One of the great maxims of frugality is “eat in”. Carefully shop, cook your own food, and watch the savings mount! It’s amazing what you won’t spend if you quit buying takeout! And healthy! Yarr!

True, true and true. Unfortunately, much like the other breathless basics all the frugality and personal finance bloggers love to beat to death, there’s a whole lot of suggestion and not much explanation. If you already know your way around a kitchen, you’re good to go, but what about those folks whose culinary talents don’t reach beyond making coffee and microwave popcorn?

Cooking isn’t that difficult, really. About half is nothing more than possessing a set of little tiny micro-skills, and having the practice to know how to mix them up effectively. The other half is knowing your tools and what they’re good for. (There is a third half of knowing how to find and combine yummy foods together, but that’s another post for another time.)

So what is it you need to know? Glad you asked. Here are the 11 Essential Things You Need to Know If You Want To Cook.

1. Know thy basic tools. You’ll need one good stock pot, two good sauce pans, two good saute pans (frying pans), something to roast in, a big knife, a little knife, a cutting board, a mixing bowl, spring-loaded tongs, a good mechanical can opener, and a baking sheet. That’s it. That’s your entire kitchen.

2. Know thy advanced tools. This stuff isn’t critical, but it’ll help you get to that next level. A drip coffee maker, a colander, a dutch oven, a griddle, a slow cooker, a probe thermometer, a balloon whisk, a food processor, a power mixer (hand, stand or immersion) and a half-decent veggie peeler.

3. Know thy hot things, and what they do. The stove top makes pans hot to heat your food by direct contact. The oven heats food evenly from all around. The broiler blasts high heat down on top of your food. The grill evenly heats your food all around AND blasts your food with really high heat from the bottom AND directly heats your food through contact with the bars. Microwaves boil the water inside your food. Slow cookers give your food a nice, gentle warm hug.

4. First cooking technique: frying. Or sauteing, if you want to be fancy about it, since I’m not talking about boiling your food in hot oil. The point of frying your food on the stove top is to heat your food up hot enough that it starts to brown, without overcooking the insides or burning the outsides. To fry, heat up your pan to a little over medium, throw a little bit of fat in the pan, and add your food. Turn your food every two minutes until desired doneness or brownness is achieved. Very few foods can’t be fried and turn up yummy.

5. Second cooking technique: roasting. Roasting I define as aggressively using your oven to cook food, using a high temperature and browning the outside of your food. Pretty much any temperature over 400f will roast your food.

6. Third cooking technique: baking. Nicer brother to roasting is baking. Baking is using your oven gently to cook food all the way through, but not doing a whole lot of browning.

7. Fourth cooking technique: boiling. Pretty much everyone knows this one. Boiling uses water heated as hot as it can get to cook food quickly. Boiling is good for dry food (pasta), sealed food (weiners), food that won’t dissolve (broccoli) or food where you want to separate the fat and aren’t worried about losing flavor (chicken,brisket). Whatever you do, strive to keep your boiling time to a minimum — if you boil broccoli for less than a minute, you have delicious hot fresh greenery, but if you boil it more than a minute, you get the noxious toxic waste your mother forced you to eat when you were a child

8. Fifth cooking technique: grilling. Grilling is something that takes time to learn how to do right, because it cooks your food several different ways at once. Using your broiler will take some of the guesswork out of it. Much like frying, you can grill just about anything to good effect, but I would suggest that you stick with foods that won’t flow through a rack, like eggs or doughs or extremely floppy meats and veggies, until you’re sure you know what you’re doing.

9. Sixth cooking technique: simmering. It’s like boiling, only… not. A simmer is gentle blurping bubbles, not a rampaging steam explosion or a still pot. Food gets simmered when flavors need to meld in a liquid concoction, or slightly delicate food needs to cook in a liquid for some time, or a liquid needs to be reduced.

10. Seventh cooking technique: braising. Braising is when you take food and cook is slowly at a low temperature with a lot of wetness, usually in a sealed container. Pot roast is the iconic American example of braising. Braising can be done in the oven with a sealed container or packet, on top of the stove with a dutch oven (or by a campfire, doncha know) or in your slow cooker. Braising is for when you need to break food down a bit before you can eat it, so cheap meat and braising go together like coffee and a hangover — they’re essential to each other.

11. On seasoning. If you can’t figure out how to make food taste good, you won’t cook, and seasoning is vital to making food taste good. The simplest way to season your food is with salt and pepper, and I suggest you try salting and peppering your food like you would normally, but do it before you cook instead of after, and see if that isn’t a vast improvement. Instead of just sitting on top, the salt and pepper will permeate your food and season the whole thing, and your food will just plain taste better. And while we’re at it, I don’t think most Americans use enough salt in their cooking. Dani thinks I like my food way too salty, but she’ll also agree with my assessment. (Won’t you, honey?) If you’re on a medically-necessary low-sodium diet, ignore me, but the rest of you, if your food is still lackluster after preseasoning, try adding more salt the next time and see if that doesn’t fix your troubles. The goal is to get the food on the plate and not need to shake anything extra on after you taste it. It takes practice, but once you figure out the right level of salt, you won’t want to go back.

Any questions?