When I was 20 I still hadn’t learned to cook. It was too difficult, or so I thought. Then I got a job living alone on a farm, snowed up for much of the time, with the boss out of contact 6 miles away. I realized to my horror that I was going to have to learn to cook.

So I bought “The Reluctant Cook” by Ethelind Fearon and really enjoyed my voyage of discovery. In her introduction she says

If you are hampered at every turn by tiresome complicated recipes; an inefficient kitchen… instructions to use half a dozen different containers or operations where one would do, I don’t wonder that you’re reluctant.

The approach of simplifying everything suited me perfectly. In a few weeks I was cooking eggs with recipes that I made up as I went along (the 400 hens on the farm produced a couple of dozen cracked eggs per day and I tried leave as few as possible to throw out), snaring rabbits and making rabbit and pigeon pies, making cheeses (I had to pour about ten gallons of milk down the drain each day so if I could convert 5 gallons to cheese that was OK).

I remember one lemon meringue pie that I made with the whites of a dozen eggs, that foamed up to about six inches high. I enjoyed the first slice so much that I ate it all at one sitting.

How did I become such an expert in a few weeks? The secret is that if you start off with good tasty food, it’s very difficult to spoil it. You can of course ruin it by tipping in too much salt or pepper or curry powder or garlic and so on. You can even make it taste like a poultice by adding too much sage and onions. But you can avoid the problem by increasing these tasty additives gradually until you find the level that you prefer.

Why learn healthy recipes? It gives you the freedom to be healthy. You no longer care how toxic additive 211 happens to be - you don’t use it.