if you're learning how to cook or branching out or feel like you just are not a very good cook or can't cook at all it is so important to know that when experienced cooks say they're measuring with their heart they are lying to you. They are measuring with their intuition, instinct, and experience, all of which are built by following recipes (written or taught by family), experimenting a lot, or some combination of the two: no matter how they learned, they learned it through cooking way more than you have. If you're trying to cook based on instinct or the assumption that you should just be able to figure it out and you don't like how your food comes out or you don't know where to start, find recipes and follow them to the letter. There is nothing wrong with looking up how to scramble eggs or make a stir fry. It will make your cooking better and easier, I promise.
I am a very experienced cook. I cook near daily, I bake a lot, I write recipes, and I rarely *use an implement* to measure ingredients while cooking. This is because I have years and years of experience figuring out how to adjust recipes to my tastes and I know that I can eyeball the amount of starch or salt or flour to put into a recipe. I'm not measuring "one tablespoon" of starch, I'm just shaking in what looks right, which is approximately a tablespoon and I know what too much or too little looks like because I've measured a lot of tablespoons in my time.
And STILL, even with that knowledge, if I'm trying to cook something for the first time I'll usually try making four or five different recipes before I combine what I like out of all of them into my "standard" recipe.
And even if I'm cooking something that I'm familiar with but haven't cooked in a while or haven't written my recipe for, I may look up a video or check a recipe or two as a refresher. For example, I almost never cook pork, so I flip open my betty crocker cookbook and check the weight and temp charts any time I pick up a pork loin. (The betty crocker cookbook is a good basic book with handy charts that is inexpensive and easy to follow if you're looking for something that has a wide variety of recipes to try)
AND STILL, with all of that, I use measuring cups and measuring spoons for nearly everything when I'm baking. Baking has a lower margin of error than cooking. You can maybe get away with eyeballing the poppyseeds in lemon poppyseed muffins or the chocolate chips in chocolate chip cookies, but you cannot get away with eyeballing the baking powder. Knowing what you do and do not have to measure exactly is another dimension of the skills that come along with experience.
Cooking is a skill that takes practice. It gets easier as you go along and you should never feel bad for using reference or looking up techniques. Nobody "just knows" how to cook well, they all had to learn.
I think investing in a good quality knife and learning how to sharpen it can be immensely helpful for beginners cooks. Mid to high range knife companies sell individual culinary knives. Which are more affordable then buying a set.
Sohla El-Waylly writes amazing recipes for beginner cooks imo.
Also remember it’s okay if you fail at cooking. You can eat it if it’s mediocre or just chuck it out if it’s truly terrible. And then you can just try again tomorrow. It’s quite a low stakes endeavour most of the time. And the more you practice the easier it gets. So you’ll be prepared when it’s a more high stakes situation like cooking for a dinner party or baking something for loved ones.
I also measure precisely when I’m making something for the first time. I look up cooking methods for things I cook rarely. And I always measure when baking because as you said there’s a lower margin of error in baking.
(It’s essentially creating specific chemical reactions for flavour & texture etc… which gets increasingly complex depending on the recipe ie macrons & meringues. Like the temperate of eggs and butter matter. Which is why I enjoy Nigella Lawson recipes because she tends to list if ingredients like butter should be room temperature or fresh out of the fridge. I love baking meringues and strongly recommend Nigella’s Easter Egg Nest cake recipe).
