Does anyone else struggle to cook?

Possibly not the healthiest or slimming of foods.

You can do the same with a loaf of sliced bread, take out one or two slices and toast them.

i discovered u can put frozen potato waffles ( its on the instructions ! ) straight into a toaster so i have been eating potato waffles for a few days now

i cook until black lol
just stick something in the grill and wait until its nice and black so that i can be sure i wont get food poisoning.
but as for losing weight, i dunno i rather take the excercise route... go out for walks, pump weights. you know if you build muscle, which kinda builds weight, it burns fat anyway even when your doing nothing. so muscle is a investment that keeps on burning fat even when your resting, a engine, of which fat is its fuel and it is a very hungry engine. i wouldnt be too focused on the weight number, as muscle is heavier than fat, but rather be more focused on getting rid of fat and gaining tone and muscle.

i dont even bother with gyms too, too expensive, you dont get your moneys worth especially when you can buy weights for like £20 or £40 worth and then you have all you need to maintain yourself forever without the awkward interaction of a gym and the expense of paying them hundreds of thousands over a lifetime.

Cook rice for one person.

Get a pot with a lid ( glass lid is easiest because you can see inside)

put in the pot half a cup of raw rice (add a pinch of salt if you like)

wash it in cold water only

remove the cloudy water

add a cup of fresh cold water

put it on electric 2 setting, close the lid

after five mins check the rice, give it a stir and close the lid

after another 4 mins check the rice, if it looks cooked but its still wet leave it with the lid closed and the heat turned off.

That's how I cook rice. It's easy. 

There are a few variables to note, if you have a thick metal pan it will take longer to warm through and if your cooker is slow to heat you might have to wait 5 minutes before it is up to cooking heat.

The best way to lose weight is iron self control and eat less, when you've been eating enough and you still feel hungry, just drink plain water.

Find a dish you'd like to master: something you could eat most of the time and spend time with it.

One thing I learned about my senses is how to use/engage them! Cooking is one part chemistry and one part sensory experience. 

When I'm looking at a recipie, I might re-write everything down and then say it out loud to make sure I'm actually hearing it correctly. Chances are I'll mix up words in my head so when I say them out loud I can give myself a wee chuckle.  I also started out baking (being ceoliac), so I had learned in a fun way how various ingredients influenced each other. Like baking soda and lemon juice. 

The sensory part is important. Smell the herbs, indulge in covert things like charcoal salt or garlic herb mixes. If you engage your senses thoughtfully while cooking, eventually you can tell when a thing is finished with your nose!

It's easier to do a thing when you enjoy it, though. Peel through recipies on BBC for example and look for a particular food item which is a favourite (it's not full of adverts and frustratingly difficult information).

Of course, there's always a trusted jacket and a little salad. But even with the potato, little did I know you could rub it in oil, stick a skewer through it and throw it in the oven! My son taught me this one :) 

Cooking for one is difficult, an onion a tomato some meat and a tin of kidney beans would be enough for three people, freezing the rest is always a good idea. To get cooking instructions I like to watch someone cooking on youtube, I don't like reading instructions. Some are easy to follow and some are not. Usually they are made for people who are already experienced cooks.

What I find easiest is a slow cooker, great for making a stew, put it on to cook and it will be cooked soft and tender hours late. Potatoes will cook in the stew and no need for rice. 

I'm a fairly good cook but it's just because I have been cooking all of my own meals for most of my adult life. Cooking is not something I enjoy, I consider it a chore, but I find it hard to go wrong. I don't measure anything. I judge everything by eye and don't use recipes, I just combine whatever ingredients I have in the fridge and cupboards. I am a creature of habit so I eat the same dishes over a two week period, so most things I cook I have cooked hundreds of times before.

When I do experiment with new recipes (such as my attempts at baking in lockdown) I found that even when they go wrong, the end result is still edible and nice, even if it has the wrong texture, home-made things taste so much better than processed products from a shop that have been on a shelf for ages.

Before I learnt to cook properly there was a few years in my teenage years where I ate the worst diet possible and ended up suffering from malnutrition. With everything in my life - cooking, cleaning, personal finances, personal hygiene, etc - I had to fail at it catastrophically before I learnt how to do it, and then from that point on I purposefully got good at it because I didn't ever want to suffer over it again. So my life is a history of massive failure and then learning from those mistakes.

yes i have dyslexia as well. The spell checkers can deal with the spelling mistakes but sometimes i have to read thing 2 or 3 times to get all the meaning.

Thank you Martin for the tips!

I’ll leave the roast to the family haha - I have plenty of cook books but always put off by big recipes 

Thank you! I’ve never thought of making a chilli before, and though i don’t enjoy really spicy foods I’m always open to try something new! I’ll have a look around next time I go to the supermarket  

Chilli is one of the easiest to start with as you can do it in many ways, have it with different things like rice, jacket potato,  pasta. It's very easy to bulk out with veg which will lower the calories and give you more vitamins and minerals.  It's also one of the best dishes to make which can teach you about spices. I don't like super spicy, but they can really make a difference to your cooking. You can start with a spice mix that's already blended, start by adding a little at a time, stir it in and see how it tastes as you go. Once you get going, you can start to work out what spices you enjoy the most. Finally, chili is an excellent candidate for batch cooking. You can prepare a nice big batch, freeze it in small containers and pull them out as you need them.

Get a slow cooker - just bung stuff in and leave it all day - very hard to mess things up.

I mean when cooking, you only learn as you are doing it, so even if you just cooked all 100ml of the food this time, you learned about servings sizes and how to divide them for one person next time. It might take time to cool a larger portion of food, but it's not like it's an impossible thing to do, and you're still new to cooking, and a part of cooking is learning as you go. 

Sometimes with recipes, you can draw out a picture for the measuring sizes, ingredients, and food preperation, to have a better understanding of what to do. I mean I know someone that works as a cook that was not the best student in school and would fall asleep trying to comprehend anything that's only in writing, so she draws all her recipes on index cards with a few words on them, to keep everything as simple as possible. 

And maybe if you're not good at drawing, having something like text-to-speech that reads things out loud in the recipe for you, might help as well.

I had dyscalculia (dyslexia with numbers) and a math phobia, so I can mix up the numbers and the amounts without knowing it if I'm not careful. I really had to use visuals and another numbering method to cross-check that the number I'm reading is actually the right number, and I didn't switch the number positions around by accident without knowing it. I mean it still catches me off guard from time to time, so I understand how those with dyslexia can switch around letter positions when reading them, and how stressful that can be.

Keep tasting what you are cooking - obviously not with almost raw chicken etc.- and get to know what tastes good and how adding things affects the taste, Too sour, add a small amount of sugar or honey, too salty add a sliced peeled potato, then remove the potato before the food is cooked - the potato will absorb some of the salt.

Don't try cooking a roast dinner, which requires lots of elements to finish cooking at the same time. Try a chicken stew, Irish stew, Lancashire hotpot or even something like paella or risotto, they are all things that just cook in a single pan or casserole dish. You prepare all the ingredients then add them to the pot and cook, admittedly risotto needs fairly constant stirring and adding stock.

Cook for four and freeze the leftovers

Any tips for getting better?

Not me personally,  I'm a good cook. I prefer one- or two-pot cooking, over preparing multiple separate elements, if possible.