me (while I was making more MatchLight burgers...). Had some friendly fellow tailgaters share some samples with us a few times and I was hooked and committed to trying to figure some stuff out.

From there it was a lot of trial, and more error - I had more ambition than knowledge - but slowly I started to learn. I cussed at some sort of vertical cooker that wasn't a WSM, learned a little with a propane cabinet smoker, learned how to actually light charcoal without lighter fluid in it. The cooker that settled me in was actually an electric unit and an Amaz'n pellet tray that accidentally read about. Then I learned more about the importance of a good thermometer combined with some temperature knowledge and bought a Maverick and then things really opened up for me. To this day when people express interest in learning to cook temperature knowledge and a good thermometer are the first things I talk about. When someone I know gets a new "smoker" and asks me for advice I tell them (half seriously) that I can't help them until they get a real thermometer.

[SheilaAnn]

“Can’t help them unless they get a real thermometer” 💕💕💕🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼🤣🤣🤣

[rlozinak]

When I was in high school, I started working in a restaurant as a dishwasher, eventually I started cooking late night orders. Then the chef taught me how to be a sous chef. So basically I took care of working the oven and the stovetop. He took care of the broiler. I learned a lot. And I discovered I loved to cook. Oh did I say it was an Italian restaurant. I stayed there 6 years.
Then mom learned I could cook and would help her with dinner. She taught me what she new and I taught her.
When I got married I bought a WSM smoker and that started me in smoke. That was about 20-25 years ago.

[DTro]

Being the youngest of seven I was kind-of raised in the kitchen. My mom, who learned to cook from my nana, was an excellent cook. She was always throwing something on for us to eat and for any neighborhood kids who always showed up right around dinner time. The door was always unlocked. I think I was really her sous chef. I can remember at a young age standing on a chair at the stove stirring a big pot of sauce. Often times she would give me a piece of bread to dip and ask if it needed salt and pepper.

The first thing I started to cook on my own was breakfast, mostly pancakes. The recipe which I sent to my sister in a letter when I was age 7 is below.

When I moved out, my mom took me shopping and bought me knives, a cutting board and a set of Revere Ware.

You guys and gals on AR and SUWYC have upped my game!

[DTro]

Panhead John It is really cool to have. I'm guessing I was 7, but I could have been 8 . I was seven when she moved overseas for school.
Skip Yes, she gifted it to me framed a few years ago.

[SheilaAnn]

Love the drawing! “serving suggestion” like on packages of food or grocery ads.

[CaptainMike]

That's a treasure.

[Texas Larry]

I’m almost entirely self-taught, meaning from mistakes. Cooking for my folks was not a priority, just had to feed a family on a blue collar budget. Grilling (never real bbq) was a rarity, mostly burned over charcoal, which example I followed when I started out with my own family.

As I matured a little I began learning from cookbooks and tv chefs from the Galloping Gourmet to Alton Brown. I took a very helpful knife skills course at a local supermarket. I developed a desire in the early ‘90s to get better at grilling and bbq, beginning a long series of MCS driven acquisitions. You Tube chefs and grill masters were readily available later on. Then you lot came along and have been a constant source of inspiration and information. I still mostly just marvel at the SUWYC offerings. I am also blessed to have a wife who is an excellent and creative cook. And I have way too many cookbooks.

Sorry for the rambling post, just wandering along memory lane.

[Clawbear57]

I like memory lane😇.

[dubob]

I worked in a restaurant at the Grand Rapids, MI airport my senior year in high school. I ran the whole kitchen every other Sunday and learned quickly. We served steaks, chops, prime rib, chicken, etc. Quality restaurant; NOT fast food. Been cooking ever since and I'm 80 now.

[snowswamp]

My parents both worked. I started enjoying cooking shows on PBS as a kid during summer break. At first I’d make suggestions to my mom and then I started cooking breakfast and lunch for myself. They were simple things, nothing fancy. I ruined some of my mom’s good pans in the process (sorry mom). When I left home I expanded my cooking library and kept trying new things. I really took a big leap when I was living with my fiancé who had a full time job and I was laid off for 8 months. My days were filled with looking for full time work and doing temp jobs, but I would experiment and have dinner ready finding joy in the process compared to the stress of the day. I still enjoy PBS cooking shows and a few YouTube ones.

[Mosca]

Never underestimate desire. I was single until I was 35, and nobody was going to cook stuff for me, so I learned how to do it myself.

Growing up, I used to sit in a rocking chair in the kitchen and read while my mom cooked. I didn’t learn how to cook by doing that; I loved to read, I loved my mom, and I loved to eat, so it was something that made sense.

I had some “lost years” in the middle. I was on my own, though, and I picked up some cookbooks: I preferred The Fannie Farmer Cookbook to The Joy of Cooking because it made more sense. Not that Joy didn’t, but Fannie was better written, IMO, and things were moving fast, and the recipes fit the American palate of the time better (1970s). Joy was stuck in the 50s and 60s.

Very influential on me back then were two small cookbooks by Jane Butel: Chili Madness and Barbecue. I can’t overestimate these; I still have them, even though I’ve moved on from the recipes in them. If you look up a recipe in a general cookbook, it gives you one recipe for that dish; but here were cookbooks with dozens of different recipes for the same thing! I made pretty much everything, in both books, over the next couple years. (Side note. Back then, “ribs” meant country style ribs. I didn’t know what brisket was. Real bbq was unknown.)

I got what I considered “good” at what I call guy food. Red sauces, spaghetti, chili, burgers, casseroles and soups, stew, etc. I learned a mean lasagna and a damn good sautéed chicken from my mom. And a great source of knowledge back then, which should never be sold short, was the “Food” and “Lifestyle” sections of newspapers. Those have been overtaken today by the vastness of the internet, but they were ubiquitous, and very useful.

Mrs and I met in ‘87 & got married in ‘89. She doesn’t cook but maybe a little bit (but she did make me a lasagna early in our dating that won my heart), so I have been the cook in the family. It was then that I started trying different things, because she likes different things than I do. And it was then that I realized people make up a lot of crap and put it in cookbooks figuring that no one will ever try to make that garbage. I’m looking at you, The Silver Palate Cookbook! So, we’re still pre-internet, and getting ideas from cookbooks and newspapers, and cooking magazines. But I’m a lot more circumspect when I see recipes calling for yogurt and orange juice.

It was around the mid-90s that I started attempting rib roasts/prime rib. And I tried every single wrong way, basically treating the Christmas roast like the Thanksgiving turkey. We even got a Ronco Rotisserie Oven and filled the house with smoke, creating a charred mess! Then my BiL gave me a computer, and I got an AOL disc, and I found a web page by Tanyth Tyrr titled, “The Perfect Prime Rib”. And my eyes were opened. And I learned that low and slow was the path to tenderness (like it is for many things in this world) (but it still hadn’t sunk in yet as a general principle). I followed those instructions, I made perfect prime rib.

I was still treating everything outside like it was grilled. Of course I found actual spare ribs, and baby backs, by then. But I grilled them. And they were tough. (I know, Blasphemy Ribs. These were tough.) I just figured, it’s pork. That’s how pork is.

And then, Amazing Ribs. (This had to be back at the beginning, because I didn’t get the BGE until about 2010, and I started looking at them in 2007 or so.) And I saw the similarity between ribs and rib roasts. I set up my gasser for indirect. I remember having to prop the lid open with a stick, about an inch, to get the temperature down to 225°. And: real ribs! (I will never, ever dis on gasser ribs. No, they are not charcoal, they are not smoked. But good God, people. They’re ribs. Cook them in a crock pot, they’re still ribs!)

BGE in 2010. I added the Weber Kettle in 2016. I reintroduced the gasser this last year, and then swapped it for a griddle in September.

Which brings us to, “How good a cook am I, really?” Well, I have a theory that most home cooks have a repertoire that doesn’t vary much, and they get pretty good, by their own standard, at making it come out the way they want it to. But can they take what they like and give it to someone else, and make that person’s eyes pop, and tongue dance? I think I can do that with some things. Ribs, definitely. Steaks, absolutely, and rib roasts. Brisket, about 75% of the time. Some of my chicken recipes. I have about a dozen things I can whip up with complete confidence.

But I make a lot of what I call brown food. Stuff that tastes good but looks like slop. Gruel. Porridge. Chicken with rice and beans, that kind of thing. It’s delicious, but it’s family food, not cookbook food or “cuisine”. It’s like the stuff your coworker microwaved for lunch, and she might like hers and you might like yours, and if you swapped you might each compliment the other, while each thinking to yourselves that your own was better. And that’s fine. Because we’re talking family, and sustenance, and satisfaction. And there is no judge there. If your family asks for seconds, you have succeeded.

And here’s a secret that I’ve learned from a lifetime of cooking:

If you start by sautéing onions and garlic, whatever you’re making will probably taste pretty good.

[SheilaAnn]

Mosca great story! And I hate the way “Joy” is written. The only reason I have a copy is because BF brought it into the relationship.

[Old Glory]

"And a great source of knowledge back then, which should never be sold short, was the “Food” and “Lifestyle” sections of newspapers." No doubt! I have a binder of photo copied newspaper and magazine recipes.

[ssennott]

My wife and got married just out if high school so we learned to cook together as well as many other things.

[WayneT]

Since the OP and all the current comments are past tense, I’ll answer in a few years.

[RonB]

Go ahead and post. We are all still learning here.

[RogueCookers]

The bbq forums, internet, food network, few classes, trial and error, and THE BBQ CENTRAL SHOW listening to other pitmasters.

[tstalafuse]

So, I guess I am self taught. I am a latch key kid, my parents separated when I was in 1st grade. So, I learned how to cook to survive, and no doubt there are many who grew up with worst stories. I first learned to cook hot dogs, and then cook mac n' cheese. I guess it could have been worse.