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Comment by reubenswartz | Hacker News Reader

This is so important. I don't know if you can "learn to cook" in an hour, but you can probably drive to the store, buy some vegetables, come home, and make a great salad with an awesome homemade vinaigrette dressing in less than an hour. I try to eat fairly healthy, but having a salad that's easy to make that I actually crave (oh no, I've turned into an old person) most days at lunch is amazing. It's fast, and I have great energy all afternoon.

Here's my default dressing: salt & pepper to taste. Bit of lemon juice. Bit of dijon mustard. Balsamic vinegar and EV olive oil. Adjust relative quantities to taste and based on what you have in your salad. Gets rave reviews and could not be simpler. ;-)

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If I only had an hour, i'd focus on a simple intros of really fundamental techniques kinda like the OP indicated, and not necessarily cooking everything in that time.

Knife skills. Keep them sharp. Mise en place. The importance of salt and pepper. Searing techniques for cooking meat and how not to do it. Roasting vegetables 101. The basics of finishing pastas and reducing sauces. The fact that you can make your own dressing in no time.

You can probably cover all of that quickly and in enough time to ask the right questions moving forward and begin your jorney - IF you had a curriculum. If it's self study it takes longer to figure out what you don't know :) For me it all started with "why does my Grilled Cheese suck? This should be easy" and it's been all downhill.

The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt was a big window into this for me because of the approach around time and temperature, and the book takes you through all of this stuff by section.

Love The Food Lab. (And I think my grilled cheese is pretty decent, at least according to my kids, which is saying something.) ;-) Agree with everything you are saying here, but I'll add that salads often have a bad reputation (I avoided them for years), but I can't think of an easier, healthier, more enjoyable thing to eat, assuming you can get good ingredients.

> Knife skills. Keep them sharp.

Cooking for over 15 years at home and still only learned this recently despite already knowing about it. I had to grind out a chip from one of our knives, and I realised when I was done it was much sharper than I usually get them. I hadn't been doing it quite right all this time.

> Mise en place

Asian wok-based cooking is great for learning this. You don't have time to mess around. It's something I've been trying lately (my frying pan stir-fry was always pathetic so I never made it at home, but now that I have a wok I can do a decent one).

I regularly make my own dressing as well! I have a few basic recipes—most are pretty much the same as yours. One I like in the summer especially is a really simple one:

+ 2 parts olive oil

+ 1 part honey (try and make it good wildflower or clover honey)

+ 1 part squeezed lemon juice (add some zest as well if you're feeling energetic—I hate cleaning graters)

+ Salt & pepper to taste

I actually started with a bit of honey and removed it after some experimentation. Figure any time I can avoid adding sugar and like the taste as much or more, I should take advantage. ;-) I'm with you the cleaning graters-- too lazy for that... Depending on what's in the salad, I'll adjust the proportions, or even throw in some turmeric, paprika, or sautéed garlic.

Oh I’ll have to try out those last ideas sometime soon. I can see paprika being great

Smoked paprika especially. :)

I do something similar. Mine is olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and a tsp of really strong mustard. I put mine in a small Tupperware in the fridge, that way I can shake it up easily to mix, and I just add to it as I get low.

I use the exact same technique if I’m trying to keep a batch going.

Having a dishwasher makes using a grater so much less dreadful - perhaps more than any other single kitchen implement. When I had a dishwasher at home we even got a Microplane zester. It's amazing how much flavor and aroma exists in lemon (and other citrus) zest that's not in the juice.

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