Anyone Can Cook (Yes, Even You!)

Learning how to cook and provide a healthy diet for yourself is another important step in living independently. Eating out every day is not a great option in the long-term: it’ll cost you a lot more per meal, and typically restaurant food is much unhealthier than home-cooked meals. It’s also a great skill to have in general, and can even be fun when you start learning your own specialty dishes and how to create your favorite meals. The best way to learn how to cook is to just do it - the more you practice, the better you’ll get. The reason behind the cliche that parents can just eyeball the portions of ingredients they put into a meal instead of having to measure is experience. But for someone getting started, there’s no shame in looking up and following the online recipe. Fortunately, there are millions of recipes out there, many with clear step-by-step instructions and ingredients lists, and completely free to use. Some websites, like NYTimes and Bon Appetit, have sections dedicated to providing these recipes. These are guaranteed tasty and good-looking dishes, but they can require a little more time and effort to prepare.

For those not looking to become expert cooks, or hoping to minimize their time spent on cooking, I recommend two things: slow cookers and meal prep.

Slow Cookers

Slow cookers are beautiful, magical machines that make cooking as easy as making a bowl of cereal. With a slow cooker, you simply place all your ingredients into the pot, put on the cover, and then let it stew for 4-8 hours, depending on what the recipe calls for (sometimes you need to cook ingredients prior to placing them in the slow cooker - the recipe guide will let you know). There are tons of slow cooker recipes out there, and the majority of them involve about 5-20 minutes of prep time and then several hours of just letting it sit in the pot. Do that once a week, and you’ll end up with enough food for at least several days. These miracle boxes will save you time and money on making your meals, as long as you’re okay with eating the same thing several times over the week (or split with roommates!). Fancy slow cookers can run into the hundreds, but a standard one - which is really all you need - is around $25-35. That’s a very cheap investment for the tool that will let you pump out four to five $5 meals each week with only 15 minutes of effort. I cannot recommend these bad boys enough.

Meal Prep

While slow cookers are more specialized advice, meal prepping is something I truly believe any working (or full-time student) adult should take up. Meal prep, as a concept, can be anything from preparing the ingredients (cleaning, chopping, storing) to use for cooking later that week to cooking all your meals for the week and individually storing them for later eating. The idea is to devote one day a week (or whatever time frame you want) to doing all the actual prepping and cooking for what you will eat throughout the week, rather than making each meal that you want to eat at that moment. The truth is, there will be many days where you’re either too busy or too tired to cook. Having your meals already prepared ahead of time will condense that effort into one time slot, and prevent the temptation to buy something instead. It also makes it easier to keep the habit of cooking, since you can have a pre-arranged time for making your meals each week rather than relying on “finding the time” during your busy weekdays. Besides that, meal prep can involve whatever sorts of meals you want, and can include as much variety as you want to put in the effort on your “meal prep day” to create. If you’re interested, there are also lots of forums and communities dedicated to sharing meal prep ideas and creations, such as on Reddit. 

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image created by midori-n

Those are just two general methods for cooking for yourself, and there are many other strategies as well. Feel free to cook every meal if you want, or try out different techniques for making your meals too - there are a million ways to cook. In the end, whatever makes cooking the most fun for you and helps you stick to it rather than relying on takeout is what matters. There’s also the matter of how to eat healthily, which is important for your physical and mental health, but that’s outside the scope of this path. Generally, the meals I linked to above, suggested by slow cooking and meal prep websites, are healthy and nutritious. Just make sure you’re getting the recommended portions of proteins, carbs, and fat each day, while maintaining a calorie count suited to your body!

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While we have touched on a number of topics in the previous pages, we’ve truly only covered a small fraction of all the problems you’ll probably face just in your first few years of living independently. And while you should continue to learn how to do things like cook, clean, and take care of your mind and body, the truth is you won’t be able to learn how to do everything. There just isn’t enough time to prepare for all of it. Realizing that, and becoming skilled at dealing with problems as they arise, is the key to successful independent living. There will always be something new you don’t know how to deal with, and that’s okay. The independent person knows that true independence is asking others for help when the situation calls for it - whether that’s friends, family, knowledgeable experts, or even the Internet. Knowing how to ask, and who/where to go to for help is a skill of its own that will allow you to solve any problem you will ever have to face, without needing to become an all-knowing master of all subjects.

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