Teaching others to cook

I have somehow been talked into teaching a friend of mine to cook. Not everything, of course, but maybe a few basics while we watch the Top Chef premiere tomorrow. She really has no background or experience, and I certainly don't want to feel overwhelmed or scared about the process of making something good and nutritious and homemade.

I was thinking a lasagna with a homemade sauce (which is versatile enough that once she nails the sauce down, she won't think twice about making it rather than buying jarred stuff), so that it's not as simple as throwing spaghetti and sauce together, but actually going through a process that can be rewarding...

maybe a tomato cheese bread.

So besides some basic knife techniques, can you recommend any good starter dishes for the beginning cook?

My own first dishes were Filipino dishes, and I don't think she's ready for the home-cooking smell of adobo just yet!

Good ingredients, simple prep. Roast Chicken, Grilled or Pan Fried Steak, Lasagna, Mashed Potatoes, Meatloaf, Baked Potatoes, roasted Asparagus, etc. Focus on good, simple preparations.

I second the idea for roast chicken. It's one of those classic dishes that every person oughta know, and it creates a good number of leftover options(cue Bubba from Forest Gump): chicken salad, chicken soup, chicken jambalaya, chicken quesadilla, chicken pot pie...

I think I'd want to know what she likes. . .

She might not be ready for adobo, but she also might not like roast chicken, for example. If you know she does, great, then start there. If it were me, starting with red sauce would be pointless - I don't like it a whole lot .

You may already know her well enough to know these things or have asked her. If so, pay no attention to this post. If not, I'd ask her what she likes to eat, how she likes to eat it, and what degree of doneness she likes (my idea of a well-cooked vegetable is not the same as my MIL's idea). Of course, she may like them that way because she has never had anything different. Once you know, you can steer her to things that fit her palate while gently expanding her horizons and showing her that there are other options.

I did ask her if there was any dish that she'd always been curious enough to attempt at home, and she seemed pretty open to any possibilities. Not sure how she feels about touching raw chicken (which I know some people have an aversion to), so I figured that going with a pasta dish might work. She said she'd think about other options, but she's pretty much left it in my hands to devise a good, go-to meal for her.

Thank goodness she's not picky.

edit to add: Apparently the moment she decided she wanted me to teach her to cook was over Easter dinner, when she had brought some tasty, rustic deviled eggs and I didn't know she was, so I was preparing to make my own, and she was in awe that I was piping them into the egg whites with a plastic bag. So maybe she's going for technique as well.

Basic skills to teach:

1) knife skills (peel, chop, etc.)
2) steaming vegetables
3) sauteing simple meats
4) roasting simple meats
5) preparing simple pasta dishes.

****The key part is to have a lot of early successes.****

Do remember that people learn by watching and helping. Have the friend help you prepare a big meal. You can give the friend the easy dish and show the friend what you are doing.

There is a real easy recipie in Alton Brown's I'm just here for the food called Chicken with Garlic and Shallots where you take chicken pieces, brown them, and cook them in about a quarter inch of Oil for an hour or so with fresh herbs. Very easy, and its quite good. You could make it with a salad, and maybe throw in some potatoes for the last 30 min. In fact, that cookbook is a great one for beginners in my opinion. Very educational with quite a few good easy recipies.

I'm also a fan of home made tomato sauce. I do that about once a week.

For Roast Chicken, Marcella Hazan has a great recipie for lemon chicken where you just stick a few lemons in a chicken, close it up, and cook for an hour and a half, flipping once. The lemons keep it juicy inside, so its hard to overcook. There's a little more to the recipie than that, but real easy. You could make the tomato sauce while the chicken cooks and then boil the pasta at the end for a whole meal.

That said, if you ask her what she likes, it might be more interesting for her to actually cook something that she chooses.

Here's two cents from a mainly self-taught home cook:

I think jlawrence gives good advice. Focus on skills that can be applied rather than specific, complex recipes.

Learning how to make lasagna teaches you how to make sauce, but will also spend a lot of time teaching you things that are very specific to lasagna. Once you know how to boil lasagna noodles and cover them with seasoned ricotta, all you can really do with that is make lasagna--not particularly useful.

Teach things that can be a basis for improvisation and exploration and be sure to talk about how a simple recipe can be turned in a variety of different directions depending on what's available.

In addition to what jlawrence discusses, I'd consider:

1) Roasting vegetables simply with oil, s & p (an immensely useful skill for a home cook)

2) The sear-and-blast method of cooking meat or poultry and creating a pan sauce by deglazing.

3) Creating improvised soups. If you know the basics here, you'll never go hungry.

4) Making a rice pilaf (which is a base for a lot of exploration and simple, inexpensive meals)

5) Finishing a dish. This is something many people forget and it makes all the difference. Fresh herbs, good olive oil, or a little acid in the right place make the difference between a decent meal and a really good one.

The key is that you should be teaching someone techniques that are useful in a variety of situations that don't require recipes, rather than teaching how to make one specific complex dish. In my mind, a good home cook is someone who can look at the ingredients they have on hand and be able to put together a meal based on tried-and-true techniques without needing to look up a recipe.

Best,
Michael

Something else you might be able to do tomorrow night, is get her started on blending her own salad dressings. I know that's not always necessarily cooking per se (though it is a mother sauce ), but it can be an easy and fun addition to repertoire of the new cook. It's also a good primer on copying restaurant recipes at home by taste.

P.S. Wak, glad to hear you say that about A. Brown's first book. My brother is in college for Chemical Engineering, and I was considering this as a gift when he moves into his first apartment. Want to get him self-reliant int the kitchen, and I think that book will appeal to his mindset.

Hi,

Patricia Wells covered this concept in her talk recently at Culinary Historians. She advised people identify 10 meals they enjoy, obtain the recipes and practice until you get them to your taste. Gary was in the audience who asked during questions-answer period, "Would you please write a note to my wife on preparing recipes repetitively until you get them right?" Gary didn't master BBQ, bread or miso soup by preparing these occasionally. He made them with great regularity to get a solid understanding.

I taught myself how to cook largely influenced by the quality of meals in my Grandmother's home. I do give credit to my 7th and 8th grade home ec teacher Mrs. Fritchie for learning good basic skills, especially knife skills and how to make sauces. I would also carefully watch how things cooked to the point of being ridiculous by most observers. I was maybe 11 or 12 years old, I left my best friend's Cathy's house early because I was making soup. This was when I watched pots very carefully. Only later did I learn you put it on a simmer and WALK AWAY. While everyone loves their All-Clad pots, I love my Corning clear vision pots where I can watch what's happening at a glance across the room.

Starting with good skills is certainly the right path. Persistance and repetition will refine those skills.

Regards,

Michael,

You BOIL your lasagna noodles?!?!? (g)

I have made a 1000 pans of lasagna and boiled noodles ... ONCE.

jlawrence01 wrote:Michael,

You BOIL your lasagna noodles?!?!? (g)

I have made a 1000 pans of lasagna and boiled noodles ... ONCE.

I've never made a lasagna. I guess it shows.

starbird wrote:My brother is in college for Chemical Engineering, and I was considering this as a gift when he moves into his first apartment.

I think that's a great idea. Its a good beginner cookbook, and Alton's kind of a geek, so he might have appeal to the CE crowd.

If he ever takes to it, the next step might be Shirley O'Corriher's Cookwise. That's the one that really got me interested in cooking. Much more science, but more complex recipies too.

wak wrote:

starbird wrote:My brother is in college for Chemical Engineering, and I was considering this as a gift when he moves into his first apartment.

I think that's a great idea. Its a good beginner cookbook, and Alton's kind of a geek, so he might have appeal to the CE crowd.

If he ever takes to it, the next step might be Shirley O'Corriher's Cookwise. That's the one that really got me interested in cooking. Much more science, but more complex recipies too.

Don't forget McGee-On Food and Cooking: doin' it long before Brown

I second McGee. It's my go-to book whenever I want to figure something out. Any semi-serious cook should have it on the shelf.

I learned to cook when I was 16 from Julia Child and Simone Beck's Mastering the Art of French Cooking . The directions are clear and there are helpful hints for rescues, should they become necessary. I see no reason why Julia and Simca cannot help you teach your friend.

We all learn so differently. And we have different ideas of what it means to be a "good" cook. To my sister, boiling water is about as good as she wants to get. Some of us can read a book and completely "get" it. Others of us watch. Others of us have to do it (complete with mistakes) and reading won't help. My guess is that if this person were any of these types, she'd not be asking for help! She probably prefers having someone guide her to what is important, rather than determining it herself.

Whenever a good teacher (of any age) decides what to teach, the first thing they do is look at their audience; they do an audience analysis of sorts. What do they know? What do they like? What impediments are there, if any? How do they want to apply these skills? What other skills do they have that they can apply to this situation that will help them learn more easily? What prerequisite skills must they have (or else have to learn first) such as addition, subtraction, reading. . .Etc. That is what determines the course content. . .not what the teacher thinks is important.

I would agree with those who have mentioned having a foundation as being very important, however. Once you know what is important to someone and how they want to apply something, you can teach them the basics that apply to their situation. You can show them how other things relate so that if they decide to broaden their range at a later date, they have an idea of how to do it. Learning how to read and follow a recipe, how to make substitutions, how to add measures to increase a recipe's size (or the opposite to make it smaller), how to realize that if I can do X, it will apply when I do Y, etc. are what really makes us be able to feel comfortable and happy in the kitchen.

A good teacher also knows the difference between "nice to know" and "need to know." It's nice to know how to sharpen a knife for example, but it doesn't mean you can't follow a recipe - or even make up your own - and create wonderful food if you don't know how to do it.

To me, another important thing a good teacher does is to remember that you have forgotten much of what you know and it's know automatic. Your student, however, will not have any of this automatic knowledge. In this case it could be fractions to knowing what ingredients are to basic cooking terminology and everything in between.

The 'spouse occasionally calls me from work for aid (as in "how do you make the...") After reading this thread, I realized that shopping is an integral part of cooking that is difficult to learn from a cookbook. A tour of the meat section of a grocery store, for instance, is something that's crucial to the new cook (I've had calls from the meat section) Also, knowing your vegetables (e.g. the myriad uses of a shallot)

I think Views Askew REALLY hit the nail on the head here. Diff strokes for diff folks when it comes to teaching / learning.

A simple skill for cooking, I would suggest, is stir frying or chowing.
It re-inforces prepping your ingredients FIRST, and does not rely on exact measurements (I.e. starts the student on actually THINKING about the amounts of ingredients added - I know, I know - who in this world actually THINKS anymore )

Do you really MEASURE a few tsp of sesame oil out of the bottle?
A spoonfull of chili garlic sauce (maybe more, if YOU'D like it)
Drizzle of soy sauce (more if YOU'D like it)
Drizzle of oyster sauce
Mince up some ginger and garlic (Depending on how much YOU like ginger and garlic) etc..
I would think stir frying is a fun way to introduce the whole "by the seat of your pants" way to look at cooking.
It also specifically shows results from searing as opposed to sauteeing.

Then, you can also show them how easy it is to make rice if you simply
follow directions.