Cooking Cooking has progessed a lot since ancient times. Technology has helped too, to give us creative ways to come up with new flavors. But you should always be creative, and have an inquisitive attitude when cooking.
Of course, most people don't just start from scratch. That's why we have 'recipes'. Then there are good ones, and not so good. It helps to use recipes from your family, because you can ask the cook more details on how to do it right. If searching online for recipes, try to find recipes where the comments about them are favorable.
Get the ingredients and cooking utensils you need to do a good job. You don't need a lot of fancy tools to do a good job, but you need some pans, and definitely measuring cups, and spoons. Possibly even a kitchen scale.
It's a good idea not to substitute ingredients when you are a beginning cook. The person that wrote the recipe already went through trial and error.
Try to get all the food ready in your cooking work area before actually beginning the cooking process. It can goof up the recipe if you have to leave things cooking while you go hunt for the next ingredient. The great chefs all emphasize having things ready to go, and this is called "mise en place" by professional chefs, and they think it is indispensable to good cooking.
Be sure and wash or clean all food. For a lot of food, rinsing in water will be good enough. Some fruit or vegetables may have chemicals on the outside. You want to get rid of these.
Then you usually have to cut the food into the right size pieces for cooking. There are many ways to cut it, but try to have a nice sharp preferrably larger knife, with a good handle. Some electric can openers have a built in knife sharpener which will actually do a great job at tuning up your knife when it becomes a little dull. Fruit, vegetables, and meat are much easier to cut with a good knife. And good knives aren't that expensive.
Seasoning. Over the centuries, man has discovered so many 'spices' that enhance food. The distinctive flavor you attach to certain foods is often due mostly to those spices. Some foods have a ton of spices. Such as curry. It seems curry has just about every spice that's normally in your cabinet (curry powder, garlic, dill, nutmeg, and the list goes on). Be sure not to overseason. A little less of the desired flavor is actually better than way too much. This is especially true with salt. You can't double the amount of food to get the salt level back to being acceptable.
There are other advanced techniques, probably not what you need to do right now. Such as fermenting. Yeast is a form of fermenting, and bread raised with yeast we are all familiar with.
If boiling, or baking, preheat the appliances or water. Otherwise, the food may not cook at the right speed. Put the pan at the right place on the burner to get the right heat. Same goes with the oven. Figure out which shelf would be the best for what you are cooking.
Certain things just go well together, and as you cook, you'll get to know that you can make a decent dish just by doing a couple of things. For example, you could cook onions, or potatoes or other vegetables to make a soup. But soup must have flavor. How to fix? A couple of chicken boullion cubes will usually make the whole thing taste like soup instead of hot water with potatoes or whatever. Sounds simple, but it works.
Training.
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