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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

I agree 100%, but I would say: it is possible to learn _something useful_ about cooking in 1 hour (e.g. how to chop vegetables, or how to cook a steak).

I am doubtful it is possible to have the same experience with music, although maybe one can learn things like "what is a canon".

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> I agree 100%, but I would say: it is possible to learn _something useful_ about cooking in 1 hour (e.g. how to chop vegetables, or how to cook a steak).

Yes, I recently took a knife skills class with a some friends. Technically ran a couple hours and $60, but well worth the expense.

You could presumably figure out the same stuff by watching online videos, but the social experience and getting immediate feedback on physical skills was nice.

:-) I'm a jazz musician, and I think a bad piano teacher. I basically teach everything in one hour - how to read music, basic chords (triads, and with all kinds of 5ths and 7ths), cycle of 5ths, basic harmony - then tell people now they have to find great musicians they love and learn from them. (So much easier with the internet than when I was a kid) Sometimes I give them a list of people to check out. Of course, you have to practice that stuff for years until it's like breathing, but the basic theory can be presented in under an hour. You learn from years of listening to the music, transcribing solos and playing them, and playing with other people.

Watch bon appetit on youtube for an hour. It's fun and you may find yourself thinking about cooking more for fun rather than a chore afterwards.

Whether cooking is fun or a chore is, I think, directly related to how much stress the rest of your life is causing you. If you’re extremely busy holding down multiple jobs just to pay the bills and feed your kids, then it’s hard not to see cooking as a chore.

A person in such a situation is going to get very impatient trying to watch most cooking videos which tend to waste a lot of time talking about things unrelated to the recipe at hand.

Home food prep takes a lot of time, quite a bit of skill, and a ton of knowledge, for the whole process, not just the cooking itself, especially if you want the supposed health benefits and savings it grants.

1) Shopping. What's a good price on X? Meal planning's a factor and takes time, and you've gotta already have some notion of what's cheap right now for that, or else much better cooking skills to be able to make something with whatever you happen to pick up, in which case you also need to be a good judge of how much of each thing to pick up to cover meals for a given period of time. All this also takes time.

2) The actual cooking. Obviously. Takes time, takes skill, takes schedule stability if you don't want to end up with a bunch of "well shit, I guess we're ordering delivery pizza again" days.

3) Cleaning. Even if you're great about clean-as-you-go while also trying to watch kids or whatever, is your spouse? Uh huh. And cleaning as you go is another skill in the cooking department, gotta know when you're done with things, when you have minute to wash a pot without ruining anything, how to prep your ingredients and space and in what order for maximum effect (being other-than-awesome at this adds quite a bit of time to your cooking process). How to clean various things requires a little knowledge and experience, too.

(Of course it can be super cheap and incredibly easy and low-time-commitment if you can convince your family to be OK with rice-cooker rice, beans, and steamed whatever-frozen-veggie-was-on-sale for every dinner. Good luck.)

Of course, that's true of a lot of things. Many things are fun when you're doing them because you want to and have the time but are chores when you have to do them even though there are other demands on your time or you're just not in the mood.

I'm definitely like that with cooking. It's a hobby of mine but there are nights when I just need something to eat and get on with other things.

How to open a bottle of wine

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