Reddit reviews Food & Wine Quick from Scratch Chicken

First of all, here is the "reddit cook book". I've made a couple out of here, and they're easy to follow and make.

My dad says one of my grandfather's favorite sayings was "If you can read, you can cook". While that's not entirely true since you need some coordination and stuff, the best way to learn to cook is to cook. Find some recipes online that have a minimal number of ingredients, and try making them. If they turn out shitty, use common sense to try to figure out what went wrong, or try another recipe. Epicurious and Allrecipes are good sites...I also highly recommend this book from food and wine. Almost all of those recipes are available online on their site, but having the book there and the ability to make notes in it is very nice. I've made just about every single recipe in there, and every one turned out tasty.

Once you get accustomed to techniques and flavours, you can start creating your own without too much of an issue as long as you stay reasonably simple. I wanted orange chicken, but didn't feel like looking up a recipe. I cut up chicken and cooked it in a pan till mostly done, then added various amounts of sweet chili sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, ground ginger, and two squeezed oranges, and then mixed some corn starch with water and added it to thicken it into a glaze. Tasted it and adjusted a bit till I liked it...bam. Done.

When you know what kinds of ingredients, spices, and herbs go in what kind of food, you can just play around with varying amounts and come up with something good. I'll often just saute up some onion and garlic, put in some fish or meat, toss in some rosemary, salt and pepper. Deglaze (that is when the meat is done, pour in a little wine and scrape off the brown tasty bits and make that sort of a sauce) and that's dinner over some pasta or quinoa or whatever.

So I rambled a bit, but...

tl;dr read, watch, and practice and you'll be able to make pretty much anything in no time.