8 foods you should learn to cook in your 20's

1. A Deliciously Melty Grilled Cheese

Serious Eats has a great step-by-step slideshow of how to make the ultimate grilled cheese.

The key tip is that you should toast one side of each slice, sandwich the cheese between those toasted sides, then toast the other sides.

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2. A Truly Perfect Roast Chicken

Thomas Keller’s recipe calls for super-high heat, three ingredients — chicken, salt, and pepper — and teaches you essential techniques that will last a lifetime..

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3. Basic Roasted Veggies

Set the oven to 450°F, toss veggies with oil and kosher salt, spread out on a baking sheet so they aren’t too crowded, and roast until they look/taste good. The only trick is that you sort of have to understand which veggies take a little longer to cook — harder veggies like carrots, potatoes, broccoli, etc., take longer than soft mushrooms and tomatoes — so you’d cut those into smaller pieces so everything cooks at the same rate. Basic recipe below.

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4. Fudgy Homemade Brownies

First recipe is from One Sweet Appetite, although a lot of people also love Smitten Kitchen's recipe.

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5. Macaroni and Cheese From Scratch

You don't even need a recipe

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6. Killer Guacamole

Authentic guacamole doesn’t have garlic or tons of lime juice in it. (Personally, I think tons of both makes it heavenly, so I add it anyway.) The most important thing is to choose avocados that are super ripe and salt aggressively.

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7. Easy Homemade Tomato Sauce

Tomato sauce is just canned tomatoes with some kind of seasoning that you add cooked together for a while to let the flavor develop. Marcella Hazan’s famous tomato sauce recipe just has you simmer canned tomatoes with a butter and an onion cut in half. That works. So does sautéing a chopped onion, maybe some garlic, then adding the tomatoes and simmering for a while, like the second recipe from Bon Appetit. You can also get more complex by sautéing even more veggies (carrots, celery) and adding red wine and meat by clicking on the last link.

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8. The Best Chocolate Chip Cookeis

The New York Times did a great story in 2008 where they tested and retested different chocolate chip cookie methods to “assemble a new archetypal cookie recipe.” The results indicated that letting your dough rest overnight before baking is essential.

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