I've written two books over the past decade as well as learning some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most vital lesson I've learned. There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding.
The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Consistent effort over time is one of the greatest forces in the world. Persistence beats focus, inspiration, and genius 90% of the time.
> There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding.
There is an amazing book called The Slight Edge which is based on this very principal and it can really change your life. Here is a small excerpt from it that really resonated with me:
It sure would be nice if, somehow, you could do something dramatic. If you just wake up tomorrow and have it all turned around—snap your fingers and change it. That might happen, in a movie.
But this is your life. What can you do? What happens if you add one small, simple, positive action to the success side?
Nothing you can see. What happens if you add one more? Nothing you can see. What happens if you keep adding one more, and one more, and one more, and one more ...
Before too long, you see the scales shift, ever so slightly. And then again. And eventually, that heavy - failure side starts to lift, and lift, and lift ... and the scales start swinging your way.
No matter how much negative weight from the past is on the other side, just by adding those little grams of success, one at a time (and by not adding more weight to the failure side), you will eventually and inevitably begin to shift the scales in your favor.
The Slight Edge is about your awareness. It is about you making the right choices, the choices that serve you and empower you, starting right now and continuing for the rest of your life, and learning to make them effortlessly.
It's not a question of your mood or your feelings. And it's not a question of will power. It's a question of simply knowing.
Simple things you do every day, in fact. Or, as the case may be, don't do every day. Time will be your friend or your enemy; it will promote you or expose you. It's entirely up to you.
If you're doing the simple disciplines, time will promote you. If you're doing the few simple errors in judgment, time will expose you, no matter how well you appear to be doing right now.
Scott Adams book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" touches on a similar theme, "systems vs goals". Have a system that takes willpower out of the equation - so you can do simple repetitive tasks everyday, to achieve big things over time.
A goal might be - lose weight! But a system might be - batch cook steamed veg with some healthy condiments, and eat that only during the day by having it always within reach.
By having a system for preparing easy, health food, you compound the effect instead of having a seemingly impossible intimidating goal that you keep putting off.
Other stuff that resonated with me were doing things that keep your personal energy as high as possible, stacking skills (be in the top 25 percentile at multiple things), and the idea that your brain is a moist computer that you can actually program in a desirable direction. The book really resonated with me.
Gee. Steamed veges (potatoes, corn, broccoli, beans, carrots, brussel sprouts etc) with a lil vegan butter, salt, and herbs or minced garlic on top is one of my favourite things in the world.
Lightly steamed (retaining crunch, flavour and nutrients), plus melted butter (in moderation) and salt is my go-to as well. For instant pots, there is even a table on how many minutes each type of vegetable should be correctly steamed. That makes all the difference.
You probably mean steamed to death. if you blanch them, they mostly taste really good. of course, don't blanch potatos or something like that - but broccoli is a good example. Most people cook them until they are soft, but a short blanch is usually enough.
James Clear writes in his book Atomic Habits, that making one small change and performing that change consistently every day is the compound interest of life. I like how James’ description and the one from your book suggestion are so similar.
Losing weight, there's never been a day I felt perceptibly different from the day before, but looking back a year some things are certainly easier or more comfortable already after about 80lbs. Slow by most measures but that has its own benefits.
I started lifting weights two years ago. First time I've ever really succeeded in developing an exercise habit in 50+ years. Progress is slow. Every few weeks I can add maybe 5 lbs to a particular lift. Or maybe not. I have no specific goals. But the accumulated progress is remarkable to me. I have a better body now than I did in high school. It's still not "fun" but I do it every other day and rarely miss, and it does give me a sense of satisfaction to complete a workout.
I also enjoy lifting weights and I recently started doing high-frequency, low/moderate intensity training throughout my workday. I'll just choose an exercise for that day and do it many times per day. It's always around 50-70% effort so pretty easy (eg. if I can do 10 pullups I'll only ever do a set of 5 max). That way I have perfect technique for each rep and set and I never get close to failure. I always feel refreshed and never beaten down and I don't have to set aside specific time to lift (I'm currently trying to just maintain while I do technique work). Yesterday I did it with front squats for 10x3 of very high quality reps. I plan to increase the reps/weight slightly once it gets super easy and repeat.
I've been smoking daily for past 5 years, it cascaded into smoking from morning until I fall asleep. Decided to stop on my 25th birthday 3 days ago.
It's really hard and even though I love this devil's lettuce I wish I never started smoking it. Any tips for a fellow smoker ?
I don’t smoke but have been involved in some programs to (hopefully) help people quit smoking. One of the things that seem to work was replacing the habit.
Just being bored doing nothing on the time that you used to be smoking will drive you mad and use a huge amount of will power.
Doing something that you enjoy on that time, even better if it’s something that uses your hands (as opposed to Netflix) could not only help you get rid of the habit you doing, but also add something that quality to your life. To my mind comes woodworking, gardening, sports, RC Cars, model airplanes building… just something that you enjoy.
Good luck!!
Cardio seems to be key to a healthy relationship with the plant. I think it has something to do with it accumulating in fat cells but I don't know the mechanism, that's just based on my observation of the difference between healthy and unhealthy tokers.
For me, mostly work issues. While I find pot is great for interpersonal relationship building, I've struggled with the following while smoking and running a startup:
* I can't prioritize tasks properly (both within work and outside e.g. fitness)
* I become passive as a leader, which isn't good leadership
* I evaluate situations based on emotional resonance rather than factual data
There are more, but those are the ones that immediately come to mind. These led to bad decisions, poor productivity, and ultimately hurting my trust with the team.
The Slight Edge is an amazing book about an amazing concept. Dramatic change happens one percent at a time at a consistent cadence.
Also great chapter in The Psychology of Money about Warren Buffet. He's been investing since he was a child and is now in his 90s -- He's been compounding returns on a longer timeframe then anyone else alive.
That is selection bias at its worst: he really is an outlier. There are plenty of investors that beaver away every day and do not get his returns. I suspect you could pick one of his decades and only find a few people that exceed his ability.
> And he also hasn't beaten the market in over a decade.
You say that like it's an accurate condemnation of Buffett's investment skill.
A 30% - or higher - average annual return like the old days means Berkshire would have to go from a $636 billion market cap to a $8.7 trillion market cap in one decade. Yeah right.
Berkshire no longer competes with the market. It is the market. The larger you get, the harder it is to keep high returns going; Berkshire got really, really large. In terms of value it's also overwhelmingly an operating holding company, not an investment portfolio. The investment side of the business is not what drives Berkshire's stock higher, and hasn't been the primary driver for decades, operating results are.
When I first got into home cooking a few years ago, the learning process was painfully slow. It must've taken several attempts spread across a week just to learn how to make basic scrambled eggs the "proper" way. Now after a few years of experience, every ingredient I learn to work with seemingly unlocks a dozen more dishes that I can easily assemble. The rate of learning accelerates evermore.
Software is very much the same. And the cool thing about software is that the domain of knowledge is effectively infinite. No one person can ever run out of things to know in this field. You can only learn more and get even better.
The number of domains of knowledge that are effectively infinite are compounding...this thought tends to make me hyperventilate if I think about it too much.
It was very important to me to be smart so that people looked positively at me, now that I'm getting older, I'm having a hard time letting that go as I know more and more about less and less.
And yet, “smart” is less about how much you know and more about how quickly you can become competent in something new. You can feel confident in the knowledge that when you need to know something you can learn it, just-in-time.
Would you mind sharing what you used to learn cooking? My main struggle is recipe books that teach you the recipe rather than cooking. But I'd love to learn HOW to cook, not WHAT to cook.
I actually think starting with recipes and following them semi-blindly is a great way to learn to cook. For a couple of reasons:
* It gives you successful experiences early in the process. It can be really disheartening to spend hours making a mess of your kitchen and end up with something unpalatable. Following tried and true recipes gets you to that amazing feeling of "I created something delicious" as quickly as possible, and I think you need that to keep motivation up.
* There are definitely many systematic aspects to cooking. Things like the French mother sauces, the role of acid, Maillard reaction, etc. But also, a lot of cooking really is just "we put these ingredients together because we've always put them together". When you think of food you love, part of the reason you love it simply is history and cultural association. Rote learning of that lore is an important part of the process and recipes are good for that.
* Much of cooking is technique—literal physical and low-level skills. Knowing how much salt to add to meat based on how the salt feels in your fingers and eyeballing the size of the cut. Knowing whether your onions are a little smaller than usual so you need 1 1/2 of them instead of just 1. Developing good knife technique so you can cut veggies efficiently and safely, which makes all cooking easier. How quickly to stir a sauce to prevent it from burning. How much to mix a batter to get it smooth but not tough. Recipes give you a safe space while you learn all of those important fundamentals. We tech nerds tend to assume all knowledge is discrete and encodable in words and concepts, but so much of cooking is not that. The nonverbal intuitive techniques are a huge aspect.
* Humans are incredible generalizers. Trust that as you "blindly" follow a few recipes, your brain is hard at work spotting patterns and commonalities. Without even realizing it, before long, you'll start seeing connections. Once that happens you'll begin tweaking recipes, and then making bigger changes, and before too long you won't need them at all.
Don't feel that you need to reinvent the entire culinary arts from first principles. There's a reason that generations of cooks have used recipes and watching each other cook as the primary ways of passing down that knowledge.
Agreed- I learned to cook at first by just doing some recipes, and also just making some basic dishes like pasta with sauce (from a jar) but then jazzing it up by adding additional freshly chopped garlic, or oregano, basil, whatever.
If you start making enough dishes, you will start to see the similarities. You start realizing that making something like chicken marsala is just like cooking almost any other protein and making a "pan sauce"- First you brown the meat with some oil (causing Maillard reactions) in a pan, then take the protein out and brown some onions, and maybe soften some garlic, then throw some liquid in the pan, typically chicken stock and/or wine, to get all the brown bits stuck to the pan up and unlock that flavor (called deglazing), then throw in other things to make it flavorful, whether it be herbs, mushrooms, veggies, whatever, and then you let that reduce down to a much thicker consistency, and then thicken with a fat like butter or cream, or maybe even mustard or roux- butter and flour mixed together and cooked briefly (finishing).
This is the basic process for making a pan sauce, and you can start experimenting from there.
For more specific advice, after cooking a bit, you can read a book like How to Cook Everything by Mark Bitman or Ratio by Michael Ruhlman that goes over some of the fundamental ideas of cooking. One interesting thing I have learned as I have gotten more adventurous is that many ingredients are often thrown together because of climate, geography and history- Tomato and Basil are like peas and carrots because they thrive in the same climates and are naturally harvested at the same time. Thyme rosemary and tarragon are heavily used in French cooking because they grow like weeds there, particularly in the south. With our modern supermarkets, you can get a lot more creative. But that's for later and you have to prepare yourself for a lot of failure in that process :)
There's a ton of great content on YouTube to learn the basics. There's a channel called "Pro Home Cooks" that's definitely more focused on teaching you the basics as well as techniques, tips and tricks, etc. That's what I watched to get me started.
They have a couple of "Basic tips & tricks everyone should know" type videos and I definitely recommend those. It's stuff like, "pat down your chicken before cooking it or the water will make it steam instead of sear", "tenderize your meat so that it cooks evenly", "salt your veggies to reduce the water content, it will cook better and faster", "adding salt to boiling water doesn't just season it, it makes it boil faster too".
Lots of good stuff that you definitely won't get from recipes.
Some of this might be great advice and the reasoning sound. Some of it I can't tell but the thing about water and salt makes me suspicious.
I suppose you mean to add salt after the water boils instead of at the start? Why would the water boil faster without salt with any significance to cooking?
I looked it up again and apparently
The temperature needed to boil will increase about 0.5 C for every 58 grams of dissolved salt per kilogram of water
One teaspoon of salt is about 6 grams. So let's say 10 teaspoons of salt to increase the boiling point by 0.5C for a liter of water. I guess you will boil about 4 liters or so for your pasta? So 40 teaspoons or about 240g of salt to raise the boiling point by 0.5C.
How long does it take a regular stovetop to heat 4l of 100C water to 100.5C?
The good enough answer to that is that it's not noticeable for you even if you had wasted this much salt on your pasta or potatoes or rice or whatever. Never mind that nobody would/should eat this food any longer as you've just cooked your food in saltier than ocean salinity level water. With the proper amount of salt it would be even less noticeable of a difference. Less time than it takes you to get the salt and put it in.
I suspect this is more about giving that almost-boiling water more points where it can break tension and start forming bubbles. So it doesn't make the water reach 100° faster but makes it more visible.
I'm not entirely sure how you mean. Would you care to elaborate your point?
Just to make it more clear, in case I wasn't, the 'common wisdom' as also perpetuated in the parent's statement is indeed about the faster boiling time. It's all over the internet too (and youtube).
The 'problem' with it is that it it is actually factually true. That water will definitely boil faster without salt added to it at the start. It can be calculated to the T if you know all the input parameters, like initial temperature, power output of your heating element, amount of water and salt. The fact remains that it's only by maybe milliseconds for common water and salt amounts used in cooking. So pedantically, whoever mentions it, is right, but it doesn't matter and is not how it's commonly referred to. It's more used to throw around your knowledge about cooking, giving 'tips' etc. I don't doubt that many of the other 'common wisdoms' of cookery are similarly unfounded if pedantically true. Not all of them probably.
Hands down the best cooking channel on YouTube for me at least.
The thing I most appreciate about Mike's work with Pro Home Cooks is that he shows what _doesn't_ work and what he would do different next time. I find that's the most important skill to hone when learning to cook.
He also does a ton of improvisation during his videos. Things like, "I was going to put broccoli in this but all I had was kale, but I still want a little more substance so maybe I'll make kale chips and roast some cashews too." Creativity in the kitchen is a huge part of the fun, and I haven't seen other cooking education sources that demonstrate it effectively.
I would recommend "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking". It has a great focus on the fundamentals rather than specific recipes.
There’s also a 4 part Netflix series of the same name featuring the author, each show tackling one of the four elements in the title. It’s not a replacement for the book but it’s a good visual companion.
I was in the exact same position, and I can't recommend Ruhlman's Twenty enough. It goes through 20 techniques/ingredients, from ‘Water’ and ‘Onions’ to ‘Roast’ and ‘Boil’, giving you all the information you might possibly need, and then provides a handful of recipes to explore all the avenues of each. The only downside is that a lot of the recipes include meat and the book never really touches on how to make sensible substitutes, which depending on your dietary preferences might be more or less of an oversight, but I didn't find it too difficult to sub things out.
I've not read Salt, Acid, Fire, Heat so I can't comment, but I assume it takes a similar approach.
Seconding Ruhlman's Twenty, it's the book that really taught me how to cook. By focusing on techniques, it allows you to understand that when a recipe says "saute onions on medium-high heat", it really means to sweat them, and what that looks like. So rather than mechanically doing what the recipe says, you understand how the ingredients respond to different treatments, and how to get the results you want based on your equipment. And when watching a cooking show, you can see what the ingredients are doing and understand why, so that you can fill in the inevitable gaps.
The food lab by j Kenji Lopez alt is another cooking book (with lots of recipes) that really helps you understand why and what you are doing rather than just telling you a process to follow.
Highly recommend anything Kenji does (previously he was the main force behind seriouseats.com) and also does a lot of first person point of view cooking videos on YouTube where he explains why he is doing things while he is doing them.
Second that! He has a very scientific approach, sampling various ways (cooking dishes in six different ways, comparing them), which makes it far easier to understand why something is done that way.
The Joy of Cooking is a bit old but describes the practicalities of cooking fairly well. It's full of recipes yes but there's essentially an entire chapter at the start of each section that outlines different techniques and even how to select cuts of meat, etc. It's fairly basic advice but that + Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will basically cover "intro to cooking" and give you a good set of the basic recipes to cover off.
I love the Joy of Cooking because it teaches cooking in layers. So it will start off teaching you how to make a simple dish, then the next pages are all permutations of that dish where you add a few ingredients, or slightly change the cooking technique.
In addition to Twenty and Food Lab already recommended, I'll mention Niki Segnit's books: Lateral Cooking and the Flavor Thesaurus. Lateral connects "adjacent" dishes -- you know of dish X, but Y is almost the same but from another food culture but everyone agrees on these basic things with just these slight pivots.
The Flavor Thesaurus does the same for ingredients -- you want to do something with figs, what dishes have figs in them, what complements them? The books cover the Western world, and Niki is the most witty writer among the dozens of culinary books I have.
Outside of that I like the "Perfect" columns by Felicity Cloak in the Guardian. Felicity takes a well-known dish and analyses all the differences in recipes, e.g. 6 cookbook authors have 6 different takes on coq au vin, what works best and how do they end up differently to each other? Like on Serious Eats, there's always well-spirited discussion.
"How to cook everything" by Mark Bittman was a book I found very useful. It has a whole bunch of recipes but it also does a great job of explaining the logic and overall structure behind each recipe. So you learn not just how to make a specific soup, but what the basic concepts behind making a soup are, as well as tons of alternatives for each recipe. It helped me quickly move from following recipes to being able to look at what I have in my kitchen and whip something up.
I think in this quantity is important, you’ll learn how long to boil/cook/bake/sauté/season to perfection with trial and error. You’ll also learn what you like, it’s pretty personal. I liked Jamie Oliver’s “in 15 minutes” book, I never finished any in 15 minutes and I changed the recipes a lot but there are a lot of simple tasteful things in there. Also on his website. And you learn techniques that make you faster/more efficient.
I think cooking is very similar to programming. You need to basically do it with your hands otherwise you won’t “get” it. The ingredients are one thing. The chemistry behind it is another thing. Both probably easily to teach through a book. Knowing how to hold the knife and how to dice onions fast is something you can only learn by practicing. Even better someone showing it first (eg through a video), but it won’t work without practice.
watch J. Kenji López-Alt on youtube. does the full recipe from start to finish while telling you the whys. he started doing that kind of thing semi-frequently at the start of the pandemic and now has a pretty large catalog of videos.
The best part is that he does very little editing, so you see him screw up and make modifications on the fly - nearly all other cooking shows/videos don't show that and so you feel like everyone can cook perfectly. Kenji will forget to add things, or burn things, or do things out of order, but he keeps rolling with it. To add to the videos, he has the best articles on seriouseats.com that explain how and why everything is done in the recipe.
indeed... that and not following the recipe by the book and substituting or paring down the recipes for a more accurate representation of what cooks do at home. also suggests what you could add or omit all the time.
A lot of people recommend videos to get started. A lot of (as in most) recipes assume you know enough to tell when the stove is at an appropriate temperature, when a texture is "right," etc. Video isn't a panacea but written directions for many things tend to assume you kinda know at least the basics.
ATK's best recipes and maybe some of Alton Brown's books (though I'm less enthusiastic than some are) are probably better than most at breaking down the steps and the reason for doing certain things.
Two recommendations that I think will be especially suited to the personality type that’s already matched to software development:
1) The Professional Chef - This is the textbook used in culinary schools. It’s advanced but it starts out from first principles assuming no prior knowledge and just methodically walks through literally every concept one could ever encounter. Not for everyone but if you’re the type that likes to just RTFM this is it.
2) Cooked by Michael Pollan - This is basically the opposite of the textbook I recommended, it’s all high level and narrative and conceptual but as someone who was just starting to cook seriously I found it life changing, it did so much to contextualize what I was doing, so it wasn’t just procedural recipies. This helped me a lot in learning how to open up the fridge pick some ingredients and just know what to do next. Also it’s a breezy read.
It's a great book. Most of the recipes do need to be scaled for home purposes (eg. soup recipes are one US gallon, mains are "makes 10 servings").
One of the neat things about the book is that many of the techniques illustrated end with "evaluate the quality of the finished product," which serves as a reminder to check what was done and how it can be improved.
I also favour Felicity Cloake; there's very little introductory fluff, it's straight into the food.
In the "How To Cook The Perfect"..., series, she tackles standards. She gathers the opinions and recipes of various authors and chefs, and tests them against a tasting panel. She then settles on her chosen recipe; but you get to decide whether you prefer to go with chef X or author Y, in respect of (e.g.) the capers.
I've learned a lot from Cloake. And her writing suits my cooking style - I don't like to be tied to a recipe past the first attempt.
Have a look at Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here for the Food." It teaches the different cooking methods - braising, grilling, roasting, frying etc. It teaches you why how these methods work and what foods benefit from them. It's a fun a book and you will cook a bunch of good stuff and there's a healthy bit of science in there as well. It will get you on your way to cooking without recipes.
The other recommendation I could make would be to "Cooks Illustrated" magazine. It's a monthly magazine but they're the kind of thing you could keep around for years as a reference. Besides the usual recipes also lots of "how to" and they usually have a seasonal focus so you can learn to cook things in season.
Delia Smith has done many series of cooking programmes; "How To Cook" addresses your question directly. It starts with the very most fundamental basics: how to boil an egg.
I'd be surprised if these programmes can't be found on e.g. Youtube.
I strongly suspect there is a book or two in print with the same title.
Delia's recipes work. She's not a purist; she does shortcuts (but always from-scratch - no tinned Cambell's Soup).
If "How To Cook" is too basic for you, her website is full of well-explained recipes for all kinds of standards.
[Aside: One of the things that pisses me off about online recipes is the fifteen paragraphs of gush that seems to be required if you want to be a paid food "influencer"; Delia doesn't do that.]
The book "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" is fairly modern still but also considered a classic by many. The entire goal of the book is to break cooking down to these aspects.
Another person in this thread mentioned the Master Classes with Gordon Ramsey and Thomas Keller and I can concur that both of those are really great in teaching technique that is reusable across just about anything you cook.
Cooking is pretty easy once you get enough of it under your belt and are confident with different techniques. It's also quite liberating as many things go with each other and it isn't a mystery if something will work. You can begin to target "profiles" you want your food to take on.
Nothing wrong with just following a bunch of recipes. If you do it enough you'll start to internalize common things and techniques, also play around with modifying them and substituting similar ingredients.
I would recommend The Professional Chef - it provides techniques and how do them, and follows this with recipes that apply them after. As might be expected though, this is a fairly serious book.
I highly recommend Masterclass to get into cooking. The Gordon Ramsey and Thomas Keller videos jumpstarted me into serious cooking last year. 10/10 would recommend.
I learned to cook in a restaurant setting (a nice restaurant, not Applebees or something), but the skills used to train line cooks apply to home cooks as well. You just have to be more deliberate with practice since you don't get the opportunity to cook 200 dishes a night.
Essentially, you learn one dish really well. To the point where I'd understand every action perfectly. Say it was a dish with chicken breast fried with some veggies, sauce, then tossed with pasta. They'd show you what the chicken should look like before you add the veggies, then how the veggies should be cooked before the sauce is added. Then the rest would be adding the sauce, pasta, and plating.
Once you had one dish down, you'd then learn the dishes which are permutations on that one dish. So chicken with peppers and onions in a garlic butter sauce, chicken with onions and mushrooms in a red wine sauce, chicken with tomatoes and peppers in a spicy sauce, etc. You get the picture. So every night for a week or so, whenever those four dishes would be called, I'd take them, that's all I did.
Most proteins pan fry about the same, the biggest difference will have to do with thickness and appropriate doneness determines how much heat you use. But for the most part, food is forgiving, especially when served with a sauce.
Veggies are tough. Cooking a veggie correctly is mostly in the prep and cutting, with moisture being the other big consideration (wet veggies macerate initially when fried). The good news is, you probably eat like five veggies regularly, so focus on learning how to cook your Big Five veggies first and you'll be good. You can use frozen steam veggies to supplement your diet while you learn.
Baking dishes is fairly straightforward. Generally small things require lots of heat and short cooking times, while large things like casseroles require lower heat for a long time.
Grilling is easy-ish. Commercial gas grills are hot up front, cool in the back. So you'll generally first oil the grates with an oil rag, then put a protein on the grill for 4 minutes, after which you turn it 90 degrees for another 4 min. This will produce grill marks you get in nice restaurants. Then flip it over and move it to the cool side of the grill until it temps out. Very large proteins (like pork tenderloins or thick cut chops) will be finished in a hot oven or covered with a cloche to get to temp without burning.
Pastries, breads, cakes, etc are their own specialized domain. If line cooks were JS devs, pastry chefs would be doing C++. My advice is to buy Duncan Hines and focus on decorating.
Learning to cook is not that different than learning most other skills. Start with simple things to develop fundamentals, then slowly add more fundamentals to your repertoire.
It is 100% okay to follow recipes. In fact, i highly recommend it because most recipes will use fundamentals. America's Test Kitchen is great. As is Serious Eats (the website), especially for foreign/fusion cuisine. I do a lot of cooking out of the Better Homes and Gardening cookbook as well, especially backed goods. If you're an American mid-westerner whose mom/grandma was a great cook, there's a good chance she was making dishes from that cookbook.
Edit: oh yeah, buy a probe thermometer! Seriously, it's the best cooking investment you'll make. 90% of the compliments I get on my cooking are because I'm cooking meat to the appropriate temperature.
A friend of mine (who couldn't cook) learnt by buying the delivered raw food packages that have say four evenings dishes with recipes.
The recipes are designed and written so that they are hard to screw up.
It was a least effort path that worked for him: no videos or books (so a different option than the majority of answers so far!). Mostly I believe it is just the desire to cook - even if just making one _favourite_ dish. Good luck!
I think they're interesting if (in most cases) you're part of a couple, you're fine with spending a fair bit of time multiple times a week to prepare, and you don't have much of a pantry at ho,e.
Most of those don't really describe me, especially pre-pandemic, and the one time I tried Blue Apron it just didn't work for me. About half of three recipes were OK. Another one was incredibly fussy for a burger.
I know there are a million services out there and some probably better align with my preferences though they're all pricy.
I disagree with the J. Kenji Lopez-Alt suggestions. He is too extreme/OCD for beginners.
A much more accessible source is Harold McGee who wrote "On Food and Cooking - The Science and Lore of the Kitchen". McGee reviews the science but also some history. He also reviews some of the cooking tips your mom gave you and why they work or don't work.
> I disagree with the J. Kenji Lopez-Alt suggestions. He is too extreme/OCD for beginners.
He's good for sous vide. You don't need much to do it at home (just an instant pot) and he's basically just telling you how to program it and leave it sitting for two hours. Not hard.
Most other cooking is imprecise and you have to learn to read the spirit and not the text of the recipe, or something. (Not baking though. You have to actually get that right.)
McGee's On Food and Cooking is a wonderful book, but I'm not sure I'd call it accessible. :)
For beginners I'd instead recommend his book Keys to Good Cooking. It takes all the information in On Food and Cooking and distills it down to the practical lessons a cook will need to improve their cooking.
My favorite for teaching cooking, not just recipes, is 'How to Cook,' Julia Child. We have our own and keep a copy at the in-laws for ready reference. We are also big fans of Alton Brown's 'I'm Just Here for the Food.'
One of the greatest lessons I took from formerly subscribing to a high demand religion was exactly this. "By small and simple things are great things brought to pass."
I started doing this with side projects a little while ago. The revelation for me was to create a monorepo out on GitHub and actually keep my hackaround projects under some reasonable form of source control and all in the same bucket.
What I started doing was rewriting my projects over and over trying to chase down the core first principles. I would take my previous iteration - MyProject12 - and create a fresh one - MyProject13. The idea would be to use the prior copy as a reference point for the new one, and to only use it for the little nuggets of value I think I still want to carry forward. I have VS solutions with every iteration of that project in it so I can quickly do a sln-wide search for something I discovered previously.
I repeated this process about 40-50 times for an application framework. Fast forward 3-4 years and we are now talking about setting up a license agreement between myself and my employer for purposes of using this IP in next generation products. It is incredibly nice to have permissive employment contracts so that I can freely explore my interests without fear of reproach. Seems this has very powerful win-win mechanics.
It may sound strange that this is what someone would do in their free time after work, but I actually do derive pleasure from indulging the fantasy of being allowed to rewrite code piles. If I were to take this tendency into my professional work, everyone would have quit by now. It seems to be a good outlet for me.
This is inspiring, thanks! I'm on a similar path and am about a year in. I now have a blog, app, and infra stack each in their own repos, each with their own deployment automations. I run a solo kanban board on Trello to help me prioritize what to work on next.
I don't know if the current project will turn into anything useful to others or not. But it feels satisfying to look at the list of little "done" cards and see how each of them has contributed to something tangible, while both the product and my skills are improving with each deployment.
When I'm ready for the next project, this year of work is reusable to launch something new super quickly. And the infra cost is close to zero while I work on it thanks to static site hosting and serverless tech. If it ever gets enough traffic to bill me I'll be happy to pay it because that will validate something useful is there.
My next step is to make it "good enough" to share it in the wild. That part is still scary. I'm almost there though.
Agree, this is how I somehow ended up using bash/vim for all my needs. I realized it wasn't "normal" when I saw my boss' face as he watched me typing. And it keeps compounding :)
I wrote a novel-shaped object (OK, it was never printed, so "object" is perhaps a bit bold) over about 6 months, by the simple expedient of making sure I spent at least 15 minutes every morning with the NSO editor open. Target was "Minimum one word", but (apart from a long stretch in the middle), more like 500-1500 words per day.
The long stretch in the middle was when I had to figure out how to deal with the main character dying half-way through, due to the logic of the story. That took a fair bit of revising previously written prose and setting things up for a sequel character, as it were (the main "protagonist" of what was intended as a series was an organisation, not an individual; as it turns out, there's a reason that is not a common format).
For what it's worth, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series was written this way with the Foundation or the concept of it being an "organization" spanning hundreds of years. It might provide some useful ways to handle this though in general I think his solution was "jump forward 20yrs and introduce a new character while brining up the former's legacy".
Yes, sort of. I think one of the early Foundation books was essentially composed of two or three shorter works and had both a time gap and a change of protagonists.
But having a change of protagonists in "continuous time" actually was not easy to pull off, and I am not sufficiently happy with the result to consider it worth distributing wildly.
Nonetheless, actually keeping at something means it's surprisingly easy to amass results over time.
Do you explicitly try to keep it all green, like a "Don't break the chain" habit tracker?
I can imagine committing code nearly every day, but what with the occasional travel day, sickness, etc, there would always be some holes, unless keeping it green and making at least one commit was explicitly important to me.
I find writing to be like this. Write something, go away for awhile and do other things. Come back and refine what you wrote. Once you do that several times, you'll have something worth reading. But it takes time.
There might be a reverse principle that our natural tendency is to forget what a problem is or how hard it is unless we warm up back into it. Doing thing regularly gives us that.
I don't think just doing an activity is enough - there has to be conscious effort at improvement.
A person doing a drunken Saturday 18 isn't going to improve. A person going to the range and focusing on technique 20 minutes a day will improve, with far less net time spent.
I think of it in terms of the "10,000 hours to mastery" - how many masters of driving do you see on the road? Most people are just barely not crashing from place to place, not focusing on skill.
Not to take away from your point, but from what I have read, the Grand Canyon was most likely not formed by little drops of water, but instead by occasional torrents of water. There is ~70 feet of boulders and detritus at the bottom of the Colorado River. Only a flood powerful enough to get all that material moving at once will erode the bottom of the river bed and carve the canyon deeper. The slopes and walls probably erode more continually though.
And in geological time, an every-10,000-year event may as well be like every day to us.
OP's comment is a vast simplification of what's happening underneath, but nonetheless still tremendously valid as a useful heuristic.
Valuable work, like many things in the real world, is not normally distributed, but skewed or following alternate distributions, such as power-law. This is likely what occurs within "torrents" of work: work that is has significantly more leverage than other work.
Nonetheless, the implicit bedrock of the just-showing-up heuristic is that the valuable work cannot get done without the consistency of simply showing up; indeed, expert performance is often a function of deliberate practice plus persistence (time); one without the other rarely nets positive results.
That's not true. You might be thinking of the Missoula floods that carved out the channeled scablands of Eastern Washington. But the Grand Canyon's river is generally the same size it always has been, and slow erosion forces created it.
Why not both?! It's not ridiculous to allow for constant, steady erosion and the occasional 10,000 year flood shenanigans!
Example from in our great-grandparents lifetimes. There's a cool place called the Bridge to Nowhere in Southern California => https://goo.gl/maps/XMerBpT3J2caLJ696 / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Nowhere_(San_Gabriel.... The bridge was built as part of a massive project to build roads through the San Gabriel Mountains in the mid 1930s. Only a couple years after the bridge was completed, there was a massive rainstorm washed away most of the newly built roads. The bridge stand about 120 feet, roughly 36 meters, above the river below. I was talking to a park ranger who said there were reports that the flooding nearly reached the bridge. While this bridge stands over a river that's been slowly eroding the valley below for (millions of?) years, every now and then Mother Nature says "I'm bored, let's hit the biblical flood button and see what happens!" What kind of boulders could a violent rush of 20m-30m+ flooding move? Big ones I'm sure! Who the heck knows what kind of freakish rain storms or natural damn bursts have happened in the time that the Grand Canyon has been forming!
For anyone in the SoCal area, the Bridge to Nowhere is a fun day hike. It's about 5 miles (8km) one way from the trailhead. It's a very cool hike. If you're going in summer time, bring plenty of water, sunscreen, and some head protection. It gets toasty in that canyon.
Sure, there are certainly big floods now and again. But the point stands that the grand canyon's formation was primarily from slow erosion, not from big floods doing the bulk of the work.
Not sure about the Grand Canyon, but at least around the Alps, lots of wide, deep river valleys were carved into close to their current form at the end of the last ice age, when rivers carried hundreds of times their usual water for quite a while as the ice shield was melting away.
The deeper the canyon gets, the larger its watershed and the more likely flash floods, etc. The answer is both, and it has changed over time. Trickle and torrents.
As a proportion of Earth’s water it is ‘tiny drops.’
As a metaphor it is reasonable as ‘tiny drops’ is not a scientific unit. And a boulder is any non-monolith greater than 256mm…seventy feet is not particularly large in a scientific sense just in an ordinary tourist talk one.
Well, I think you will find most fluid dynamics researchers will agree that a "drop" is a body of fluid where surface tension is non-negligible. We might argue over whether that limit is 25 mm or 5 mm or whatever for a given fluid, but we all agree it's a lot less than 1 meter for water.
Well, in this case the concept is that a drop-like thing has relatively large surface area compared to volume. Translating e.g. to people, it could mean many/all of the people in a group have ties to outside the group. Maybe "drop" is a neighbourhood and "sea" is a country.
Wouldn't the torrents be composed of drops of water, just descending in large quantities. And would not the little drops of water evaporate at some point forming clouds that may come down in torrents at some point?
Both. I am naturally a very "torrent of work" kind of person, but I've learned that one approach isn't enough. Some problems require a bit every day, some torrents.
I think it depends on the activity. It's impossible to build any medium to high complexity software by working on it for 5 mins a day. But you can make a lot of progress by practising every day for very little time. For example, I've improved on my tucked planche progression by just leaning forward while holding a plank for 5 seconds every day.
> It's impossible to build any medium to high complexity software by working on it for 5 mins a day.
Both of the books I wrote, one of which includes two complete implementations of a programming language, were mostly written in sessions of less than an hour. Occassionally I get longer ones and very often they are much shorter.
Learning to task switch and suspend efficiently is also a really valuable skill that improves with practice. I have kids, so if I couldn't make progress while being interrupted, I'd never be able to do anything.
And I wonder how you do it. How are you able to suspend and resume work on a complex project like this? How are you able to stop thinking about it when scheduled time is up, and then pick it up the next day, without paying a huge time cost of loading yesterday's state back into your head?
Could you elaborate on this? I'm asking seriously - I myself wish I could do that. The way I work today, in irregular but long bursts of high focus, is somewhat effective, but doesn't lend itself to having a balance in life (work-life balance, but also "personal interests - life balance").
My experience has been that a small amount of work each day builds mental momentum which can snowball into something bigger when my schedule opens up and I have some free time & an idea that excites me.
Yes, working on a problem daily means your subconscious is daily prodded to "think about the problem". As you do other things, your brain is 'working on it' so when you do get those few minutes or maybe an hour to work on it, you almost always know what to do - you've been thinking about it all day!
There is an apocryphal story of what Newton said when he was asked, "How did you come up with the theory of gravity?" replying: "By thinking about it all the time."
Yeah I agree. For software I find the major infrastructure laying and overhauling should be done in "torrent" blocks of several hours to a full day, while incremental bugfixes and feature add-ons can be done by daily short amounts of time.
I think at this point we're reading too much into specific units to compare very distinct things. The point of the analogy either way is the compounding effect of seemingly small things repeated.
to follow the example closer, you need to put in work every day, however small (continuous river flow), and that will carve the channels in your life (eh?) to enable the torrent of work that might come when conditions allow.
I don't know, I appreciated the correction and additional information. There was also an acknowledgment that it doesn't change ops point. Seemed like a useful comment to me.
Since this comment got some attention, my source for this was
[0] Ranney, Wayne. “How Rivers Carve Canyons.” Carving Grand Canyon - Evidence, Theories, and Mystery, 2nd ed., Grand Canyon Association, 2012.
I was listening to a podcast recently with a PHD scientist, and she was saying that she was a terrible programmer and that she would go back to her code after !6months and it didnt make sense to her, but that she was good at adding comments to the code, but they were useless because she was commenting on her emotional state while she was writing the code (her thesis was on the way stars evolve and devour solar systems and planets etc) ((dope premise btw))
but the fact that her code comments were all about how she was feeling at the time, and were completely unhelpful with discerning what the code meant/does...
And this is the great thing about threaded comments — everyone who wants to follow the pedantic branch of conversation can do so without derailing the others (though this ideal is frequently thwarted by bad UX).
Of course, it's nice when the pedants are self-aware, as is the case here, and acknowledge the pedantry of their tangent.
I don't think it's pedantic though. If what makes your argument powerful is tying it back to a natural phenomenon, then it should be right, otherwise you're using a bad example.
Also, to the degree it's wrong, you can try to take that error back and see where the argument flows.
Like, compounding is magic, except realistically, one or more of the following typically happens:
- Interest rate is so small that it doesn't add up to a meaningful difference over your lifetime. See e.g. most people and regular savings accounts.
- You aren't able to keep systematically saving / learning / etching a canyon for long enough for the compounding to matter.
- There's a natural decay process that is stronger than compounding.
Whether it's digging a canyon, learning new skills, or amassing wealth, it seems that concentrated but unfrequent actions are much more effective than a steady but weak trickle.
Ah! When it comes to arguments, yes, I do agree that their supporting examples really ought to be true-to-life.
But I don't think that's quite what was going on here.
munificent was using a metaphor in service of his plea, his encouragement, his advice that you really ought to consider making regular efforts at what you care about. To me, that feels a lot less technical and a lot more human than an argument does.
The difference between metaphors and examples might be that the important part of a metaphor is how it functions in context, how it adds to the metaphrand[1], and the important part of an example is how it functions out of context.
To give an example of metaphor: many Native American tribes besides the Lemhi Shoshone have stories that claim Sacagawea as one of their own. The stories—themselves metaphors for tribal values—are, of course, wrong, but they serve an important instructional purpose, nonetheless, transmitting values and custom in a narrative that inspires. In that case, it seems less important that the children of these tribes are hearing something factually incorrect, and more important that they are inspired by and identify with the story.
To give an example of example: if you're making an argument in court, you have to reference examples of past rulings that support your position. The strength of your argument depends completely on the validity of your examples, as they occurred outside the current context.
1) Julian Jaynes, in the beginning of "The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", does a lovely segment on how we only learn via metaphor, and in which he develops the terms metaphier (commonly, the metaphor itself) and metaphrand (the thing being described by the metaphor).
Using bad logic is building a house on sand. One might get lucky and the house might stand their lifetime but they're also likely to get swallowed by a sinkhole.
I’d much rather see pedantic comments that are technically correct than people just nodding along and perpetuating meme-like garbage facts. Too often when I scroll through social media I read quotes and posts that make me roll my eyes at how people will avoid critical thinking and reasoning as long as the words sound good and tell a good stereotypical story in their minds. In this case, the idea that vast canyons are formed by little drops of rain over time.
The irony considering your comment itself is an example of. A useless comment while OP made a valuable correction while respecting the original point made
The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Consistent effort over time is one of the greatest forces in the world. Persistence beats focus, inspiration, and genius 90% of the time.