Cooking for chumps Essay Example for Free

Cooking for chumps Essay What is one skill you can use all your life, no matter what career you end up in? Cooking is a fundamental skill that benefits life in all aspects! Engineers need food, Scientists need food, stay-at-home moms need food, even people with no career need food. Its a necessity of life! That is why I choose to learn cooking as my skill for my learning project. I have learned so much over the past few weeks that I will never forget. Cooking is not just about throwing something together, its a real learn-able skill. Cooking is a skill that never really appealed to me. I always had someone to cook for me. However, Im growing up. There is not always going to be someone there to cook my meals. So I thought I should learn how to do it my self. I never know how fun and rewarding cooking could be. It is an awesome feeling to cook for someone or even your self and have the meal or dish turn out exactly how you want it. Especially if you don’t burn it! Before I could even start cooking I needed to learn a little bit more about the skill. I did some research, looked up terms and asked my family to tell me what they thought I should know. This is when I got one of the best pieces of advice I could have ever gotten. â€Å"If it doesn’t turn out right the first time, or you mess up don’t get discouraged and feel free to experiment! † This came from my family. This piece of advice is really what kept me going through this project. When I would want to mess up they would remind me of why I was doing this and the rewards I would get for completing it. They were right, if I had given up I wouldn’t have the skill I have now. I wouldn’t be able to cook for myself. It doesn’t always turn out perfect, but life isn’t about being perfect. Its about doing what makes you happy and doing your best at it. I have a variety of recipes that I choose to make for this Learning Project. Each recipe was chosen for a reason. I choose to make the MM cookies because they were my favorite cookies as a child. I wanted to be able to carry on the tradition of my family in my future. These cookies are quick, easy and delicious. Next I choose Sausage Gravy and Biscuits. This recipe is just an all around classic. Everyone loves it and its easy and pretty cheap to make. However, the biscuits did give me some trouble! This recipe taught me that until I am more comfortable with what Im making I need to follow a recipe and not try to guess proportions! Next I made the dish that was just for me. I love honey and garlic, so I decided to make the chicken. It was really simple, but I got distracted and I burnt the chicken. I quickly remembered it before it was to burnt. It still tasted pretty good. Next I made dinner for my whole family. I made roast beef. It was really easy and good. For my final recipe I wanted to share something with the whole class. So I made a chocolate pie. This was one of the most difficult dishes I made. It involved so many terms that I didn’t know had anything to do with cooking. It required me to learn different techniques and follow a recipe exactly. I hope it was worth all the trouble! Its sitting in my fridge waiting for our presentation time! Ive never had to do a project like this before and it took me forever to choose my topic. I kept thinking and thinking and I finally came up with cooking. My family at first disagreed with me saying that it wasn’t really a skill. But think about it, how many teenage boys can cook a really good meal for himself or anyone else I really wanted to be able to do something not many other boys like me could do. There is actually a lot of knowledge needed to be a good cook. There are hundreds of different terms that you need to have an understanding of in order to make a successful cook. One term that confused me was â€Å"cut in. † I was trying to mix some butter into sugar with a knife, needless to say it wasn’t working. The recipe didn’t really want me to cut anything. It just wanted me to cream the butter and sugar together with a pastry blender (which isn’t really a blender at all)! Like I said if you don’t know the terms you could really mess up a recipe. Another big thing you need to know to be a successful cook is the techniques need to make a certain dish. For instance if I don’t know how to hand knead dough then I cant make homemade bread. If I don’t know how to make a mousse then I couldn’t make a chocolate pie. Thank goodness that there are multiple websites and resources that help you to understand and get help perfecting these techniques. In conclusion cooking is a very useful skill that everyone needs to know even a little bit about. I am so glad that I choose to study and learn about this skill. It is such an easy and rewarding skill to learn that I don’t know why everybody cant be a good cook if they try to be. However, it is much easier if you have someone who has experience to help you!