"Good ingredients prepared simply" is the most basic truism in cooking. Be extremely wary of what you learn on cooking shows; there is as much fetishism for people who will never cook as there is instruction for those attempting to learn. Anyone who tells you that crushing garlic is bad but chopping garlic is good is attempting to intimidate you, not educate you. Vegetables benefit from being undercooked and suffer horribly from being overcooked. When in doubt, aim low. USDA "minimum done" and "recommended done" are not the same things. There is a great deal of controversy here but Thermoworks has yet to steer me wrong. On a related note, I'll bet you feel you can't afford one of these. That's okay. You don't need one immediately. But mark my words - as soon as you get one, you'll wish you had one a lot sooner. Put it on your wish list or whatever because anything that allows you to execute flawless poached eggs, steaks and fudge in one tool is a worthy investment. American Chinese cuisine is fundamentally four(?) mother sauces and a couple preparation techniques. Not surprisingly, French cooking is similar. Master the sauces, master the cuisine... and then you can mix it up and improvise with a great deal of success. A "really great steak" is like a "really great omelet" - it's really great ingredients left alone as much as possible. Tools matter. Reddit likes to argue about which you need more, a good set of pans or a good set of knives. Then they get into pissing matches about what "good" means, someone throws the Cutco bomb and it descends into invective. This is dumb because the whole point of having decent tools is that they make the process fun instead of a chore and generally you need to cut things that go in a pot and unless you're a rawist... Wusthof or Henkels, choice is yours, that set of four knives, a steel and a pair of scissors for $130 on eBay will do just fine. I've found that Wusthof tends to keep an edge better than Henkels but that could be confirmation bias on my part 'cuz I like their logo better. Not sure who's making Cuisinart's blades these days but they're okay. Despite what Rachael Ray is telling you, you don't need a Santoku. You probably do need a carving knife, a chef's knife, a bread knife and a paring knife (and a decent pair of shears). You also need a steel because the more often you hone the edge the longer you can go between sharpenings. And you should probably start out by getting your knives sharpened for you. This costs anywhere between $2 per blade in Seattle to twenty fucking dollars in LA. I was all set to drop $400 on some All-Clad back when I was in my early '20s but instead bought the (then $150) Kirkland Signature set. Aside from a couple Le Creusets I have purchased no cookware since 1998... and I have a $100 thermometer. Non-stick is a waste of time. Do not bother. The teflon will come off over time, your choices of cooking implements is severely limited and you don't need it. In order to keep food from sticking you need only raise it to room temperature (by running it under warm water, for example) prior to putting it in the skillet. Once butter stops sizzling, it's ready to cook. And by limiting yourself to steel, enamel and cast iron, you can use spectacular tools such as this which will render nonstick to ribbons in two sets of pancakes. Best of all, should you have a kitchen disaster (such as reducing olive oil to varnish by getting distracted while heating a pan), stainless iron and enamelware all respond favorably to a blast with Bon Ami. The best "starting out" cookbook is not The Joy, it's not James Beard, it's not America's Test Kitchen, it's Eduard de Pomaine's French Cooking in Ten Minutes from 1930 for the simple reason that it argues ingredients plus cooking equals food, a fundamental maxim entirely lost by todays overfetishized food worship culture. Cooking is learned by cooking. It is learned by experimentation. It is learned by confidence. It is not learned by letting others tell you what you can't do, by assuming that if it's tarted up with excessive prep it will somehow be better. And finally, know that presentation matters. I've personally been skeptical of this but I spend half the year eating out of a buffet. last year, one of the cooks prepared me a plate of the exact same food I eat out of that buffet and lemme tell ya - well arranged food actually does taste better than that very same food heaped on a plate. Don't get precious with it but have a little pride. I leave you with this: ZOMG Thomas Keller cooking a ZOMG roast chicken. See how obsessive that fucker is? Now hie thee to Amazon and watch Season 1, Episode 3 of Julia Child's French Chef from 1963. Notice how it is the diametrical opposite. I've cooked both. Know what? They taste like chicken.
I have 2 La Creuset dutch oven pans. They are awesome. I have a few All Clad Blacks but only use them when I'm getting all serious. Otherwise I use some decent mid grade cookware. Nonstick work good for about a year if treated with great care. You can't get them as hot as other pans or you'll damage the coating over time, not great for saute. I still have a nonstick fry pan, I guess it's a bad habit that I should get over. I have a variety of knives but only use a mid grade chef knife for everything. I dice garlic and core tomatoes with a chef knife. I would drive chefs mad on the job refusing to use pairing knives but my fine knife skills are good and I'm fast when I need to be so in the end they just let me use my chef knife and left me alone. You only "need" a chef's knife an a bread knife but there are about a million posts on the internet telling you otherwise. I like Bittman's how to cook everything as a starting place for what I'm going to make but I have a ton of cook books and a decade+ of Cooks Magazines that I go to for ideas. Cook books are there mostly for ideas.
My knife skills should be a lot better than they are but I never had any desire to excel as a mindless kitchen drone. If I had a great knife I'd do much better. I'd guess that I've spent the better part of a waking year if my life with a chef knife or meat cleaver in my hand. You can't help but get better when you have one in you hand for 30 hours of a 40-50 hour work week. At one time I worked at a restaurant that had all you could ear fajitas. No one worked that station more than two days a week because their hands would get so fucked up from holding a cleaver for hours on end. My right arm looked like Popeye's my left looked like a normal guys arm who never worked out. People would laugh at it when I'd show them. At the end of a shift I could neither open or close my right hand until the next morning. I remember the despair of the entire Harvard football team coming in for fajitas mid shift. You would be a perfectly useful kitchen drone in a week. In a month your knife skills would be way better. The competition not to suck makes people who care get better super fast.