I started "cooking" regularly when I went to college; mostly I made pasta from a box, avocado and sprout sandwiches, and yep, stir fries with frozen veggies. My 'fancy' dishes were a soy marinated salmon, an egg white 'omelet' with spinach and goat cheese, or a black bean soup. I've changed so much! I've become more adventurous--I never thought I would bake bread, and now I'm doing it weekly. I can look at a recipe and tell almost instantly what changes I'm going to make to it to suit what I like. Really, once you get the basic skills down, you discover that all recipes pretty much follow the same formula, and that allows you to be more confident in creating your own dishes.

My diet during my first year at university was comprised almost exclusively of eating shake-n-bake chicken and stir-fried celery on rice. Lunches were macaroni with jarred sauce (though augmented with onions, green peppers and ground beef). For 8 months straight.

I was too uptight about cooking "properly". My mom taught me that cooking was like chemistry lab, and thus easy. She didn't have to face my freshman chem lab supervisor, who was a terror. It took watching James Barber, the urban peasant, to get me to ease up and relax in the kitchen.

I was lucky to inherit great cooking genes. My grandmother and my mother were natural cooks who could create a wonderful dish out of just a few ingredients. They always cooked from scratch and seasonally.

The only difference between my cooking and theirs is that I explored world cuisines a lot more than they did (their cooking was mainly French, Italian and Spanish). Over the years I have added a lot of Indian, Asian and Middle Eastern dishes to my repertoire.

In college and in the years after, my cooking was mainly sauteed chicken and vegetables, usually stirred into some kind of boxed rice mix. I've always enjoyed cooking, but I didn't know that much about it. When I decided to start learning, I started to make a lot more things from scratch (no more boxed mixes!). Now I bake most of my own bread, and in the past six months or so, I've started eating a primarily vegetarian/vegan diet and getting much more into whole grains. I still love burgers, but eat them way less often. I think the biggest difference really lies in what I buy in the supermarket: way more variety in the produce department, and almost nothing from the middle aisles.

Sometimes, I do get nostalgic for my sauteed chicken and red peppers in Goya black beans and rice mix, though.

It's a little difficult to really nail down what has really changed over the years. I guess I'm leaning more towards the healthier and fresher foods. Not as much processed and I'm attempting to make a lot of the things that I would normally purchase; chicken stock, tomato sauce, bread, and other things that are easier bought, but more satisfying if made at home.
I learned to cook as a child, so naturally I've moved from things I liked as a child to more of the things that I enjoy as an adult. We're about to have our own child, so we're looking into making baby food instead of the jars of questionable food products. Hopefully my child will love cooking as much as I do.

I definitely was trapped in the pasta, stir-fry, and curry routine for the first year or so that I lived on my own. I knew I could do better, though, because I was cooking for a long time before then, and I was never afraid to use spice; after that year, I started challenging myself to find and make new dishes every week.

Now, I still do that, but I'm spending more time trying to really familiarize myself with particular foods and the many different ways to cook them (most recently rice: the book Seductions of Rice has *really* inspired my cooking in the last little while).

Also, salt: my mom almost *never* adds salt to anything she cooks, and I learned to cook from her; even if I noticed it was called for in a recipe, I would always forget to add it. I still don't use anywhere close to the amounts called for in most recipes, but I'm glad that I've learned to add a pinch now and then.

I used to live almost entirely on frozen chicken nuggets, reheated, and placed over a salad. I went from there, to veggie stir fry over rice. Then, fried egg sandwiches with a weekly splurge on something tasty. Like dal palak, or crustless quiches, or kale mashed potatoes, or

LOL, when I first started "cooking" 15 years ago, it was Tuna Helper, etc., boxed mac and cheese, or large pieces of meat (i.e., chicken breast or pork chop) overcooked and served with a starch. Occasionally I attempted something (a meat roll or lasagna) from the massive Betty Crocker or Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks I received as wedding gifts. I then graduated to making "sauces" with Campbell's soup. Eventually, I discovered Martha Stewart and am happy to say that today I cook a variety of interesting dishes, mostly meatless, inspired by many cultures, with mainly fresh and healthy ingredients, and nary a "seasoning packet" in sight. Of course, it helps that you can buy a wider variety of produce at the grocery store now, and I live in a big metro area. I've always enjoyed cooking though, even when it was tuna mac.

I've been cooking since I was old enough to stand on a chair and help stir when my dad cooked. I've gone through a few phases of cooking.. 5 years of vegetarian cooking, years of Eastern European dishes, Middle Eastern.. and now I'm bigtime into skills and French cuisine. My goal is to be able to successfully cook pretty much anything. I'm working on tarts and next up I think is going to be prime rib :)

Overcooked chicken.

I knew what uncooked chicken looked like, but couldn't seem to grasp figuring out if a cutlet was still uncooked in the middle.

OK skipping past the horror of fully processed everything, when I first started cooking I refused to deviate even slightly from listed ingredients---now I'm a little more flexible, I figure in a few more years I'll be making my own recipes.

My mom taught me basic cooking skills--and a killer recipe for tomato meat sauce--when I was small. For the first several years on my own I cooked from packages and boxes--frozen stir fry mixes that came with sauce, boxes of rice--almost always with chicken breasts. Over time I wanted to get away from all those boxes and increasingly made things on my own--rice, bread, pasta, etc. Now, like so many of the other posters, I make all our bread and on nostalgic days, I make my own version of Rice a Roni or Near East pilaf.

Lots and lots of metal cans.

I've always been experimental and adventurous, but only in recent years have I taken the extra steps to cook my own dried beans, freeze soups in big batches, or can my own in-season tomatoes.

Now I can't stand ingredients that taste like a can, and I shudder to think of the BPA and who knows what else that was mixed in there.

I never cooked with too many boxed or prepared mixes, etc. so that was never an issue for me so much. For me I just had to get beyond the pasta, protein, starch combo that I relied so heavily. I still love my pasta but it appears on my menu on average once/week. Also, I always thought that I had to have a meat or fish based protein at every meal and now I prepare many more meatless meals than what I did previously.

When I lived alone after college I went for quite a while on eggs, tuna fish, and Subway sandwiches. I'm surprised I didn't get scurvy. Now that I'm married, I cook a full meal every night. Well, almost every night :)

I've been cooking since I was ten and ambitiously started with the Silver Palate Cookbooks. My technique has certainly improved since some of my early trials, but mostly I've noticed that I've been cooking more seasonally for the past 5 years or so-- a reaction to reading Michael Pollan's books and I started buying nearly all of my produce at the farmer's market (what I don't grow on my year-round balcony garden). I'm also experimenting with more ethnic cuisines (Indian, Middle Eastern, Asian).

Finally, I've noticed that as Americans become more interested in food, cooking, and ethnic cuisines, there's been a greater variety of authentic products available to us. I remember when my mother tried to replicate italian risotto using plain white rice--now I make risotto using Arborio or Carnaroli at least once a month. Other products that have become available more recently such as farro and fregola are now staples in my kitchen.

My mom was a single mom and I was cooking full meals and baking for the family ever since I was a preteen.

My kids aren't big veggie fans so when I cook I chop into bitty pieces instead of chunks and used crushed tomatoes instead of diced or whole.

I used to plan a meal and then shop. Now I shop and plan a meal based on what's on sale combined with what I've stocked up from earlier sales.

I gave up on home canning when our garden became shaded over, didn't produce well due to soil type, and water costs made it prohibitive. We're back in business now that my kids are canning for the 4-H fair, only using purchased produce.

Back 15 years or so ago just out of college my lunches were lunch meat sandwiches on white bread and dinners were boxed pasta or rice (rice-a-roni or pasta-roni type stuff) with some sort of meat usually chicken breast or sausage, and occasionally a veggie or two thrown in. Now I make almost everything from scratch including the pumpernickel bread, pastrami that I smoked this weekend, and mustard with caramelized onions and porter for my sandwich for lunch today.

I started out with sauteed chopped veggies (fresh!) and jarred pasta sauce over pasta. For me, it was the best way to really learn about vegetable cooking times and the unexplored world of spices my cheapo spice rack had (Mace? I still haven't figured that one out.) I was a poor poor college kid and a vegetarian to boot, so eating out wasn't so much an option. Slowly, I graduated to learning to cook Korean food (my mother is from South Korea) and fish tacos. When I was pregnant and essentially waiting to give birth, I started baking pies and cakes from scratch out of sheer boredom and an inability to be really mobile. Last January, I made my own, 3-tiered, Salted Caramel Chocolate wedding cake and am working on a Kimchi Fish Taco recipe to rival the Kogi Truck.

I was just thinking about this!

Tonight, I made beef tips over egg noodles for my husband. It's one of the dishes that I would make for him 20 years ago when we were first married. At that time, almost everything that I made was something that my mom had once made. The meals revolved around meat and I generally used canned vegetables. *wince* I grew up eating overcooked vegetables and so I didn't care for them much.

Since then, I've learned to like every vegetable that I hated as a kid (by using different cooking methods and seasonings). I'm really passionate about vegetable dishes now.

I also eat a mostly vegan diet and my husband eats considerably less meat. Cooking blogs have certainly helped my cooking to evolve as well as the food channel and collecting cookbooks. I like to work with plating and... I could go on for a long time. I won't be competing on Top Chef any time soon, but I like to pretend that I am. :)

I was in the lucky group with VanBC- my mum was a great from-scratch cook and I learned from her.

I think now that I have a little more time and a little more money I would say that I'm excited to do more recipe cooking! (Feeling a little backwards from most people here!)

I've really only used recipes for "ethnic foods" (for me, Indian, Thai, African) in the past, but friends have been turning me on to sites like Tastespotting that have really been fun to explore.

I find myself buying veggies and herbs I've never utilized before and I like how it's expanding my culinary vocabulary.

The next goal is to cut back a bit more on processed food, or "pood" as I heard it called recently! Also trying to do more meatless-dinners.

In college I ate a lot of macaroni and cheese, ham or turkey sandwiches (on 12 grain bread, though, and often with spinach), and stir fried chicken with frozen and/or canned veggies.

Then I was jobless for about four months, just moved across the country to be with my boyfriend, and really started cooking from scratch. I learned to bake from scratch, including yeast bread (though I still only ever have tried the one recipe), how to cook various kinds of meats, and I learned to love a dozen or so different varieties of apples as well as more vegetables than I ever thought possible.

In fact, these days, my boyfriend and I rarely eat meat at home, except chicken or occasionally beer battered fish out of a box. And sausage. He loves sausage and it's cheap and easy, so we eat more than is probably good for us. I still make some favorites from college (Zatarain's spanish rice cooked with black beans, tomatoes, and corn), but more often than not a meal is based on what's in season and in my fridge. I rarely cook from recipes anymore.

I do yearn for those four months of free time, though. I could have used them much better! Ah well, I have a full-time job now, so I can't complain, despite the fact that I'm working 50 hour workweeks. Lol... Still... now I yearn for a farm. :)

I've always been a fairly creative and confident cook- it's just that I really used to never actually care. My mom would send me recipes or I'd go on a random Epicurious hunt and come up with something good- that I'd cook maybe once every few months. I ate a lot of pasta, a lot of nachos, and a lot of pb&j.

Now cooking is a nightly thing that I do with my boyfriend, and our ingredients are always fresh, whole, local, seasonal, and really- just wonderful. We do get into "ruts" where we're cooking the same types of dishes week after week- but I think we do quite well for the most part. Weekends I do a lot of baking and am focused on expanding my knowledge and strengths in the kitchen. It's something I've always loved- but now I'd call it a passion.

Like many folks here, I learned to cook out of necessity. As the eldest daughter of 5 children, someone needed to pick them up from daycare and get them bathed, fed, and into bed by the time my mom got off of work. She would leave out step-by-step instructions- spaghetti and meat sauce, honey dijon chicken thighs and rice, mushroom pilaf, soups and stews and lots of banana bread. We lived on a budget, and made almost everything from scratch, didn't use disposable baggies, spray oil, or paper towls. My mom taught me how to bake sandwich bread and peanut butter cookies.
When I was 17 I moved in with my grandmother to take care of her, and that was a huge shock- cooking for two instead of 7! For a while I lived off of pate, harvarti, olives and pickles. Sometimes a sandwich. Soon, though, I discovered her recipe book collection. First-edition Julia Child, Canadian Living magazine clippings, records of some of the very fancy dinner parties she hosted as a younger woman. I started working my way through Child, figuring out how French cooking worked while having never eaten at a French restaurant. I remember my glee at discovering how to prepare pork shoulders, the giant cuts of meat that sold for so cheap at the grocery store- we would live off one of those for a month. We had international students rent out rooms in our small townhouse, and I would feed them all. I came to really love dinner parties :)
Then, 5 years later I moved across the country for grad school, fell in love, studied ethics and became a vegan. Becoming vegan has opened up so many culinary possibilities for me. It's easy to make food taste good with butter and bacon and double cream. It's a far more subtle art to turn collards and beans into a feast. I have learned so much about international cuisine. I now cook at camps, serving exclusively vegan food to omnis with my cooking soul mate, aka best friend, who has a knack for knowing exactly what a dish is missing, what I'm forgetting, and remembering to time how long things have been in the oven.
I'm now almost done my graduate degree in Philosophy, and wishing for more vegan chef apprenticeships while trying to decide what to do next: I know I want to feed people. It's just a matter of finding the best way to make a living doing that.

I started with a reportoire that consisted entirely of roast dinners, and a large variety of puddings and cakes since my Mum always asked me to make the cake or pudding for Sunday dinner. My parents were the epitome of Englishness and we ate very bland food with basic boring veggies. Nothing to get excited about since food was more about refueling in our house.

When I went to Uni she taught me basic bolognaise and savory mince recipes and I lived off that and a lot of grilled food for ages (I make a tasty lasagne, though I suspect it is nothing like a real italian one!). I finally learnt to enjoy less bland food and now I cook all sorts of things. I still stick to following recipes for most dishes as I'm not too good at adapting - yet, but I have a stock of things I can cook from memory which are all pretty foolproof. I still love to bake most of all though :-)

Cooking has been such a part of my life from an early age that it is hard to pin down how it has evolved. My mom and dad always made interesting foods - homemade potato chips, Cajun & Creole recipes (I remember the blackened fish smoking up the *entire* house), tortillas from scratch - and one of my earliest memories, because it was so fun, was making pizza from scratch in my Mom's Easy Bake Oven that was handed down to me.
In middle school my go-to meals were either broiled filet or broiled chicken with a baked potato and garlic bread, and occasionally I made pepperoni pizza from the Chefboyardee box. Late middle school/early high school I started following some of the Paul Prudhomme recipes in a cookbook we had, making shepherd's pie, crawfish boils, gumbo, etc.
Throughout college I cooked quite a bit (I laughed at the first apartment I looked at with a two burner stove and a half fridge - that wouldn't do). By then I had also added soups, spaghetti (jarred sauce augmented with beef, onions, etc.), and many other things to my repertoire. Iron Chef (the Japanese version) and discovering new cuisines changed the combinations I was willing to try (I made a killer pasta dish with chicken, pineapple, and a soy-based sauce).
In the past 10 years, I've started to follow more recipes, as I have tried to recreate many dishes, and I've used more fresh vegetables than ever before. I've noticed how over time I went from cooking with no recipes, to using them heavily, and now I'm leaning back toward making it up as I go along, only now with a larger knowledge base of technique, ratios, and ingredients.
What a great exercise - thinking about how your cooking has changed. I really liked this question - it brought back so many happy memories!

I started to love cooking when I realized cooking isn't dumping a box of rice a roni in a pot and grilling a piece of fish. My mother is a fabulous cook but she uses a lot of "shortcuts" of processed food. As soon as I realized I could make my own side dishes that actually tasted BETTER I was excited. When I realized I could replicate some of my favorite restaurant meals for half the calories, I was hooked :)

When I first moved out on my own, back in 96, I remember using tons of cream of chicken soup in recipes. I'd use it every chance I got. That and I lived off of Kraft Dinner.

There's nothing wrong with either one of them, as far as convenience foods go and the occasional usage-but years later, I can appreciate so much more now the flavor of fresh ingredients, a good olive oil, and a nice wedge of cheese.

Thanks to the folks at The Food Network (most of them aren't there anymore, except Ina Garten and Alton Brown) and the PBS cooking shows for always inspiring me!

Food has always been a love-hate thing for me....

Growing up, my mother was an awful cook - she fed us out of pantry boxes and freezer foods. She admits that she was an awful cook, but states emphatically that she was a great baker (which she is!).

That said, when I moved out of my mother's house, I ate out a lot; we never really were taught to cook like a lot of "normal" people. I went through a really hard recession in my career where I didn't have a lot of money, and so I became a frugal buyer -- I bought a lot of things on fire sales and ended up with a mash of ingredients.

I think, really, that's what prompted me to become a bit of a foodie... I love cooking now, mostly because I was forced by necessity to get creative with what I made in the house ... it was either that, or eat Top Ramen for the rest of my life (bleck). Allowing my creative muscles to stretch was the thing I needed to really start looking at what I was putting in my stomach every day, and it's led to a lot of really awesome things.

Now that I have a family and other people to cook for, I adamantly refuse to take the "easy way" out like my mother did feeding us kids; I won't put anything on the table that I, myself, wouldn't want to eat -- that includes chicken nuggets and mac n' cheese -- so I've learned how to mock a lot of "favorite" meals with better ingredients.

Now, we make a lot of our food at home, from noodles to ice cream, and the Kitchn has, in large part, helped continue to inspire me to try new things and create fantastic concoctions... Maybe someday I'll app for a spot on staff!! :)

Most commenters seem to be reporting wonderful developments in their cooking; mine has only devolved. In my 20's I was all about healthy, wholesome, mostly vegetarian cooking - minimal salt, minimal fat, lots of produce; wouldn't buy anything (like bread or yogurt) that I could make at home. Now that I'm in my 30's, and my husband and I get home from work and sports at 9 pm, I find myself reaching for the frozen gyoza, the jar of pasta sauce, the - gasp! - prepared beans. Because of our CSA we sometimes have to get through vegetables that I'm not wild about, so I find myself making them good with cream or hidden in meaty lasagne.

Now that I'm pregnant and utterly exhausted when I finally make it home (srsly, I never cook any more, and I LOVE to cook) we are regularly eating pizza and those pre-roasted chickens and mac'n'cheese - the opposite of the kind of conscientious pregnant person I had thought I'd be one day. I finally /get it/ when I see all those ideas for 'short cuts' that moms supposedly swear by. Short cuts sound really good right about now. *sigh* I'm trying at least to make my own 'freeze ahead' meals and ingredients on occasion, but it's not as regularly as I'd like. Kudos to all of you for still moving forward.