I don’t know if anyone here has been through this… but I eat a lot of fast food because I have a fear of using anything to cook, if it’s for me to make something like bread and butter, that’s fine, it’s just a fork that I need, but when it comes to using a furnace or those kind of things, I just have a fear I might mess up somehow and start a fire or something… I know it sounds stupid but it’s a nightmare I have in my head for some reason =/, I thought I’d try getting over it so I could cook my own meals and get more healthy but thar’s a barrier stopping me… can anyone who has been through this give me any advice on it?
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Take a cooking class. Learn how to manage a kitchen fire with a fire blanket or extinguisher and get one of each. Start practicing. You’ll burn stuff and make food that’s no good but you’ll get better. Start simple with stuff like pasta.
Might be worth picking up some fire safety equipment if that might give you some peace of mind and reduce that barrier a little. Not talking about parking a shiny red fire truck in your driveway but a small kitchen fire extinguisher shouldn’t be too hard to come by. There are also stovetop extinguisher canisters that go off automatically when exposed to intense heat (fine for normal cooking but intended to be activated by an uncontrolled fire).
If you haven’t seen it already, I’d also recommend watching a video or two about how to control grease fires. Reading about it is one thing but seeing the demonstration of why not to use water really drives the point home. Scary for sure but the other side of it is that you learn how to handle one of the worst-case scenarios so it can be a confidence boost moving forward.
Also as far as cooking hardware, glass-top stoves are very difficult to start fires on, and induction cooktops are even more, at least for stuff like boilovers and spilled food.
I’d also suggest taking some sort of cooking class, many community colleges have classes that you can take at night, and there are several businesses that offer classes as well. Getting used to the tools and techniques in a supervised environment can go a long way for confidence at home.
Step 1 - burn the house down with gasoline.
There is no step 2.
Now whenever you cook, no matter what you do, no matter how badly you fail, it’ll never be as bad as the time yoj caused a house fire, which resulted in several houses catching fire.
I have not, but why not start by helping someone else cook, or inviting someone over to help you cook?
It does sound like an unhealthy obsession not an actual cooking problem but if it’s more like you just never did it and have built it up in your head, perhaps taking small steps and seeing that your fears are not fulfilled will deflate them.
I agree you don’t necessarily need to cook, assembling can go a long way, but if you want to cook that is a very good reason to cook!
I will say - as an experienced home cook, shit does (rarely) happen so maybe also taking a kitchen safety class and getting fire suppression equipment would help, practicing what to do if something does happen so you don’t panic at a small fire and let it become a big fire when it would have been easy to put it out.
I would wonder if you felt the same about driving? I’m betting that part of it is that you don’t know how to react in a bind. That’s practice and training more than anything.
Try this: Go watch some kitchen safety how videos. Go by some boxed Mac and cheese. Make it, it’s foolproof.
Notice that everything turned out ok. Try it again a few times. Now go try something different that you might like.I’ve started a fire in the kitchen. Not by messing up, but by using a toaster built in the 1950s and designed to toast bread as a secondary function to killing you. It was thirty seconds of horror, and then things were okay. The toast was in the sink under a stream of water and the toaster was unplugged.
It’s important to realise that even if a fear comes true, things will be okay. Get a kitchen-suitable fire extinguisher. Learn to use it. Don’t use death as an ingredient like I did. Understand that even if things go wrong, you’ll fix it. Your ability to deal with shit is bigger than the shit you have to deal with.
This is an irrational fear that is having a severe effect on your ability to function in a normal way. You should seek therapy if that is practical.
Jesus Christ why is everyone else giving cooking and safety advice when OP obviously needs therapy
Cooking can be therapeutic.
And one doesn’t preclude the other.
We don’t know how rational or irrational this is. Kitchen fires do happen. If you don’t know how to prevent or handle them, then it’s a very rational fear to have.
I’m always annoyed when people say “You should just get therapy”, because of how completely inaccessible it is to those of us not wealthy enough to be in the upper middle class, which is most of us these days.
They’re basically saying “Your problems are fixable but only if you’ve got thousands of pounds to throw away on a therapist, if you’re a normal working class person you’re fecked”.
You might as well be saying “Homeless? Just buy a house duuh”.
I know you yourself mean well (and you do use the “practical” caveat which is appreciated), I don’t mean to sound overly harsh, it’s just this comes up a lot and as someone suffering greatly from mental illness destroying my life that I can’t afford to get treatment for it’s very depressing :-(
While I sympathize with your point of view, there are also people who can afford it, need it badly, but don’t use it.
If you have the features, learn how the timer system of your appliances works. My family has never figured them out and screws stuff up regularly because of inattention. I'm disabled and I know better than to trust myself. I set timers to start and stop stuff that is cooking in the oven. If I want something hot at a special time, I just set a delay timer that turns on my settings and then has a stop timer. If there is absolutely any doubt that a dish in the oven may leak, I place a pan on another lower rack to catch absolutely anything that might potentially leak. I tend to cook 2 weeks worth of food at one time in the oven and just arrange all the stuff so that the potential leaks are onto other safe stuff.
I also do not bother with recipes. Most ovens have terrible temperature controllers, so times and settings are largely useless in reality. My secret is to start with boring but edible food. In reality, you likely do not eat some great variety of foods. Fundamentally it is the same 2-4 meats (sorry vegans), bread, and some veggies. So I started by filling a large glass casserole pan with green beans, broccoli, and cauliflower, a second pan I fill with corn on the cob, a third I do a bed of sliced onion and a meat on top with seasoning, and I finally have a covered glass bowl for cooking two cups of rice. I eat this steamed rice for 2 days before making homemade fried rice. Well made fried rice will easily last the remainder of 2 weeks. The meal is mostly rice, with some veggies and a few ounces of meat. This is my only full meal each day. I cook that on whatever my oven calls 450° F for 1 h 20m. It does not require any oil or anything else. While it is edible like this, the last trick is to make a sauce with half a jar of mayo, about a quarter of the jar filled with the best teriyaki sauce you can find, and a small amount of sriracha sauce to taste. This sauce can be further improved slightly with any small amounts of savory sauces from pickling or fermentation or in more simple terms, the juices from a jar of whole olives, peppers, old alcohol, left over pan glazing stock, etc., or like Worcestershire or soy sauce if you have trouble with these abstractions.
Form a boring baseline of food, then start tuning this baseline to make it better over time. If you limit yourself to this kind of repetition, you’ll eat much more consistently healthy, but also you’ll really learn how to cook using abstracted information and a deeper understanding of your available tools.
I do this with everything. I occasionally make some cookies that just go in the oven. The whole preheating your oven thing is just an attempt to make recipes transferable. The controls on your oven are likely way off and the control algorithm or temperature switches are extremely inconsistent. People do not make these appliance purchases in general while shopping for these features. Therefore these corners are cut in most hardware. I just ate the same cookies enough to know exactly how long they cook for with my favorite properties. I cook them for 22 minutes at 475° F from a cold start. I can put that on a start and end timer and have hot cookies any time I want. If there is a high probability that I will not be present or available when they are done, 20 minutes at 450 will produce good results if they remain in the oven as it cools down.
Using the timers means you can never forget something in a way that is catastrophic. I don’t recommended running an oven unsupervised, but you can take precautions to enable failsafes like pan under pan setups.
Convenience appliances? You can do a lot with a microwave oven, air fryer and coffee maker, without any flame, or really any exposed hot surfaces
You could try getting a grill and cooking outside. Grilled food tastes really good and you dont have to worry about the kitchen catching on fire.
It sounds like you may have obsessive compulsive disorder. I would encourage you to seek out a therapist who utilizes exposure and response prevention (ERP) as a treatment.
I haven’t experienced what you’re describing. Previous experience suggests exposure is the next step for you. If a cooking class isn’t feasible right now then start with watching some videos online (best if they’re home cooks - you want to watch common cooking of foods you like to eat).
You’re not trying to memorize anything or learn hard skills during this time. You’re only trying to become more familiar with people working in a kitchen so it doesn’t feel as alien and maybe not quite as scary.
Do that regularly for a while. If it’s too much for you: dial it back. You do want to push your boundaries but only when you’re feeling ok about it. Small wins will turn into more small wins and eventually you might be interested in trying to cook something.
If that happens, and I suspect it will, know that it is OK to start cautiously and take your time learning how to use the oven and stove top. Try turning a burner on with no pan or pot on top. Let it get hot. Turn it off. Let it cool down. Repeat that across a few days if the first one helps you.
Once you’re comfortable you should do that practice again and add water to a pan until its half full. Once the burner is hot: place your pan of water on top of the stove burner. Let the water come to a boil. Remove the pan from the stove top. Let the pan and water cool down. Note how much water is missing (some of it will have steamed away while boiling). Add that much water back to the pan and practice this again.
You can build your experiences, step by step, with safe extensions and new footholds, until you’re feeling confident about cooking something with the boiling water. You’re going to boil an egg!
Complete your practice again but instead of taking the water off right after it boils: leave it on the burner for 6 minutes. Then remove it and let it cool. Success? Do that again using a pot instead of a pan. Pot half full of water. Grab a serving spoon or similar item. Once the water comes to a boil:
- Lower the burner temperature to half / medium. The water should be moving and steamy but the bubbles should be very gentle or cease. Dropping the egg into actively boiling water may cause the egg to crack prematurely.
- Use the serving spoon to gently place the egg in the center of the boiling water.
- Wait six minutes.
- Remove the pot of water from the burner.
- Turn the burner off.
- Use the serving spoon to lift the egg out of the hot water.
- Run the egg under cold water (this helps it from over cooking and helps make peeling easier).
- Enjoy your egg.
You can absolutely boil any kind of pasta, lots of vegetables, and almost all starchy foods. Boiling is very safe because the water regulates the temperature for us. So long as there is water in the pot the pot is unable to meaningfully exceed 100 degrees Celsius (the boiling point of water / ~212F). It is very difficult to burn anything or start a fire while boiling water.
Best of luck my friend.
Main topic aside, what are you doing putting bread and butter together with a fork?
All the small appliance suggestions so far are great - they remove a lot of the danger and give you an easy place to start. Same for the safety items. Even with no fear, it is sensible to have an extinguisher and fire blanket in the kitchen.
When you feel that you are ready to start picking up knives and working with flame, do it with a friend or family member that is suitably understanding & willing to teach. Simply watching it done is still familiarising yourself with the process and hopefully reducing your fears.
My sister is the same way - I am teaching her slowly. We started with baking, as all the prep work is done cold with only one heating process. Not exactly healthy, but it it gets the ball rolling on working with heat.
You could try baking
You might mess up! That’s normal. Even experienced professionals do. That might be part of your apprehension? Like, if those experienced professionals can goof up, imagine what an inexperienced person might do?
But, the reality is that you’ll mess up the same when you mess up. It’ll be a little cut here, a little singe there. Your kitchen won’t explode, you won’t catch on fire. All in all, you stop thinking of some things as mess-ups and start thinking of them as just a normal outcome.
Here’s what I would recommend doing if you want to practice in safe ways:
- Practice mixing drinks. Not necessarily cocktails! Like, mix some herbs and juice in with a club soda. Tada, that’s cooking.
- Practice making salads with take-home kits. Add some vinegar or oil and herbs in addition to what you’ve got out of the kit.
- Make hot drinks: teas, coffees, things like that. Eventually start making your own syrups for them: look up simple syrup recipes and infusions.
- Get frozen pizzas or other frozen foods. Buy extra shredded cheese and Italian seasoning. Cook them as normal except add the cheese and seasoning on top before you do.
Here’s what I would recommend if you want to increase your own personal safety:
- Get a fire extinguisher and put it somewhere obvious in your kitchen.
- Look for “cut resistant” gloves. They help protect your hands when you’re working with knives and stuff.
- Get some timers with magnets on them and practice using them. The most likely way something’ll catch fire is if you’re distracted and timers will help you avoid that.
- Get some silicone mitts and handles for the oven. They’re incredibly heat resilient!
I’d also maybe just say familiarize yourself with cooking enough to demystify it? Like, marathon watch Good Eats or Iron Chef or something? Put it on in the background while you do other stuff, and just get used to seeing kitchens and food in action?
Fundamentally though this might be worth talking to a therapist about, because it could be that you’ve got some kind of reason (maybe more rational than you imagine) to have this apprehension. If that’s the case the first step is, honestly, talking it out with someone and not ignoring it and forcing yourself to do something you’re uncomfortable with.
