Kitchen: skills checklist

Kitchen: 17 skills, each with steps, a quiz and a printable checklist, covering five dinners, knife skills, eggs, rice, steak, grilling, roast chicken and food safety.

Cooking for yourself is the fastest way to eat better and spend less, and it does not start with recipes. It starts with a handful of techniques you can repeat without looking anything up: dicing an onion, cooking rice, frying and boiling eggs, searing a steak, roasting a chicken and turning the pan drippings into a sauce.

This category builds those techniques into meals. You will find five dinners that cover most weeks, a grocery plan for a week on a budget, a Sunday meal prep for work lunches, and a simple plan for hosting friends. Grilling on gas or charcoal is here too, with the two-zone setup and the flare-up rule.

Running through all of it is the part of cooking that matters most for your health: food safety. The temperatures on these pages come from the national food safety chart of safe minimum internal temperatures, and the leftover rules follow the same guidance. An instant-read thermometer is the one gadget we suggest you buy. Preserving food in jars and home-cured meats are left out on purpose, because a wrong step there can make people seriously ill.