How to Look Like You Know What You’re Doing in the Kitchen

I cook almost every day.

This started out as a practical kind of practice for me. I like good home-cooked food, and being an adult, if you want that in your life, you then—ostensibly—need to learn how to cook.

However, this “chore” has always been something I get pleasure out of doing, so I’ve since transitioned it into a hobby—something I actively try to improve at.

Now, the goal of having a hobby and actively seeking to become better at it isn’t about impressing your friends. But I also won’t tell you that wanting to impress your friends with skill at your preferred hobby is necessarily a bad thing.

I love cooking → I’ve gotten better at it → I want to share it with friends and get social proof of skill. That’s a completely normal journey. This is especially easy to do with cooking, as opposed to, say, solving puzzles—because what you make begs to be shared.

Just don’t be an asshole or stuck up about it.

Having invested in this hobby for a long time, I’ve found a lot of great advice on how to get better, cook more often, and spend less money. It’s out there in spades, and I suggest you start here, here, and here.

What I want to give you instead is some straightforward advice on how to make other amateur cooks in your social orbit a little more impressed with your ability in the kitchen. This might be the only cooking advice I feel really confident giving, because doing these things makes me feel really good about myself in this space.

1. Learn how to cook without non-stick:

Outside of the emerging field of study around the harm cooking with Teflon and consuming microplastics can cause, really good cooks don’t rely on non-stick. Doing so yourself takes some time, energy, and upkeep that will (if you invest in it) immediately impress your friends. Revel in the looks on their faces when you fry the perfect egg on a stainless-steel frying pan and enjoy the larger world of high-carbon steel pans and cast iron.

2. Keep a thoughtfully stocked pantry:

How you attack this one comes down to space, and I’m fortunate to have a pretty good amount of shelf space to hold ingredients for a wide range of my favorite meals. However, the heart of this is that it makes cooking a lot easier if you can make great things at the spur of the moment. This started for me with always wanting to have the ingredients to make midnight pasta. It’s grown to include the staples to really crush tacos, stir-fries, pasta bakes, and stews. What separates this is the thought behind the ingredients—having your preferred sauces and items that aren’t just the big-box grocery store standard.

3. Use restaurant-style Tupperware:

This was a big upgrade for me from the mismatched drawer of missing lids and weirdly sized containers. There’s a reason restaurants and chefs use these types of containers. They stack easily, fit neatly in the fridge, come in three convenient sizes, and are sturdy enough for reuse while being non-precious enough that you can send friends home with leftovers and not worry about it. Plus, you can get them BPA-free nowadays.

4. Embrace the freezer:

For years, I saw the freezer as just a place to keep frozen bananas for smoothies and ice cream. Realizing I was criminally underusing it was a huge step forward in my home-cooking life. First off, I organized it and made everything easy to access — that’s the key step to making it useful. Then I started keeping things in there that I often needed but didn’t always have on hand: staple meats to build meals around like chicken thighs, ground beef, sausage, salmon, and breakfast MVPs like bacon. I also stocked up on vegetables that actually hold up well from frozen — spinach, corn, stir-fry mixes, and more. Now I have a reliable reserve to plug holes in weekly meal plans and can always pull together a solid, filling dinner no matter how long it’s been since I made it to the grocery store.

5. Make sauces from scratch:

Admittedly, I’m still working on this one, but my god, there are points to be won here. Sauces are incredibly popular (think pasta sauce, salsa, curries, etc.) because they’re delicious and not impossible to make. They wouldn’t be so popular if they were hard to make, but the world of food has somehow convinced us to just buy them (not a critique — I buy them too). Making them yourself is fun, usually easier than you think, and they’re so much better from scratch.

6. Play great fucking music:

This is an often-forgotten art. I see being the one in the kitchen as also being the center of the entertainment and the party. You don’t want to appear harried or frazzled while crafting an offering for friends and family—playing some Fela or Pavement helps cover any small frazzle on your end and sets your guests at ease. Plus, it’s just more fun to cook to music.

7. Clean while you cook:

This one’s controversial, as a lot of great cooks don’t hold to this tenet. For them, the results speak for themselves and the kitchen mess can wait. If that’s your jam, I respect it. For me, I think there’s always time in the flow of cooking to start climbing the hill back toward a clean kitchen. If you can produce something delicious and have things mostly clean by the end—that’s impressive, no?

8. Buy a real apron:

I’ve had a lot of aprons over the years. I love them, think they’re cool, and I hate getting little splatters of olive oil on my clothes. I guess I'm the target market. That said, a lot of my earlier ones had I got through happenstance and never felt a real pride in or connect too. I upgraded to one I love and it feels like I could take it from the kitchen straight to a woodworking project. It's admitted more than you need to spend on an apron, but for me putting this one on makes me feel like I’m donning a Rockies hat before heading out to play shortstop against the Dodgers. Silly? Yes! But I’d never deny anyone that silly feeling because it's also an awesome one.

9. Keep your knives sharp:

A dull knife is a dangerous knife—and just not fun to use. As someone who recently nearly took off the top of his left middle finger due to one of his knives getting a little too dull (and being sloppy on the “claw” method), please take it from me: this is a real necessity. I generally get my knives sharpened twice a year. I take mine to the neighborhood hardware store that has an automatic knife sharpener, and it costs like ~$5 per knife. So incredibly worth it. Just buy a few cheap knife sleeves to make transport easy and not terrifying.

10. Keep learning and don’t be a dick:

My god, am I still an amateur. There’s so, so much I don’t know about cooking. Although I’ve been improving for years and feel like I’ve acquired a level of competence, I’m still at the beginning of this journey. I love hearing what others have learned, and I want to keep expanding my skills while sharing what I’ve figured out with friends. As with anything you learn, remember to reach back to those earlier on the trail to help with direction—and know that wherever you are, you’ve still got a long way to go. With a hobby like cooking, that’s what makes it fun.