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Cooking from scratch often feels like one of the only battles left to be won in the eternal quest to finally be an adult. You’re living on your own, you have a job, you have a husband, you have kids - so why is it so difficult to throw together dinner without letting the potatoes go cold while the meat’s still cooking? The truth is that cooking can be extremely intimidating - but here are some tips to make sure that you won’t have to reach for the microwave dinners just yet...

First and foremost, it’s important for you to buy fresh, good quality food. If the fruit and vegetables that you buy are good quality then you don’t need to do much with them other than add a little salt and then let their natural flavour sing through on the plate - let’s face it, there’s absolutely nothing better than biting into a fresh tomato at the right time of year. If you’re ethically inclined then make sure that you go for free range meat to ensure that the animals didn’t suffer during their lives - not only is that good for the world in general but it’ll also mean that you get better tasting meat.

A good workman never blames his tools but if you aren’t a particularly good cook yet, it won’t help if you have poor quality pots and pans and knives that are so blunt they’ll barely cut anything. Make sure that you have a couple of great quality knives and that you check out goods like food processors at sites like HealthyButSmart.com as they can dramatically cut down on the amount of prep time you have to spend on your food. 

There’s absolutely nothing better than learning new skills, which means that cooking classes might be the one for you. Give the French patisserie classes a miss for now, even if you’ve been yearning how to make a croquembouche, and go back to basics. It’s important to learn knife skills so you don’t accidentally end up cutting yourself, and it’s also important to learn the basics of nutrition - for example, half your plate should be made up of crunchy vegetables and leafy greens, a quarter should be protein like chicken or eggs, and the other quarter should be carbs like potatoes or pasta. There are a lot of things to learn.

Finally, there’s no time like the present to experiment. There’s no way to learn how to cook unless you practise, which means there will probably be a few small hiccups along the way - make sure that you have a stack of takeout menus ready by your side for when things don’t go as well as you’d like them to. Don’t beat yourself up if things don’t go right the first time - the best way to learn is to make a few mistakes so you understand what you’re doing wrong, which means that you’ll be much better next time around.