A few years ago, I learned how to cook. Now, I am not (yet) at the level of professional chef, or someone who can cook and prepare food for commercial purposes, but I am now reaching a point where I can be safely go to a supermarket without thinking about recipes, or without knowing what to cook for the day. I can just grab whatever produce looks good in there, and while grabbing those, I am thinking what dishes I should cook with the produce.

Essentially, this is my journey.

  • Past me - can’t fry chicken nuggets
  • Now me - can go to supermarket without knowing what to cook
  • Future me - hopefully, can prepare and host a family gathering where I prepare and cook the food by myself

To reach the “now me”, there are a few milestones that I’ve gone through.

Milestone 1: meal kits

I started my cooking journey with just meal kits (eg. Hello Fresh, Dinnerly, Marley Spoon, etc). The kit comes with recipe cards, and all ingredients that you need to cook the dishes. When you explore the menu online, they usually also tell you what equipments you need to prepare and cook the dishes. I started my cooking journey with only 2 equipments: a non-stick pan, and a rubber spatula. Along the way, I purchased more cooking equipments as I needed. I didn’t purchase them at once.

The reason why I started with meal kits is that I can see the results immediately without having to learn all of the nitty-gritty and the cooking theory behind. You can stop here if you want to. This milestone is already able to feed you (and the family), and convenient as well, albeit the menu is quite limited, and you are locked-in to buy ingredients from only that particular vendor.

Milestone 2: impromptu recipes from social media

Once I am comfortable with the kitchen (chopping, mixing, tossing, etc), then I leveled-up by buying my own ingredients, planning my own meals, and taking note of recipes of the dishes that I wanted to cook. Basically, wrote my own recipe cards.

I learned new recipes from social media and miscellaneous resources. It really enriched my knowledge on how to cook something that I’ve never cooked before, or using the ingredients that were not available before as part of the meal kits.

Some of my favourite cooking creators (or influencers, if you will) are:

Chinese cuisines:

Indonesian cuisines:

Some of them also post on instagram, but I mainly learned from long-form videos on Youtube. I am still doing it until today - learning from the internet, or sometimes just to find an inspiration or add another dish to my rotation.

Milestone 3: just enough fundamentals from cooking books

In parallel, I learned the fundamentals of cooking by reading some cooking books. These books are not culinary school textbooks, but enough to give me fundamental knowledge for home cook (non-commercial setting).

Milestone 4: the future me - culinary school textbooks

I plan to learn more about cooking by reading these culinary school textbooks. I am doing it for fun, and this is completely optional for a home cook. This milestone (hopefully) gives me deeper knowledge of food and culinary, including food safety, food nutrients, and deeper science behind cooking.