I don’t know if anyone here has been through this… but I eat a lot of fast food because I have a fear of using anything to cook, if it’s for me to make something like bread and butter, that’s fine, it’s just a fork that I need, but when it comes to using a furnace or those kind of things, I just have a fear I might mess up somehow and start a fire or something… I know it sounds stupid but it’s a nightmare I have in my head for some reason =/, I thought I’d try getting over it so I could cook my own meals and get more healthy but thar’s a barrier stopping me… can anyone who has been through this give me any advice on it?
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I haven’t been through this but I did cause a small oil fire in a pan once. Putting a kitchen cloth over that took care of it. You can buy special fire blankets. I think they should be in every kitchen even if you’re not afraid. If you know not to put water on an oil fire they are just annoying, but they can damage your equipment.
So yeah, my advice would be to hang one of those blankets into your kitchen.
If you have the features, learn how the timer system of your appliances works. My family has never figured them out and screws stuff up regularly because of inattention. I'm disabled and I know better than to trust myself. I set timers to start and stop stuff that is cooking in the oven. If I want something hot at a special time, I just set a delay timer that turns on my settings and then has a stop timer. If there is absolutely any doubt that a dish in the oven may leak, I place a pan on another lower rack to catch absolutely anything that might potentially leak. I tend to cook 2 weeks worth of food at one time in the oven and just arrange all the stuff so that the potential leaks are onto other safe stuff.
I also do not bother with recipes. Most ovens have terrible temperature controllers, so times and settings are largely useless in reality. My secret is to start with boring but edible food. In reality, you likely do not eat some great variety of foods. Fundamentally it is the same 2-4 meats (sorry vegans), bread, and some veggies. So I started by filling a large glass casserole pan with green beans, broccoli, and cauliflower, a second pan I fill with corn on the cob, a third I do a bed of sliced onion and a meat on top with seasoning, and I finally have a covered glass bowl for cooking two cups of rice. I eat this steamed rice for 2 days before making homemade fried rice. Well made fried rice will easily last the remainder of 2 weeks. The meal is mostly rice, with some veggies and a few ounces of meat. This is my only full meal each day. I cook that on whatever my oven calls 450° F for 1 h 20m. It does not require any oil or anything else. While it is edible like this, the last trick is to make a sauce with half a jar of mayo, about a quarter of the jar filled with the best teriyaki sauce you can find, and a small amount of sriracha sauce to taste. This sauce can be further improved slightly with any small amounts of savory sauces from pickling or fermentation or in more simple terms, the juices from a jar of whole olives, peppers, old alcohol, left over pan glazing stock, etc., or like Worcestershire or soy sauce if you have trouble with these abstractions.
Form a boring baseline of food, then start tuning this baseline to make it better over time. If you limit yourself to this kind of repetition, you’ll eat much more consistently healthy, but also you’ll really learn how to cook using abstracted information and a deeper understanding of your available tools.
I do this with everything. I occasionally make some cookies that just go in the oven. The whole preheating your oven thing is just an attempt to make recipes transferable. The controls on your oven are likely way off and the control algorithm or temperature switches are extremely inconsistent. People do not make these appliance purchases in general while shopping for these features. Therefore these corners are cut in most hardware. I just ate the same cookies enough to know exactly how long they cook for with my favorite properties. I cook them for 22 minutes at 475° F from a cold start. I can put that on a start and end timer and have hot cookies any time I want. If there is a high probability that I will not be present or available when they are done, 20 minutes at 450 will produce good results if they remain in the oven as it cools down.
Using the timers means you can never forget something in a way that is catastrophic. I don’t recommended running an oven unsupervised, but you can take precautions to enable failsafes like pan under pan setups.
You might mess up! That’s normal. Even experienced professionals do. That might be part of your apprehension? Like, if those experienced professionals can goof up, imagine what an inexperienced person might do?
But, the reality is that you’ll mess up the same when you mess up. It’ll be a little cut here, a little singe there. Your kitchen won’t explode, you won’t catch on fire. All in all, you stop thinking of some things as mess-ups and start thinking of them as just a normal outcome.
Here’s what I would recommend doing if you want to practice in safe ways:
- Practice mixing drinks. Not necessarily cocktails! Like, mix some herbs and juice in with a club soda. Tada, that’s cooking.
- Practice making salads with take-home kits. Add some vinegar or oil and herbs in addition to what you’ve got out of the kit.
- Make hot drinks: teas, coffees, things like that. Eventually start making your own syrups for them: look up simple syrup recipes and infusions.
- Get frozen pizzas or other frozen foods. Buy extra shredded cheese and Italian seasoning. Cook them as normal except add the cheese and seasoning on top before you do.
Here’s what I would recommend if you want to increase your own personal safety:
- Get a fire extinguisher and put it somewhere obvious in your kitchen.
- Look for “cut resistant” gloves. They help protect your hands when you’re working with knives and stuff.
- Get some timers with magnets on them and practice using them. The most likely way something’ll catch fire is if you’re distracted and timers will help you avoid that.
- Get some silicone mitts and handles for the oven. They’re incredibly heat resilient!
I’d also maybe just say familiarize yourself with cooking enough to demystify it? Like, marathon watch Good Eats or Iron Chef or something? Put it on in the background while you do other stuff, and just get used to seeing kitchens and food in action?
Fundamentally though this might be worth talking to a therapist about, because it could be that you’ve got some kind of reason (maybe more rational than you imagine) to have this apprehension. If that’s the case the first step is, honestly, talking it out with someone and not ignoring it and forcing yourself to do something you’re uncomfortable with.
This is an irrational fear that is having a severe effect on your ability to function in a normal way. You should seek therapy if that is practical.
I’m always annoyed when people say “You should just get therapy”, because of how completely inaccessible it is to those of us not wealthy enough to be in the upper middle class, which is most of us these days.
They’re basically saying “Your problems are fixable but only if you’ve got thousands of pounds to throw away on a therapist, if you’re a normal working class person you’re fecked”.
You might as well be saying “Homeless? Just buy a house duuh”.
I know you yourself mean well (and you do use the “practical” caveat which is appreciated), I don’t mean to sound overly harsh, it’s just this comes up a lot and as someone suffering greatly from mental illness destroying my life that I can’t afford to get treatment for it’s very depressing :-(
While I sympathize with your point of view, there are also people who can afford it, need it badly, but don’t use it.
Jesus Christ why is everyone else giving cooking and safety advice when OP obviously needs therapy
Cooking can be therapeutic.
And one doesn’t preclude the other.
We don’t know how rational or irrational this is. Kitchen fires do happen. If you don’t know how to prevent or handle them, then it’s a very rational fear to have.
First, it’s OK to not cook. If you are getting by alright without cooking, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Second, I respect you coming here and admitting your fear. Ironically it takes a lot of bravery to do that!
Third, irrational fears and anxieties are a normal part of the human experience. Everybody has them, so though it can feel like you’re being stupid, you’re really just being human (though some might say that’s two ways of saying the same thing).
Fourth, I’m not a therapist or medical professional but the treatment for phobias I am aware of are CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy), and exposure therapy. You can find CBT and ACT workbooks that might be helpful. As for exposure therapy, I think it’s best to work with a professional doing that. Exposure therapy is not just taking the plunge, there’s a process to it. Of course, if you can afford it, talking to a mental health professional is always best.
Good luck!
He is eating a lot of fast food. That is not okay, it is harmful to your health (at least in the US). It is possible to find healthy restaurant meals, but it isn’t easy, if you care at all about health you need to cook yourself to get it. Of course once you know how to cook you discover you can cook much better than a restaurant meal for a lot less money.
I conditioned my statement with “if you are getting by alright”. If nutritional needs aren’t being met that’s not getting by alright. Though I can see how someone might interpret that differently, but that was my intent.
You can get by on bad nutriton for a long time but I wouldn’t call it alright.
But your point still stands. If someone is content to not improve
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQBUu3J2USA
Kitchen fires are scarier than they are difficult to deal with, if you are prepared and remain calm. You can see in this video how quickly and easily you can contain and extinguish the fire with just a baking sheet or a metal pot lid or just another pan. The real trouble happens when people panic or respond to the fire improperly, like splashing water onto it. It’s also smart to keep a small fire extinguisher in your kitchen, just in case.
There is also a lot of food that you can cook that will have little to no risk of causing a fire (soup, curry, rice, pasta, pretty much anything that is wet or contains a lot of water), although if you keep your kitchen clean and tidy, and use your stove burners on appropriate levels, there should be little risk of a fire anyway.
Main topic aside, what are you doing putting bread and butter together with a fork?
All the small appliance suggestions so far are great - they remove a lot of the danger and give you an easy place to start. Same for the safety items. Even with no fear, it is sensible to have an extinguisher and fire blanket in the kitchen.
When you feel that you are ready to start picking up knives and working with flame, do it with a friend or family member that is suitably understanding & willing to teach. Simply watching it done is still familiarising yourself with the process and hopefully reducing your fears.
My sister is the same way - I am teaching her slowly. We started with baking, as all the prep work is done cold with only one heating process. Not exactly healthy, but it it gets the ball rolling on working with heat.
I am a software engineer by trade, so when I started cooking, everything and every tool was intimidating, because I had no idea how it worked nor what it was meant for. I knew nothing about knives besides not to drop one, didn’t know the difference between a wok and a skillet, and didn’t understand how oil creates a non-stick surface on a non-non-stick pan.
What helped me was a book that wasn’t like a recipe or cook book, but something closer to a food and kitchen textbook. The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt goes into some excruciatingly scientific detail about the role of different kitchen implements, and then showcasing recipes that apply theory to practice. Each step in the recipes thoroughly describe what to do, and the author puts a lot of content onto his YouTube channel as well.
It was this book that convinced me to buy, strip, and season a cast iron pan, which has already proven its worth as a non-sticking vessel comparable to my old Teflon-coated pans. And I think for you, reading the theory and following some of the recipes might develop sufficient experience to at least be comfortable in an active kitchen. It’s very much a chicken-and-egg problem – if you’ll pardon the poultry pun – but this book might be enough to make progress in the kitchen.
Also, since it was published in 2015, it’s very likely available at your local library, so check there first before spending money to buy the book. Good luck with your culinary development!
Get a fire extinguisher. Keep it in your kitchen in a designated spot.
Start small. Learn to make ramen, mac and cheese, eggs.
Get practice before you start leaving the stove unattended. Have timers. Activate the hood fan. Learn to keep an eye on things. Don’t start other activities you can’t drop in a moment (like an online game) while cooking.
When you finish something, turn it off BEFORE taking it off/out. Double check.
Start small. Learn to make ramen
Oh boy, please tell me you’re referring to just simply instant ramen.
It takes me 2 days of cooking to make a proper ramen with the stock, tare, noodles, and toppings.
That rabbit hole goes waaaaaay down.
I’m talking about instant, like Maruchan
Convenience appliances? You can do a lot with a microwave oven, air fryer and coffee maker, without any flame, or really any exposed hot surfaces
It sounds like you may have obsessive compulsive disorder. I would encourage you to seek out a therapist who utilizes exposure and response prevention (ERP) as a treatment.
I would wonder if you felt the same about driving? I’m betting that part of it is that you don’t know how to react in a bind. That’s practice and training more than anything.
Try this: Go watch some kitchen safety how videos. Go by some boxed Mac and cheese. Make it, it’s foolproof.
Notice that everything turned out ok. Try it again a few times. Now go try something different that you might like.Step 1 - burn the house down with gasoline.
There is no step 2.
Now whenever you cook, no matter what you do, no matter how badly you fail, it’ll never be as bad as the time yoj caused a house fire, which resulted in several houses catching fire.
The best way to get rid of a fear is to face it.
Try cooking something simple like pancakes. Really, just following the directions of a recipe should make cooking anything pretty simple, if not time consuming the more complicated it gets. Even the most lavish of foods aren’t exactly difficult. They just take patience and time.
