[ryan_lane]

Taking a single hour cooking class will drastically up your game. Ideally you'd take more than one, but in most cities you can find classes like:

* Knife skills * Overview of cooking methods * One-pot meals * Quick meals

You can also usually find classes specific to cooking methods.

I highly recommend a knife skills class, as it'll cut your prep times down considerably, which makes cooking a lot more enjoyable.

[ghaff]

As someone who cooks a fair bit, I tend to agree that someone could go from how to boil an egg and incrementally add things like organizational skills, knife sharpening, simple sautes, etc. in useful one hour chunks. You can't learn to cook in any meaningful way in an hour, but it's definitely a skill that you can usefully develop on a skill-by-skill/recipe-by-recipe basis pretty effectively.

I'm not sure how many cooking classes are aimed at rank beginners but there are tons of videos these days. It might even be useful to subscribe to something like Cooks Illustrated for a more structured approach rather than wading into YouTube.