This wasn't the first thing I cooked for myself, but it was my first epic fail:
I called my mom to ask how to make an apple crumble. She told me the topping called for equal parts flour and butter, and cinnamon. I wrote down "Equal parts flour, butter, and cinnamon."
How I didn't even pause before mixing HALF A CUP of cinnamon into the bowl is still beyond me.
Circa age six, my dad (first-gen American, Greek parents with a dad who worked/owned diners) started making sure I knew how to cook; the earliest lessons were scrambled eggs (sloooooowly over low heat with tons of butter) and a Greek salad (horiatiki, aka no lettuce, cut with the in-retrospect-not-really-that-big but definitely very sharp knife, to my mother’s dismay). I was so proud when I made it as dinner for my fam! To this day it’s a go-to “lazy” meal, and I think of Dad every time 💙
Chicken Parmesan in my college apartment — breaded precooked chicken breasts, dump on some marinara sauce, top with cheese and bake long enough that the cheese melts. I felt very sophisticated about this at the time!
Lots of Annie’s Mac n cheese and pad Thai from a kit. Terrible frittatas (onion, tomato and ground lamb?). Pizza bagels. Black bean brownies (joy the baker I think?) and The Kitchn granola bars. We would drive out to the farmer’s market some weekends and that felt huge. The one recipe that persists is Peter Berley’s Greek tofu. My boyfriend at the time and I would make that (it had white wine in the marinade) and drink the rest of the wine while we watched white collar because the bake time was as long as an episode. Honestly delicious. Now he’s my husband and we make it for our kids!
Knorr broccoli cheddar rice (those pouches of powdery rice/pasta combo) with chopped up squash, zucchini, and smoked sausage. Man, I thought this was an ELITE meal. I cooked it for company all the time too. Haha!
Ohhh my favorite was Knorr Mexican rice with chopped red peppers, a can of black beans and a can of corn 🤣 I really thought I was a chef with that meal!
Frozen ground beef cooked for about 10 minutes in the cheapest supermarket bolognese sauce I could find, topped with cheddar cheese and served with penne pasta. I must have made that five times a week during my first university year. That, or, as others have said, stir fried vegetables, turkey strips (cheaper than chicken) and a packet of hoisin sauce.
This is more of a "what I shouldn't have cooked" memory...but I recall making Kraft mac & cheese (the kind with the powder) and not having any milk. So I used Coffee Mate creamer instead....10/10 do not recommend.
Eggs at home. Off at college, in my first apartment, I microwaved potatoes and put a little cheese on them for "breakfast" and made a bean salad type thing at lunch- black beans, avocado when it was cheap (2 for $1), corn, tomato, hot sauce.
Lots of other cheap food- like totinos party pizzas, back when we were all outraged they were $1 rather than 50 cents, ramen with hot sauce and canned chicken, that kind of thing.
We loved going to the grocery store for fun and just wandering around, and had the time to ponder what we made for dinner, which was usually not THAT fancy, since we didn't have super sharp knives or a lot of equipment. What I have now in money and equipment, I don't have in time.
The thing in my fridge that always felt like I had really left home was at least three different hot sauces. My family was not a big hot sauce familly.
My favorite memory this brought up for me as of one of my sisters calling me from her first solo trip to a grocery store and asking what ingredients she needed to make a baked potato (I think it actually was a request for topping ideas but it does capture the tension of wanting to be grown and also realizing in a grocery store that you don’t know how to confidently make a dish that has all the required element in the name)
My first experience was making tacos, being shocked by the price of taco seasoning, and then getting all the groceries back to the dorm only to realize I didn’t have a pan to cook the ground beef in.
In true ‘raised by boomers’ fashion I started cooking at 12/13 and was a better cook than my mom by the time I went to college. I remember being shocked that so few of my college friends knew how to cook and taught a few roommates the basics. My most regularly cooked meals in my teens/20s were soups, stews, chili, and anything pasta based. I credit my giant Cooks Illustrated ‘the new basics’ type cookbook for guiding me through more complex recipes in my 20s - like how to cook a steak and not have it come out gray!
“Raised by boomers” lol can totally relate! Knew not only how to cook but also how to bake, garden, and can, or as they would say, put up the harvest 😂
Omg yes! Baking was what I started on (helping make cakes/cookies), then pie crusts. I HATE gardening because the vegetable garden was my job for most of my childhood. We didn’t fully can but we flash froze and pickled a ton of veggies and cooked down/froze all of our tomatoes for sauce.
Thanks to many hours spent baking cookies with my mom as a kid, I developed an interest in cooking young. Got super into baking bread at 13 (and have rarely made bread since lol). As a young adult newly out on my own, I was gifted the vegetarian planet cook book and the lentil chili became a mainstay for many years. My main regret from those years is trying too hard to make everything “healthy” instead of flavorful. Oh diet culture 🙄
I cooked strictly from recipes for a couple of years—mostly from online but also from a book on how to cook “everything” and a cake recipe book that led me to make an elaborate jello salad cake. I remember making an Asian chicken noodle soup. It’s too time-intensive for me to make regularly now. Maybe I had a lot more time and energy for cooking back then. Or maybe I ate mostly pasta.
Omg my college fancy recipe was a box of Annie’s shells & cheese, to which I added diced chicken (cooked how? I can’t remember?), some parmesan, and inexplicably… a tablespoon of dijon mustard? I felt EXTREMELY FANCY.
I remember a college friend of mine teach me how to take those thin chicken breast slices and bread and fry them. It felt so adult. When I lived off campus I decided to make it healthy by baking it rather than frying it and I added a whole bowl of microwaved frozen peas and corn 🤷♀️. Not super seasoned and a little dry but I ate it a lot!
I learned to cook making the meals my parents made, which were all fine, but once I got to college I decided I could pick my own things to cook and for MONTHS I ate this wild meal that was frozen mixed veg, quinoa, and chickpeas, with just a ton of salt. It was "saved" from blandness only by being so salty it burned. I feel like with any kind of sauce this would have been very respectable, but all I did was salt and then salt some more.
This wasn't the first thing I cooked for myself, but it was my first epic fail:
I called my mom to ask how to make an apple crumble. She told me the topping called for equal parts flour and butter, and cinnamon. I wrote down "Equal parts flour, butter, and cinnamon."
How I didn't even pause before mixing HALF A CUP of cinnamon into the bowl is still beyond me.
It was inedible.
bahahaha
🤣🤣
Circa age six, my dad (first-gen American, Greek parents with a dad who worked/owned diners) started making sure I knew how to cook; the earliest lessons were scrambled eggs (sloooooowly over low heat with tons of butter) and a Greek salad (horiatiki, aka no lettuce, cut with the in-retrospect-not-really-that-big but definitely very sharp knife, to my mother’s dismay). I was so proud when I made it as dinner for my fam! To this day it’s a go-to “lazy” meal, and I think of Dad every time 💙
Chicken Parmesan in my college apartment — breaded precooked chicken breasts, dump on some marinara sauce, top with cheese and bake long enough that the cheese melts. I felt very sophisticated about this at the time!
Lots of Annie’s Mac n cheese and pad Thai from a kit. Terrible frittatas (onion, tomato and ground lamb?). Pizza bagels. Black bean brownies (joy the baker I think?) and The Kitchn granola bars. We would drive out to the farmer’s market some weekends and that felt huge. The one recipe that persists is Peter Berley’s Greek tofu. My boyfriend at the time and I would make that (it had white wine in the marinade) and drink the rest of the wine while we watched white collar because the bake time was as long as an episode. Honestly delicious. Now he’s my husband and we make it for our kids!
Knorr broccoli cheddar rice (those pouches of powdery rice/pasta combo) with chopped up squash, zucchini, and smoked sausage. Man, I thought this was an ELITE meal. I cooked it for company all the time too. Haha!
oh YES i recall those pouches!
Ohhh my favorite was Knorr Mexican rice with chopped red peppers, a can of black beans and a can of corn 🤣 I really thought I was a chef with that meal!
Frozen ground beef cooked for about 10 minutes in the cheapest supermarket bolognese sauce I could find, topped with cheddar cheese and served with penne pasta. I must have made that five times a week during my first university year. That, or, as others have said, stir fried vegetables, turkey strips (cheaper than chicken) and a packet of hoisin sauce.
This is more of a "what I shouldn't have cooked" memory...but I recall making Kraft mac & cheese (the kind with the powder) and not having any milk. So I used Coffee Mate creamer instead....10/10 do not recommend.
noooooooooo
Eggs at home. Off at college, in my first apartment, I microwaved potatoes and put a little cheese on them for "breakfast" and made a bean salad type thing at lunch- black beans, avocado when it was cheap (2 for $1), corn, tomato, hot sauce.
Lots of other cheap food- like totinos party pizzas, back when we were all outraged they were $1 rather than 50 cents, ramen with hot sauce and canned chicken, that kind of thing.
We loved going to the grocery store for fun and just wandering around, and had the time to ponder what we made for dinner, which was usually not THAT fancy, since we didn't have super sharp knives or a lot of equipment. What I have now in money and equipment, I don't have in time.
The thing in my fridge that always felt like I had really left home was at least three different hot sauces. My family was not a big hot sauce familly.
My roommates and I used to make this all the time after college:
-1 box Bens wild rice - while cooking, add a can of corn
-slice chicken sausages and sauté them
-mix cooked chicken sausage with the cooked rice and corn, add in feta cheese, top with Frank’s hot sauce
I haven’t made this in well over a decade but I am now kind of craving it! 😂
My favorite memory this brought up for me as of one of my sisters calling me from her first solo trip to a grocery store and asking what ingredients she needed to make a baked potato (I think it actually was a request for topping ideas but it does capture the tension of wanting to be grown and also realizing in a grocery store that you don’t know how to confidently make a dish that has all the required element in the name)
My first experience was making tacos, being shocked by the price of taco seasoning, and then getting all the groceries back to the dorm only to realize I didn’t have a pan to cook the ground beef in.
lol both of these stories are so funny and sooooooo true to that weird liminal space of young adulthood!
In true ‘raised by boomers’ fashion I started cooking at 12/13 and was a better cook than my mom by the time I went to college. I remember being shocked that so few of my college friends knew how to cook and taught a few roommates the basics. My most regularly cooked meals in my teens/20s were soups, stews, chili, and anything pasta based. I credit my giant Cooks Illustrated ‘the new basics’ type cookbook for guiding me through more complex recipes in my 20s - like how to cook a steak and not have it come out gray!
“Raised by boomers” lol can totally relate! Knew not only how to cook but also how to bake, garden, and can, or as they would say, put up the harvest 😂
Omg yes! Baking was what I started on (helping make cakes/cookies), then pie crusts. I HATE gardening because the vegetable garden was my job for most of my childhood. We didn’t fully can but we flash froze and pickled a ton of veggies and cooked down/froze all of our tomatoes for sauce.
Thanks to many hours spent baking cookies with my mom as a kid, I developed an interest in cooking young. Got super into baking bread at 13 (and have rarely made bread since lol). As a young adult newly out on my own, I was gifted the vegetarian planet cook book and the lentil chili became a mainstay for many years. My main regret from those years is trying too hard to make everything “healthy” instead of flavorful. Oh diet culture 🙄
I cooked strictly from recipes for a couple of years—mostly from online but also from a book on how to cook “everything” and a cake recipe book that led me to make an elaborate jello salad cake. I remember making an Asian chicken noodle soup. It’s too time-intensive for me to make regularly now. Maybe I had a lot more time and energy for cooking back then. Or maybe I ate mostly pasta.
i can't recall EVER cooking from a recipe which is so weird in hindsight - like that would've helped, you know?!
Omg my college fancy recipe was a box of Annie’s shells & cheese, to which I added diced chicken (cooked how? I can’t remember?), some parmesan, and inexplicably… a tablespoon of dijon mustard? I felt EXTREMELY FANCY.
ok that sounds WAY better (although sans chicken lol - something about that texture grosses me out) - unsure i KNEW about annie's in college?!
Dijon added to ANYTHING was a move! So chic.
I remember a college friend of mine teach me how to take those thin chicken breast slices and bread and fry them. It felt so adult. When I lived off campus I decided to make it healthy by baking it rather than frying it and I added a whole bowl of microwaved frozen peas and corn 🤷♀️. Not super seasoned and a little dry but I ate it a lot!
I learned to cook making the meals my parents made, which were all fine, but once I got to college I decided I could pick my own things to cook and for MONTHS I ate this wild meal that was frozen mixed veg, quinoa, and chickpeas, with just a ton of salt. It was "saved" from blandness only by being so salty it burned. I feel like with any kind of sauce this would have been very respectable, but all I did was salt and then salt some more.
it's all YOU KNEW lol