About

Hi, I’m Darrin, and I love food.

You might know me from writing for sites such as Summer Tomato, Nerd Fitness, and Free the Animal.

I’ve created The Guy Can Cook for men who:

1. Are interested in learning how to cook.
2. Don’t have a lot of spare time and money to spend on exotic ingredients, expensive equipment, and complex cooking techniques.
3. Want to look better and feel better.

Learning how to cook has many benefits. It will make you healthier and stronger. It will make you enjoy food more, and, let’s be honest, women find that a guy who cooks ridiculously attractive!

But cooking is often portrayed as a complex task that is too difficult to succeed at. So instead we watch someone else do it on the Food Network while we make yet another microwave dinner.

This is a lie.

Cooking at home is a completely different experience than cooking in a restaurant or on TV. It involves surprisingly few skills to learn. There’s little that you have to know about food to make a tasty and healthy meal.

The biggest obstacle to learning to cook is your own preconceptions, which I can help you shatter.

A Little About Me

Ever since I was tall enough to reach the stovetop, I’ve been cooking. It started out with club sandwiches, progressed through steak and garlic mashed potatoes, and now I can bake fresh pies and ferment sauerkraut without batting an eye.

I started cooking because I wanted to eat healthier, but really stuck with it when I realized that tasty food can also be good for you.

Cooking allows me to be both a scientist and an artist, using basic skills to create delicious meals. It’s not only a practical skill, but it’s also a lot of fun.

If you’re a guy who thinks you “don’t know how to cook,” although you wish you could, I created this website for you.

Both sides of my family have men that are great home cooks, and the myth that we are somehow inherently bad at cooking is utterly false.

Most of us just need to learn the right way.

Why Should You Learn to Cook?

But why learn how to cook? Isn’t this a completely unnecessary skill in this day and age?

Here are a few reasons:

1. Learning how to cook will help you get (and stay) healthy. Over the years, I’ve tried just about every diet. From low-fat to low-carb. Vegetarian to Paleo. Now I just focus on eating Real Food, and guess what? I’m healthier and in better shape than I ever have been. We’ve been taught over the years that we should have an antagonistic attitude towards food, but different cultures from around the world show that this isn’t the case. Food is good.
2. You will be able to eat amazingly delicious food all the time. Somewhere along the line we were led to believe that healthy food doesn’t taste good. Bullshit! So-called “bad foods” such as saturated fat, starchy carbs, and salt have been in the human diet for a long time with no ill effects, and they just made food taste better. There’s a lot of misinformation and myths out there related to a healthy diet, and I will help debunk them here.
3. It’s a great excuse to hang out with friends and family. Hey, I enjoy going out to dinner as much as everyone else, but there’s something more fun about having people over to your place, where things are a little more informal, and impressing the hell out of them with an amazing meal.

Common Fears and Misconceptions

Sure, cooking is one of those skills that most people would like to have, but few actually take the initiative to learn. Why is this? Here’s a few of the reasons I’ve heard:

1. “I don’t know where to start.” Until recently, cooking was a skill handed down by family members in the same household, but the ubiquity of restaurants and microwave dinners mean that today you are unlikely to learn much about cooking from your own mother. What’s worse, we’ve been led to believe that the way to learn how to cook is by trying to make meals out of massive cookbooks that assume you know a lot more than you actually do. If you don’t know where to start, then you should sign up for my free Kitchen Hacking 101 course, where I walk you step-by-step through making your first homemade meal from scratch.
2. “I’m too overwhelmed.” Ever look up a recipe online, only to find that you need 37 ingredients, only 3 of which you’ve ever heard of before? As much as I love the wide world of flavors out there, it’s important to keep things simple when learning how to cook. That’s why I have recipes with only the ingredients you’ll actually have on hand, and the most basic of equipment.
3. “I don’t want to ruin a meal.” I admit this is a tough one. Food costs money. And it’s always tough when you cook something that you don’t actually enjoy eating. I get it. But just like anything in life, you are only going to get better at it by messing up every once in a while (and learning from your mistakes.) Fortunately, I will show you the most common kitchen mistakes (and how to fix them) so this happens far less often for you.
4. “I’m afraid of hurting myself.” Cooking can be dangerous. You’re working with high heat, sharp knives, and raw meat. And if you never learned how to deal with these variables, it’s easy to get scared. I will show you how to use a knife without losing a finger, take proper precautions against burning yourself, and handle raw meat.
5. “I can’t cook!” And the most common excuse of all. You also once didn’t know how to walk. Or tie your shoes. Or use an ATM. When you say that you can’t cook, that really means that you don’t try. That you messed up a couple meals and couldn’t get over it. That you don’t think you have the right equipment. That you don’t know where to start. It’s only by taking action that you’ll ever change this. And taking action is what we’ll do here.

Are You In?

Once upon a time, cooking was a basic skill that everyone needed to learn.

Now, with restaurants on every corner and microwave dinners in every freezer, it has never been easier to not learn to prepare a decent dinner from scratch.

But if you choose to take on the kitchen, you’ll find that the investment is more than worth it.

You’ll impress the hell out of your friends and family with your mad skills (and make your coworkers jealous when they see the lunches you bring in).

You’ll look better and feel better, since you automatically improve your diet when you start cooking so that you’re eating the types of things that allow you to live to 100 while looking like a warrior.

If you’re interested in becoming one badass dude in the kitchen, you should subscribe to the site below. You’ll get my free Kitchen Hacking 101 course (guaranteed to get you to cook your first meal from scratch) as well as new articles on various kitchen topics from basic home cooking techniques to the secrets of cooking a perfect steak as soon as they are posted.

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