How do i get into cooking?

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I'd like to be able to cook cheaply with basic ingredients, how do I get into this?

Pick a basic ingredient. Learn how to do stuff to it.

For example, if you like meats.

Buy some meat that requires the least amount of prep to be cooked. Pork chops are an easy example. Pre sliced, easy to handle. Boneless skinless chicken breast also works. Ground beef is another easy starter.

Now find a cooking technique to learn / practice - such as browning ground beef on a skillet. Nothing fancy, lust learn the temperatures and technique to brown some ground beef. Even easier than hamburgers. Or learn to bake or broil a chicken breast or porkchop. Temperature and time is everything.

Or veggies - learn to sauté, to fry, to boil, to steam - most of them are fairly easy - still just timing and temp.

Or starches - get good at boiling pasta or beans. Slow-cooked bean soup is easy tasty and filling.

Once you can do one of those things consistently, then add another. Boil pasta, then sautee some veggies to add. Grill some chicken to go on top. Or brown some hamburger/lamb, boil some potatoes for mash, add some veggies, and make a cattlers/sheppards pie. But start simple, and build up.

Practice in small portions or single servings so you can afford to ruin a serving or two without sacrificing the whole amount.

Season them AFTER you cook it, at first. Use small amounts of seasoning, one spice at a time, on bites of food, to see how it tastes and what you like. Once you get the hang of what seasonings work, and how much, then start adding them to the things you're successfully cooking, while you're cooking them.

Salt amplifies other flavors. Use it sparingly, and use it last when possible. If a food is already too heavy with garlic or pepper, salt won't cover it, it will pair up with it and make it worse. Pre-mixed seasonings (such as Adobo) are very useful to start with.

Youtube videos are your friend. Watch lots of them, take what works from each. Cooking is half science, and half art. Time and temp is the science part. Seasoning prep and technique are the art part. Both take practice.

If there's a local cooking class available, take it. All practice helps, as does learning technique from others.

TIMERS TIMERS TIMERS!! ! I always have 2 - one for the cook time, and one that goes off every 5 minutes no matter what to keep me paying attention to the food.

Local and farmers markets often have better product and prices than chains or supermarkets. Also nice to support local producers.

Electric is easier than gas to learn, on a stovetop.

Good cookbooks can be really helpful as well, especially when you're just starting. I really like The New Best Recipe from America's Test Kitchen or The Food Lab from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt as general purpose beginner friendly books, they both have a wide variety of recipes, and go out of their way to explain the why of the recipes and some of the food science behind them, which is very helpful when adjusting things to your own tastes later. My advice would be to make the recipes exactly as written the first time, and then adjust them to your own tastes as you grow more experienced and learn what you like and dislike about them, having a baseline "this is what it's supposed to taste like" is very helpful, as you can't always tell just from looking at the ingredients what they're going to taste like in the finished dish.

Also, just a personal preference, but cookbooks are the one place I stick to old fashioned paper books rather than digital, I just find it easier to work from in the kitchen, and you can put post-its in them with adjustments as you learn. Once you get the basics down you can start working from online recipes, I'd suggest Serious Eats, as you'll have a better sense if a recipe is worth making or not just from experience, and not risk wasting a bunch of time and ingredients on something you may not like or doesn't come out how you expected.

One of the recipes I started with was spaghetti Bolognese. It is both very simple and very tasty. Spaghetti can be harder to cook than ordinary pasta though.

I like to categorize food like: sources of protein, carbs and such. After that planning meals goes like this: one meat or chicken dish, one vegetable dish or salad, maybe some pasta or rice to add.

I also mostly cook big portions so i can freeze the leftovers, when you don't have time to cook everyday its a big help.

It depends on what you like. I'm not a really good cook but I can cook really plain and basic food.

I got an electric veg steamer machine that is really really useful to me. So I would definitely recommend getting one of them and they're really cheap and easy to use. I also got a George Foreman health grill as well.

Also I find that if I get all my preparation done first. Like peel all the potatoes and veg and get all that stuff out of the way and then it's just a case of getting it all cooking. With simple meals like I do you don't even need to worry too much about the timing either. Just keep a check on it to make sure it's doing OK. The food will cook itself once you get it going.

Good luck

I would love to learn to cook too. But, I wish for something cheap and healthy to begin with. Once that is done I desire to move in to more opulent dishes.

Internet Shaquille could be a good channel to check out. He has some videos about low effort/easy things to cook and breaks down how things work.

You kinda just...put food in the oven, pan and/or pot and let it cook until it's done. Simple preparation with washing/cleaning the food and everything else.

Eggs (scrambled or omelette with the usual stuff mixed in), sausages/beef/whatever meat and/or vegetables are what I tend to go with (I like potatoes as they can be utilized in many ways). I prefer using a single cooking source for a meal as it's just easier when you have some of that executive dysfunction, i.e, cook the entire meal in an oven.

I guess I cook simple meals, but it's what I like to eat anyway, so it works out.

Pick up a copy of Cook's Illustrated at groc. Pick something, go buy the ingredients and cook it. Start simple then advance as skills improve. Learn knife skills in the beginning or as soon as you can. Take a class. When you get bored with the simple, go bold. Cooking was a confidence builder for me.