If you’re a first-time cook, being in the kitchen can be an overwhelming experience. Where do you start? What do you cook or bake? How much is a pinch of salt? How long does a chicken cook until its ready? And so on and so forth.

Here is some advice to help you tackle that first roast or cake or pot of soup.

Familiarise yourself with cooking terms

What does folding mean? Sifting? Chopping? Grinding? If a recipe asks you to sauté something, would you know what to do? There are loads of websites where you can learn the basics before you head into the kitchen. I’ll do a post with cooking terms in the near future. In the meantime, here’s a helpful link.

Don’t panic

Take a deep breath and look around you. What equipment do you have at your disposal? You really don’t need a lot of equipment to get a decent pot of food going or to bake a basic cake. How much time to do you have to cook? This will help you determine what the best thing to cook would be. Remember to breathe and believe that you can do this.

Be organised

Read the recipe you’re following from start to finish before you begin your meal. This will help you make sure you’ve got everything you need for your dish. Then, prepare as many of your ingredients before you start cooking or baking. Chop all your veg and clean your meat or measure your ingredients and turn on your oven before you start putting your cake together. If you’re following a recipe, have a pencil handy to tick off all the steps you’ve completed.

Be neat and tidy

This goes hand in hand with being organised. Perhaps it’s because I have OCD tendencies (a doctor told me I’m borderline) but I like to lay out all my ingredients for my cake or chop all my veg for my food and then pack away everything that I’m no longer using.

Clean up as you go along

There’s nothing worse than seeing a stack of dishes in the sink after you’ve completed your culinary masterpiece. What I like to do is fill the sink with water and washing up liquid and wash up as I’m going along. It’s better to see a stack of clean dishes on the drying rack than a stack of dirty ones.

Taste your food

This applies mainly to cooking. I wouldn’t really want to taste raw cake batter, but you can do this sometimes – to taste if you’ve remembered the sugar in your cake. But when it comes to cooking food, always taste, especially for seasoning.

Do you have any other pointers for first-timers? Tell me in the comments section below.