Bachelor Cooking 101 Welcome

Welcome to Bachelor Cooking 101! Our goal is to help the novice cook learn to make simple but tasty and nutritious meals. Because you’re a novice we’ll use store-bought ingredients whenever possible, but we’ll fancy them up to make them more interesting (check out what we do to box pizza!). We'll also pass on cooking and preparations hints to make your time in the kitchen fun and easy. Trust us you bachelors (or bachelorettes), a good home-cook meal makes a huge impression.

How the Recipes Are Written

Each recipe has a comment, Difficulty Level (Easy, Medium or Hard), Ingredients, Special Equipment, and Instructions. Beyond the Recipe suggests improvements to the recipe.

Basic Cooking Equipment

We assume you have basic cooking equipment, which includes a cutting board, cutting knife, a couple pots and pans with lids, can opener, spatula and mixing bowls. The recipes will list any special equipment needed (e.g. a pizza pan).

We Use Simple & Basic Ingredients

This site won’t use fancy ingredients or cooking skills (we’ll save that for Bachelor Cooking 201). It purposely uses packaged food as much as possible, but also explains how it is possible to use nothing but fresh ingredients in your cooking. When it comes to vegetables if you see a technique you don't understand or know how to do, like peeling tomatoes or dicing onions, check the vegetable page.

Learn Two Basic Recipes

If you learn just one recipe from this site start with The Three Sisters. This a tomato-based sauce that becomes the foundation for countless variations, from spaghetti sauce to fish stew. Feeling bold? Master a roux and you have two foundation recipes with infinite variations of ingredients. But since the emphasis of this site is using store-bought ingredients as much as possible you don’t even have to learn these – check out our Thai curry.

Recipe Measurements

Are our recipes exact? Kinda. We’re not teaching you engineering, we’re teaching you cooking, and good cooks like to approximate and experiment (except when it comes to baking). Also, we’ve been cooking these for so long we no longer measure things. As we cook the recipes again we’ll take better measurements and photos. Until then, if you have a question feel free to email us.

Please Share Your Success or Requests!

We're always looking for success stories, so if you have a particular story to tell about a recipe be sure to email us and we’ll share them with others. Or, if you want to learn how to make a particular recipe email us and we'll see what we can do.

Have Fun!

Finally, just a reminder: cooking should be fun, not a chore. So browse around the site, find something you like, and learn to cook it. You'll be surprised how easy it is and how much better the food you make tastes than stuff from the fast-food joint or junk out of a box or can. (Trust us, once you learn to make real macaroni and cheese you'll never buy a box again).

Commercial Interruption

This site is a labor of love. Share your love by making a donation to the site by clicking on the Paypal link below!

Warning! Lottsa servings!

We’re bachelors; we only have to feed ourselves. We also don’t mind eating the same thing two or three or four nights in a row. Thus, these recipes make a lot of food. If you don’t feel the same way about eating the same thing several nights the recipes can be halved or even quartered. Of course the best way is to make them at full strength and invite friends over to share your new-found skills.

PS Let's be realistic. Half the reasons guys want to learn how to cook is so that they can impress their dates -- and what better excuse to get a woman over to your house then a home-cooked meal. Just another reason why you should learn to cook!