Make friends with your neighbors. If you're like me, you'll start to make something and realize that you a) don't have enough of an ingredient that you need or b) the recipe calls for an ingredient you don't have (and/or will never use again). Never fear! Odds are a neighbor has a 1/4 teaspoon of allspice or the typical cup of sugar.
Follow the recipe exactly the first time (if you have to substitute or omit, see #3). Cooking is an art, yes, but it's also just a matter of following directions. You don't have to get all toss-the-contents-of-the-skillet-up-in-the-air-and-add-a-dash-of-whatever-you-want the first time you cook something. Just follow the recipe. Most of the time, it turns out great and you don't have to be a cooking genius to do it.
Google is your friend. I can't tell you how many times I've googled "substitute for sour cream" or "recipes with broccoli, chicken, and cream cheese." If you don't know what to do, ask. And the easiest place to find answers is online. Take heart: there are a lot of other clueless people in the kitchen just like you and me who've found solutions and shared them in cyberspace!
Subscribe to cooking magazines or read them online. 95% of the new recipes I try come from magazines I read. I really only subscribe to Cooking Light and Real Simple, but they give me plenty of recipe ideas (and sometimes too many even with just those two magazines). Figure out what and how you like to cook and find magazines/cookbooks/online resources that meet your needs. In both magazines I get every month combined, I might pull four recipes to try. I pass over lots of other good ones because I need to have practical expectations for myself. Instead of having a pile of recipes that's so big I never make anything, I pull a few and make them happen. If I like how it turns out, the recipe goes into my recipe notebook; if not, I throw it away.
Cooking is a skill; practice does make better. Just out of college, I "made" bagged salad kits and added plain boiled chicken to it. Bleh. When we were first married, I graduated to hamburger helper, basic meat and veggie meals, and experimental grilling on the small George Foreman I owned. Eh. And now, I'm no gourmet chef, but I've found a creative outlet in cooking and have done it so much that I rarely measure ingredients, often add ingredients not in the recipe, omit ingredients without worrying about it, and try new recipes almost weekly. If I can do it, you can too!
My recipe rule: If a recipe takes longer than the time you have (for me over 30 min) and/or if it has ingredients that are obscure and that you won't use again, don't make it. Don't even pull that recipe out of the magazine or dog ear the page in the cookbook. Just move on and don't feel guilty about it. (Or save it for that rare occasion when you have time to yourself and just feel like making something special.) Otherwise, just order something like it next time you go out to eat and save yourself time and probably money.
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