The Return of the Well Cultured Anonymous/Cooking

Like most Anonymous, you've probably been living on Microwave food, take-a-way and pizza for the majority of your life. Well, the time has come for you to learn how to make proper food and preferably the kind that won't clog up your arteries tighter than the sphincter of a violated catholic school girl.

What you need

Whether you're living on your own or still living out of your parents basement, you're going to need somewhere to prepare your food, and unless you're living in Japan, where the average apartment leaves less than two meters between the toilet, the kitchen and your bed, you probably have ready access to a proper kitchen. Excellent cooking skills are handy at attracting women, making them food is a very romantic gesture. Your kitchen should at the very least have the following:

• A stove.
• One shallow pot and one deep.
• One pan.
• One cutting block, so you don't carve up your counters.
• One long knife for cutting meat.
• A spatula, for flipping burgers, eggs and such.
• A fridge, for obvious reasons.
• An oven.

If you aren't shit-broke, you can also splash out on some less-than-essential but still quite useful items, such as:

• A blender.
• A toaster (you can actually substitute for this with your pan, if you're strapped for cash)
• A sandwich grill
• Coffee machine
• George Foreman Grill
• Rice Cooker (for you fucking weeaboos and real Asian people)

Here are some ingredients that most foods will require, you seriously NEED these

• Salt, to make foods salty
• Sugar, to make foods sweet, (replace with splenda if your girl is of the harpoons persuasion, also useful for hiding coke)
• Black and White Pepper, they taste different, experiment.
• Oil, you spray the pan with it to avoid food sticking. This is CRITICAL, ecpecially when creating most breakfasts.
• Vinegar, useful in salads and anything that needs a hint of sour, also produces a delicious aroma when adding while cooking meat with wine, (carboxylic acid reacts with alcohol to create esters, which are sweet and delicious smelling organic compounds)
• Various condiments, ketchup, mustard, etc.
• Various spices, cumin, oregano, etc., look it up somewhere. They are generally not that expensive and will last you a long time.

Why you should learn to cook

Cooking is sexy. No woman, be she large, tall, short, small, tight or loose can resist breakfast in bed after a night of what was probably pitifully short (Pun strikes you for massive damage) sex. It can and probably will at some point save your relationship. Not only that, but you can only survive on instant noodles for so long before your arms start eating themselves out of malnutrition. If you don't want to break out a sweat every time you pick up a book (an unlikely event, I know), you would do well to listen.

Getting to it: Protips

Cooking is fun, in the sense that the rules are very basic, and everything else is up to imagination and experimentation. Without further ado, Here are some basics rules to live by:

• Overcooking is mostly bad, carcinogens a-plenty. When you've overcooked something, kill the stove, put it out with water to kill the smell and throw away whatever you screwed up. If it is a slight burn or if it is situated in one place, it may be salvageable, cut the burned part off, feed it to your neighbors cat, move the fuck on.
• Undercooking is mostly bad, it doesn't kill all the bacteria properly and they can regroup and make you shit chocolate rain. Plus undercooked food is not heated properly and/or taste like shit. Undercooking meat is obviously moar dangerous. Refer to the FSIS Cooking Guidelinefor moar info.
• Certain foods, such as steaks, are often much better tasting if not cooked entirely through. In restaurants, most people order their steak medium or medium-rare. If you've heated your pan correctly, it should only take 38 seconds on one side and 36 on the other to make it medium-rare. Be careful if you don't know if you have quality meat or not. See above.
• Cleanups are not best left until last. If you haven't had the pleasure of finding a bowl of corn flakes that hasn't been touched for weeks, and subsequently, breaking both your arms trying to scrape that shit off and eventually passing out due to toxic fumes, I suggest you keep it that way by cleaning the fuck up. It doesn't have to be surgically clean, just clean enough for a human being not to get food poisoning from just entering your kitchen.
• Get some small containers. These are great for storing leftovers, which you should never throw away if the food was edible to begin with. Keep in mind when you first cooked it, though, as food does eventually go bad no matter how well you seal it.
• Take good care of your fucking cookware. I can't stress this enough, cookware is expensive, you would know if you went and bought some instead of stealing from your parents. Wash regularly, BOTH SIDES, store them in a way that if they wont be dented or misshapen, take extra care of the lids since if you dent the lids, its practically impossible to put back on the pot or pan, this is the most important one: NEVER touch nonstick cookware with metal objects. This will defeat the purpose of nonstick cookware. (If it is non-stick by way of Teflon, the metal object will scratch the Teflon coating.)
• When it comes to soaking pots and pans with food bits stuck on them, USE HOT SOAPY WATER. Regular water achieves nothing.

Occasions when you MUST cook

Like it or not, there are certain occasions where you can't just order Chinese or god forbid it, pizza. These include:

• Thanksgiving (For the Amerikkkans): You'll be expected to prepare a turkey, which includes cooking, basting and stuffing, probably not in that order. May god have mercy on your soul if you fail to carve it the right way in the presence of your guests.
• Christmas: Varies from place to place and can be anything from pig to lamb to quail. Putting some effort into matters more than what your actually serving.
• Spouse's/Girlfriend's birthday: just do it, actually, just the fact that you remembered their birthday puts you in the fucking safe zone, making food for them is just going the extra mile
• Anniversary: do it if you want to get laid.

What to cook

Of course, the biggest problem is deciding what to cook and how to cook it. That's where recipes come in. And we have a bunch of them in The Big Book of Anonymous Recipes, from the main course all the way to dessert.

Setting a table

Anyone who's been in an even mildly fancy restaurant can tell you that there is a certain way to set a table. Dumping knives and forks in the middle and blinding jabbing your hand into the pile hoping to pick up the right utensils is NOT going to impress the parents. The fact that you know how to set a table also says something about yourself, mainly that you're not a sorry waste of thousands of years of human evolution. Back to the point: Plates go in front of the chair (duh), forks to the left, knives and spoons to the right. If you have more than one pair of knives or forks on the table at the same time for each guest, they are to be arranged in the order they are going to be used, first used being farthest from the plate. Tiny, speciality ustensils can be brought out with the dishes, or set with the other utensils. Dessert utensils can be brought out with dessert, or set at the top of the plate. Butter knives go on bread and butter plates, which go above the forks. Water glasses go above the knives and spoons, other glasses go nearby, coffee/tea cups and saucers can go next to the glasses or to the right of the knives and spoons. If you have any skill folding napkins, which is an essentially faggish skill, you can decorate with them. If you don't, congratulations on your heterosexuality and just put one on every dish. Alternatively, just fold them into a rectangle and place under the largest fork, or if you're less of a retard, to the left of the forks. Someone's work in a high standing restaurant: Ok, I'm not saying i'm a cool waiter or such, i happen to be the task-dump man of the service, but I get to see a few things:

• You may join the edges of the napkin in the middle of it, then roll it along that line, the edges will not stick out and it'll have a smooth look to it. This way it'll make a roll that can easily and neatly be placed on the table.
• Large cutlery(/silverware if you have such a thing) is for the main course, the normal ones are for anything but that, ranging from first dish to cheese.
• Fish often has specific utensils, such as a spoon and sometimes an unsharp knife; in the same way, dented( or very sharp) knives go with meat, but can be put out if said meat is very easy to separate(which means it is very high quality tender meat, when well done, use knife).
• If you plan on serving champagne, which is often done before the actual meal, have a few champagne glasses (the tall, thin ones) ready on the side, and remove them as soon as possible.
• If you plan on serving wine (possibly good quality), have 2 wine glasses ready per person, one for white wine, one for red wine (bigger). At my work they use a third, tiny glass for sweet wines, often accompanying desserts (sometimes fish), glass to keep away until used.