I'm not and never have been a professional chef either.

> Its hard because its not a sustainable place to put someone in to tell them they should be cooking more and then telling them to only cook the relatively limited palette presented as "entry level cooking".

Rubbish. There's nothing wrong with simple food, and the variety is huge. It's not intrinsically worse than "complicated" food.

> Probably the greatest turn off Ive ever seen to anyone aspiring to make their own meals is when they go for a month making everything themselves without ever having tasted a luxirious pan fond from the things they made because they both always played it safe and second were limited in their tooling to what they can make.

Nonesense. If you go for a month making food that tastes good without deglazing the pan then you ate food that tastest good. Deglazing the pan is just one technique in the reportoire of any cook or chef, home or otherwise and you don't suddenly go from dissapointing food to good food once you learn that one technique.

> Its more endemic of a more general problem of people wanting results now that if something doesn't result in instant success that its not for them.

That has nothing to do with how hard it is to cook good food at home.

> It took me a hundred hours of chopping and flipping pans to become good at it.

Yeah, it takes practice to become good at anything. It took me a while to learn to tie my shoelaces when I was a kid, but I didn't give up and pay for a communal shoe tieing service. The advantage to learning to cook is that you can become proficient enough (lots of recipes are dirt simple to follow) to start making stuff that's good in a short amount of time.

> If I hand a novice my knife it will take them three times longer to make larger cut diced vegetables because they have never done it before.

Yep, so? My kids are way slower in the kitchen than me. Speed isn't everything. Getting faster comes with practice, but an onion chopped slowly doesn't taste worse than one chopped fast.

> Probably the best example is how long it takes to manage to flip omelettes out of pans without breaking them. It takes a while to do that! Its not easy!

For some reason I am crap at omlettes, even after many years of cooking. But you know what? That two or three piece omlette that ended up on my plate is still edible and still tastes good. You don't have to produce perfect looking food with excellent technique.

> And I recognize I'm a total amateur. I'm not some professional chef. Those guys are truly amazing. They make art out of the same tools I have. What they do is an incredible job. A hard job. It took them years to master their craft, and its disingenuous to them to say its so easy.

You're putting words into my mouth there. I'm not saying that what those chefs do is easy, that would be ridiculous. It is clearly hard, but it's also completely irellevant. We're talking about home cooking. That's not hard.

> I just think the popular messaging of "just start cooking, its so easy if you just do only the basics"!

No, not "only do the basics", I'm saying "start simple". Simple food can be, and often is, good food. Start simple, make stuff that's good, but not complicated, and work from there. Grow the complexity as your confidence grows.

> Ends up causing way more harm than admitting that getting good at it to where you can confidently get up in the morning and not even think about eating out because you can make something you want at home if you want to is a time consuming and hard process.

What the hell are you eating for breakfast? Boil yourself a couple of eggs. Make avodado on toast. Make yourself some Pan con Tomate. Scramble yourself some eggs, maybe fry a little bacon on the side. This shit isn't complicated, and it's still good.

When you get home, reheat some Coq au Vin, it tastes great when it's sat overnight in the sauce.

> Sending signals about it being easy just makes someone wake up a few months down the road wondering why they still suck so much at it because everyone told them it would be so easy

It's not easy, but it's also not hard. It's one of those things that if you want to you can get good at to the point you can make good tasting simple food pretty quickly.

> but what they make to their palette still cannot compare to the diversity they want and get from eating out all the time so they stop trying.

You don't have to eat at home all the time. It's not all or nothing. Eat out sometimes, eat in sometimes. I go out for Cambodian food because I have none of the basic ingredients or skills to make it. That doesn't mean I can't then make lasagne at home the next day if I want that.

> I just personally see that happen all the time in my peer group.

Perhaps your peer group have just had some bad advice, or perhaps they've been put off by the incredibly negative narrative that you talk?