Recipes are for telling you how to cook the right way. I'm not here to write a recipe, but I am here to help. If you find you follow recipes but things still go awry, that you make a gigantic mess for seemingly very little reward, or otherwise have trouble in the kitchen, this is for you. I'm here to tell you how not to cook the wrong way, so the only thing left will be do to something right.
Most important: Follow the recipe. This may seem like a given, but I don't just mean the ingredients, I mean the directions about how to mix what in what order and for how long, what sort of dish to use, how long to cook for and at what temperature. Because something cooks for 40 minutes at, say, 200 F doesn't mean you can cook it for 20 at 400 degrees. If a recipe says to mix the flour and baking soda, then add that to the butter and sugar, don't dump butter, sugar, flour and baking soda into one bowl and mix everything at once. If a recipe says mix until just moist, don't overmix. Mincing is different than dicing, so make sure you're doing one and not the other, and if you don't know what either is, look them up. If you're supposed to soak something, marinate something, let something soften, have it melt, whatever, then do it. Cooking temperature, time, mixing order, amount of mixing -- lots of things in the directions really do matter. As you gain more experience with cooking, you can decide for yourself what can be altered and what can't. For now, trust the recipe.
Start with the easy stuff. You can't go from boiling water to making cr8fme brul8ee. Small triumphs and small experiments will lead you to greater triumphs and greater experiments. For now, it's really better to cut your teeth on recipes you don't need to dedicate your life to, only to be disappointed when it doesn't turn out. You can usually judge which recipes are for you -- and which aren't -- just by looking at the number of ingredients and the number of directions.
Don't be worried about making a mess. I cook a lot, and my kitchen (and I) always look like a disaster afterwards. My food presentation leaves something to be desired, and my sink is a nightmare after I'm done, but that doesn't mean the food isn't good. Don't be afraid. It's all part of your cooking style. Not to say if you are making a mess, you're doing something right -- you're just not necessarily doing something wrong.
Use recipe substitutions with caution. If you're just starting to cook, you really don't have a feel for what can be subbed for what in a recipe. Sometimes it's easy -- butter can be subbed for margarine, or vice versa. But using one of those "Buttery Spreads" -- Smart Balance, etc. -- will change your recipe. Replacing sugar with Splenda in certain recipes -- generally, anything where the sugar is meant to provide structure as well as sweetness -- won't always work. White sugar is not the same as brown sugar, and dark brown sugar is not the same as light brown sugar. The Internet is a wonderful thing, and if you don't have an ingredient, a quick search for "ingredient substitutions" will find you a wealth of resources. Until you know what you're dealing with, though, don't play around too much on your own, or you may end up wasting a lot of time and plenty of perfectly good ingredients.
Not all recipes can be reduced. Say you've got your grandma's recipe for five dozen cookies, but you only want to make a half dozen. You do all the math right, but the cookies come out salty or otherwise gross. Not all recipes reduce well, and even if they can be halved, they can't always be quartered, and so on. If you start getting into really tiny fractions of teaspoons when you reduce a recipe, you may want to find another one that's better suited for a smaller serving size or just be content with making more.
Meat is hard to prepare. It's slimy, it's a mess, and it can have nasty bacteria on it. There are ways you can store it, thaw it, and prepare it to avoid all that -- but you're all are on your own. I'm a vegetarian.
Godspeed, brave souls. The last advice I can give you is to be strong, and feel no fear. As with anything, you only need patience and practice to triumph in the kitchen.
