#psst lavender i love you :) if u have more to add feel free....

[grubloved]

How did you learn how to cook so well? Esp with interesting flavour combos?

oh i do not do most of the cooking! i bake bread and things, ive been baking for a long time! but most of the other things i post -- like, pasta and soup and such -- my lovely partner lavender made. theyve got a really incredible instinct for seasoning and cooking things perfectly :3 we brainstorm a lot of our meals together just idly talking about what we've got in the fridge and what sounds tasty and i'll contribute gnocchi or bread or something to a meal and i help prep or brown butter or whatever... but they are the one who makes the real magic happen, i can't take credit for that.

for the actual answer:

i learned to bake from my mama! but i really recommend king arthur flour's recipes for beginners. a great deal of them have videos, too, so you can get an idea of what the bread is supposed to look like at each step in the process. the thing about baking is that it is pretty precise -- you need to follow instructions to the letter until youve built up the working knowledge to be able to make decisions by instinct! but this also means anybody can do it as long as you follow the instructions :)

cooking is different -- there's a lot of wiggle room! there's some specific techniques and chemistry to keep in mind, but in general there's a lot more room for experimentation than in baking. my partner says most of how they learned to cook was just consuming a lot of other people cooking -- a lot of youtube! j kenji lopez-alt is a favorite of theirs because his videos are a good resource for learning techniques and how to think about cooking things properly. and then it's just a lot of practice! it's good to start with recipes and find out what you like, and then as you get more confident you can try doing little variations on those recipes -- what happens if i brown the meat a little first? what happens if i use brown butter instead of butter, or yogurt instead of cream? and then eventually just wing it!

as far as flavor combos go -- it's just about building up your personal memory of what tastes good! paying attention to ingredients in food you're enjoying and trying to identify the flavors is a really good first step. what's in here? what are the flavors doing to each other? as u pay more attention you'll get better at picking out what's going on in a meal you're eating -- and then that can inform your decisions and thought process when you're making something yourself! as you get more familiar with things over time sometimes you will be able to make a connection you haven't made before -- like my rosemary cookies :) also just have fun and experiment!!!