Basic Cooking

Learn Mise en place, or Mise (meez). Translates to Put in place. Simply put, prep all your dinner recipes and standard use ingredients ahead and have readily available in easily reachable containers. This could be chopped onions, minced garlic, cleaned and chopped cilantro, grated cheese - whatever you will need for the entire meal. Make sure you have everything you need in terms of tools and pots and pans before you start. This allows you to concentrate on what you need to be doing when cooking - looking at the food, smelling, timing (looking at the clock or timer). Discipline yourself to not start cooking something and then start searching for spices or figuring that you'll have the time to grate or dice something as something else cooks.

Learn the basic types of cooking, and the basic types of meat that work well with each type of cooking. Boiling, Braising, Roasting/Baking, Grilling, Pan-Fry/Sauteing, Deep Fry, etc.

You need one good reference cook book that gives you all the times and temperatures for roasting meats, boiling lobsters, etcetc. You can have as many cookbooks as you want to be creative, but you'll always need that basic reference book. It can be a Betty Crocker or Best Recipes (America's Test Kitchen) or anything that has charts that shows temp/time/doneness.

Get good knives and practice knife skills. Don't buy sets. You really only need 2 - a chef's knife and a paring knife. Everything else helps, but isn't mandatory unless you're cutting bones (then get a meat cleaver). Learn to keep your knives sharp by washing them by hand and drying them right away, putting them up in a place that will keep the edge from being damaged, and buying a steel and learning to hone with it. Periodically take you knives to a professional to get them sharpened. Don't be afraid of sharp knives - it's the dull ones that will mess you up, as you push hard on something that you wouldn't have to if it were sharp, and it slips.

Get pans that are oven-safe (can be put in the oven). A lot of the cheap ones that have plastic handles are not oven safe. A quick and easy meal is thick cut steaks or chops, browned on both sides on the stove-top, then put in a pre-heated oven to finish to whatever doneness you desire. Throw some russet potatoes in the oven about 45 minutes earlier, and you have 2/3rds of a fine meal. Make a salad and/or boil/steam some vegetables for the last 3rd.

Learn scallopine. Buy veal or chicken pre-thin-sliced and flattened, or flatten yourself. S&P, then dredge in flour then put in a fry pan with a little oil. Turn over when browned, then take out of the pan when nearly done. Deglaze with wine or broth. Now you can make any number of traditional sauces in the pan with the floury and meaty bits, from piccata (lemons & capers) to pommodoro (vodka, tomatoes, cream), marsala (marsala wine, mushrooms). Put the meat back in to finish.

Learn to bread (dip meat in flour, then egg, then bread crumbs) to make cutlets. Learn to make batter to make batter fried items - either deep fried in a pot of oil (use a thermometer), or fried in a pan, one side at a time. Learn to know the difference (when to bread and when to batter).

A good immersion hand blender