Eliminate any doubt that you CAN learn to cook.

I help people every week to learn to cook and yet I'm approached all of the time by people telling that that they can't cook. I'm here to tell you that you can cook, in fact, I believe that you just don't have the right information about cooking. Think about it, saying that you can't cook is like saying that you've lost something, right? If you've lost a leg, then you might say, "I can't walk." But what have you lost to be able to say that you can't cook?

Listen, you're not born knowing how to cook, none of us is and the fact that you don't know how to cook is not your fault. If cooking wasn't a family hobby or if you didn't have a mother or grandmother to teach you, then you've been left to get cooking information from recipe books and celebrity chefs. And I know that that means, they always let you down! They may have brighter colors, prettier to look at and be more entertaining than grandma, but cook books and celebrity chefs don't teach you how to cook.

I had a student come to class once and tell me a story about how wonderful her Grandmother's lasagna was. In an effort to ensure that the legacy of her Grandmother's lasagna lived on, she got the recipe from her Grandmother and went home to create the masterpiece making sure that she followed the recipe exactly. Lo and behold, it didn't hold a candle to the Grandmother's lasagna. When she confronted her Grandmother, she said, "Well, I never follow that recipe anyway."

Recipes let everyone down. In the end, when following the cooking information that a recipe gives to you and it doesn't come out right, you think you don't know how to cook…that you can't learn to cook. You have doubts creep into your thoughts, "Everybody cooks with recipes, right? I'm the only one who can't make a recipe look like the photo in the book."
Wrong!

You're not the only one who can't make a recipe turn out great, you're one of everyone. Everyone can't cook at one point in their life.

Everyone can't cook to one degree or another and to be a great cook:

• You don't have to be a celebrity chef
• You don't have to know the difference between escarole and escargot
• You don't have to know how to bake a cake
• You don't have to know how to open a clam
• You don't have to know how to make beef bourguignon

So what cooking information do you need to have to know to learn to cook? You already know it!