Joy of Cooking

I started learning how to cook when I was four years old. I had to be lifted onto the counter, but I measured the ingredients with spoons I still have four decades later. When you start learning early, you start paying attention to what happens when you vary a recipe. You learn what upping or lowering the temperature does to the food, and whether its a good thing or a bad one. You learn a lot of things which can be described in the C.I.A. cookbook (Culinary Institute of America), but most people never bother reading in Joy of Cooking despite lots of useful information in each section. Nowadays people go online for recipes. Many of these sites also have videos showing what to do. These really help get you started on cooking. You won't master it from a video. You have to pay attention if you want to succeed.

Lots of newbies think cooking is easy. They are wrong. There are easy recipes, but cooking itself is a skill based on lots of experience. Being a good cook is all about that experience, and the willingness to experiment and find the limits of what works, and what improves the recipe in new ways. Most of the recipes online have duplicates. It is often a good idea, when deciding on a new recipe to actually try yourself, to look at all of them, compare the different options and remember that Sunset Magazine always uses exotic ingredients even when they have no flavor, and adding really spicy things to every dish is a great way to get indigestion and wipe out the flavor profile of those fancy ingredients or concentrated flavor caused by slow cooking a dish. Fast food is bad food. Slow food is the way to make food delicious. Restaurants don't do a lot of slow food, they mostly do things that can cook in less than 10 minutes because a 25 minute or 35 minute turnover in tables from group to group makes more money. And restaurants are a money business. At home you have no such restrictions, and slow cooking should always be preferred.

Good example: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Spiced-Pumpkin-Bread-840
A good one for Fall. In a few months I'll be cooking this. It combines pumpkin, pound cake, and spices. You can also, once you are good at this, add sliced almonds, chopped dried apricot, and chocolate chips. These flavors give you the oil from the nuts and allspice, sour from the apricot, and bitter from the chocolate, which is a drastic improvement to "just pumpkin spice" and pumpkin itself. These tricks also work with banana bread. The result is loaded with calories, enough that a half inch slice = breakfast. Goes down a treat with strong coffee.

This is only one example, and there are endless more where you can cook something, taste it, and if you take the time to develop it further through additional ingredients or cooking method gets you a better result. That's the difference between a home chef and a mere technician.