Shadowex3

I'm going out on a limb with their TV habits but Alton Brown's an excellent beginner's guide to cooking, I pretty much singlehandedly got to where I am today between my mother's demanding I assist her with cooking whenever she was and half-listening to his stuff while working around the house or watching it while eating lunch.

The big thing is to teach them in the right order. Some rote learning at the beginning just for safety and the absolute physical basics, but when they can make a grilled cheese or bacon and eggs on their own they're done with that. Cooking's like math, you can either rotely memorize a lot of things and pray nothing unexpected happens or you can learn the underlying mechanics and then even if you see something utterly new you can still do it yourself by applying those mechanics in the right way.

My favorite progression is to start someone off with thawing and baking chicken wings according to the bag's instructions with black pepper, garlic, and a bit of generic paprika. It's almost impossible to screw up, teaches the basics of everything from meat safety and thawing to oven positioning and spice use, and is a good way to get a real meal as a college student.

Once they can do that and understand why it works you can expand on spices safely, everything from southern BBQ chicken wings through the middle east all the way to japanese-ish styles. After they understand spices, and know they can eat the same meat every day of the week and still eat something different every time, then you can move on to thighs and expand into soups and stir-fried meals.

Two bags of meat from costco, a bunch of bottles of Badia from the grocery store, two months (if they're slow learners), and they're ready to start learning advanced stuff off of food network.

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