[Gnewt]

I wonder if you might be approaching the problem from the wrong direction. In all likelihood, you're not going to make any grave mistakes -- you're just going to make food slightly below par a couple times until you hone in your cooking skills. It's probably worth practicing cooking some simple meals until that sense of paranoia diminishes rather than trying to cater to it.

(I honestly used to avoid cooking because I wasn't good at it -- the only thing to "fix" that was to start cooking, and now I feel comfortable with it and cook all the time)

[the_af]

Heh heh, I used to avoid cooking because I thought cooks followed a rigid set of instructions, and if they missed anything that meant the whole preparation became inedible (maybe that was the programmer in me!). Then my brother -- who's real good at cooking -- told me the truth: it's hard to screw up a meal. Beyond some basic tricks, he improvises. Exact quantities don't matter. Don't use too much salt (this is subjective and you get better at it), don't overcook (ditto), butter and oil may be unhealthy but make everything better, etc.

I'll never be a great cook, and I occasionally overcook something -- which is in my opinion the number one sin -- when I'm not paying attention, but I manage. Cooking doesn't scare me anymore.

[Gnewt]

This matches my experience! I thought there was a rigid set of instructions and that if I couldn't follow them perfectly I would ruin the meal. Definitely the programmer in me :). And definitely, in retrospect, a totally misguided notion.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Thank you for posting this!

I've been cooking in one way or another since I was about 10 years old and this perspective has simply never occurred to me. And for the life of me I could never understand why people thought cooking was so difficult.

Suddenly a lot of that makes sense now :-)

[smileysteve]

I'm like your brother; I innately understand cause and effect when cooking; I can see something in a restaurant, and mimic it on the first try with reasonable results.

a fellow programmer shared that not everybody understands cooking like that, that the causal relationships, understanding of temperatures, or additions of flavors.

He was reading this book. "The Science of Cooking" https://www.amazon.com/Science-Cooking-Peter-Barham/dp/35406...

In a way, cooking is like coding; we can all learn through a bootcamp or tutorial, but for some of us it clicks really quickly.