He clearly didn't get the guidance he needed when he was younger, but he is trying and asking questions. He is on the right path.

Yeah that and honestly, its also mainly a failure of the parents to teach him.

He a 20 yr old loving on his own. He already beat 80% of the other kids living with their parents.

He's probably injecting his message and destination into someone elses data transmission lmao

Let’s put a positive spin on this

Genuinely: why???

To shreds you say...

I assume he’s doing great.

My mans was cooking his own food; realized (own his own) that his way of cooking was suboptimal; and then asked for help.

That approach is to life is going take him far.

Probs fucked up a bunch of other things, being scared to ask again!

He's probably drinking

Hopefully got a pack of baking sheets from the supply house or Costco. Baking sheets, cutting boards, mixing bowls take up so much room but are universally useful.

to be fair, learning how to make even boxed meals is still better than nothing if you're from a home life situation where you've received zero food prep knowledge

I helped out in the kitchen a lot, but the home ec classes I took were things that I wasn't (yet) doing at home.

My mom made scrambled eggs, but the way they taught me to do it in home ec resulted in much better eggs. They taught me how to make tacos, my mom didn't know about tacos at all.

I think the issue is that my mom really learned very little from her own mother because her own mother wasn't much of a cook. My mom cooked every day. She had cook books. She had a few recipes handed down from relatives. But, she didn't know what she didn't know, which was a lot. Almost everything was overcooked and dry. She didn't know how to taste what she was cooking and adjust things. She didn't understand the purpose of the ingredients in the recipes she made, so she'd substitute things that completely ruined it.

I think my home ec classes were much better than the ones you had. But, also, my mom wasn't very good at cooking. So, home ec was really useful for me.

One of my teachers took us out hunting once. Shot a hare. We were there for every part of that journey from the hunt to it being on the plate and eaten. I definitely learned a lot from that.

Like with any class it really depends on your teacher.

When I had it, we learned much more than just cooking...

I remember they taught us how to do laundry, how to iron clothes, how to sew, how to balance a checkbook (yeah I'm old shut up), among other things.

Very useful actually, and despite it being over 2 decades ago, I still know how to do all of it.

Huh, it just occurred to me that when people say "Glad school taught me the Pythagorean theorem but not real life skills like how to do my taxes", they're just forgetting about home ec.

Makes me really sad when people can't make a cake without a box or can't make a basic roux or something. Really take for granted my privellege to have been exposed to basic stuff like that.

We learned about food safety ("don't leave stuff on the counter forever", "raw chicken is bad for you"), how to properly hand wash dishes, how to budget for a household, and a bit about the various non-nuclear family shapes. (Yes, I learned about divorce in 6th grade. It just hadn't come up in my life before. No mention of non-hetero couples or non-married couples because, you know, Kentucky in the 90s.) It was a broad life skills class with an emphasis on cooking. Not a clue what we cooked, but we got to use a flour sifter and that was fun.

The most homemade thing I made in home ec in the 90s was pancakes.

I already made pancakes at home lol

I think my school only offered sewing. I have clue where they would have cooked, except for the cafeteria kitchen. I made a dope walrus, though.

Ours was just, "Here's a video unrelated to home economics," because it and choir were the classes you got stuck in if there wasn't something else you could take that period (only 150 kids k-12)

Maybe the oven didn't have a baking sheet so he didn't think of it. Like for BBQ you cook directly on the grill

Hope that one day he develops problem solving skills.

Edit: put something under the dripping thing FFS

Every oven I think I've ever opened has always had like 8 mismatched trays in it, I think I assumed they just came with the oven.

I lived with a depressed Polish Master's student for some time who was also a sad alcoholic. Besides some other stuff he also did what you described - and my dude was in his early 30s. Only he made an entire Chicken and fries in that oil bath.

AND HE NEVER CLEANED IT UP. The fries and the oils literally sat in the oven for weeks over the summer and we ultimately had to just throw the tray out and buy a new one.

Wild times.

If you don't, it's going to smell really bad in a few days. I suspect that's what led him to start cleaning it regularly. That's not something a 20 year old is prone to do without motivation. A nasty smell is good motivation.

If it's carbonized then is sterile!!!

I am constantly cleaning my oven of blood and grease because damn German kids keep walking into my oven and the oven "accidentally" slamming shut and turning on.

Now, if you excuse me. Some fat German kid is trying to eat my wall.

Advantage of being a vegetarian I guess. I don't have to clean blood out of my oven.

Also forgot the mayo

"Common sense" is rarely all that common.

I operate strange new machines all the time. There's usually some kind of instructions or video. Never activate the device without trying to figure it out first, you won't even know what sort of personal protective equipment to wear.

You’re not wrong. But dang some things seem kinda obvious.

I had to go to the student housing council or whatever when I had an international student take the room in my on campus apartment mid year while I was in college. Dude didn't speak English and my roommate and I were NOT paying for the damage some rich kid did because he couldn't clean up the water from the toilet and sink. Also, who the fuck wants to constantly deal with standing water in your bathroom??

First and only time I ever made it was in Food Tech. Now I know a recipe that uses sweet potato instead of cheese and it's soooo good.

I use cook my ramen noodles in the bowl I would eat them out of

Seems pretty normal, just pour the kettle into the bowl…

stove

Oh, oh no…

I would eat out of the pot instead. Now Im refined and I microwave the bowl of water to heat it up, once its close to boiling, drop the noodles in and put a lid on it to lock in the steam. Wait 5 minutes and were good to go.

My younger one learned this lesson very dramatically when a glass measuring cup full of ramen blew up on the stovetop! No one got hurt, so it was a good lesson

I have to admit that no one ever said not to do that: it seems so fundamental. But even stuff that seems obvious have to be learned somehow

That's great! I am impressed the bowls survived.

Even a pot shouldn't be the first thing that comes to your mind. It should be an electric kettle. Or are you from the US where you can't use electric kettles (efficiently) cos ur shitty electrical grid runs only on 120V and therefore it takes ages to boil the water lol

Right? You do stupid once and get publicly shamed.

"Hey guys! I have a CRAZY idea! Let's put meat on the grates in the oven!" - Fun loving people millennial and older

Honestly, if you did this with the broiler, and put a pan on another oven rack under the meat to catch the drippings, it might work okay?

Agreed. School focuses too much on stem. It should be there to prepare you for life. Go to Uni if you want to advance in stem.

School should also teach other basics like taxes, finance and budgeting.

What is the EC part?

Pretty sure we still do cooking and "how to operate a kitchen" classes here in northern Europe. In Denmark it's "hjemkundskab" - basically "skills for homekeeping"

Finances not so much though, that should be a class on its own

Many of us were taught how to be a functional human being by our parents and/or guardians.

If you whip it up as it's cooling, I can see how that would turn into something mousse-like.

At my work we used to sell ramen bowls, where all the ingredients were individually wrapped inside a plastic bowl and all you had to do was open everything up, put it all in the bowl, and add hot water. Well, the prep instructions never mentioned removing everything from its individual packaging, and I had a customer complain about it. He said we really need to add “remove ingredients from their packaging” at the start because his son is cooking on his own now and is too stupid to figure it out, and would try adding boiling water to the plastic wrapped ingredients.

hey, some ready meals use containers you need to cook the food in.

If youre talking about frozen pizzas, many of them to tell you to put it right in the rack.

That's how you're supposed to cook pizza if you don't have a perforated pizza pan or a pizza stone. No one wants a soggybottompizza. Well some people might and they are psychopaths

There are pizza trays you can use for the oven. They're pretty cheap too.

Yeah this is where most of the mess at the bottom of my oven come from. The pizza is noticeably better that way so I’ll deal with the occasional stray pepperoni

Although cast iron works really well for home made pizza

I don't know if homemade pizza is any different, but I get very nice crispy crusts with a tray. Store-bought frozen pizza goes directly on the rack here only because they don't fit on my trays.

That's a cookie sheet. It's for cookies. Duh.

Mom cooks while he games in his room

Yeah this is a nice line of thinking but I disagree. Why would a kid pay attention before the food was ready. Even before the internet, we always found better things to do.

The bigger question is did the parents not involve their kids in the food preparation at any point? They should be part of it from a young age, helping to the extent they’re able, to start developing this knowledge.

I wrote above about my younger kid exploding a glass measuring cup on the stovetop, but that was because it was the first time we let him do it unsupervised after he had succeeded repeatedly with our help … I don’t remember how little he was at the time, whether that was middle school or before. The point was we involved him, he learned a few things, and still needed a dramatic lesson

every year at my middle school. I think they had it split up like home ec for the first two semesters and health for the last two, or vice versa. It's been a while, but I know we had a different main subject each year. like sixth grade was sewing and learning basic nutrition, seventh grade was basic cooking/cleaning/laundry, eighth grade a little more advanced cooking as we were trusted with more tools and techniques.

i also took another home ec style class as a senior in high school because... easy A and free food lol

Back in middle school, 1hr a day for a semester. But you had to choose between home ec. and wood shop. Most people, even the girls, picked wood shop since it wasn't much more than how to microwave & sew.

In 10th grade, I was put into home ec for some reason. I think i need a credit or something. I was the only boy in the class and the teacher was also the sex ed teacher. I spent 1.5 hours 3 days a week listening to things like how to insert tampons, or makeup tips and hair care, or The Pill, or whatever things the teacher felt like that day. It was an awful class that almost always devolved into an extremely loud chatty room with all the girls just girl talking. We never cooked anything. Though to be fair, the teacher did talk about things like balancing checkbooks, healthy relationship dynamics and other normal things on occasion, but very rarely.

We had the option for home ec. Never took it. Took sex ed instead.

I think we had it for about 3 months of a single grade in middle school, maybe once a week. We rolled out a ton of cookie dough in the shape of a pizza, put candy on top and called it cookie dough pizza, then said "To hell with learning how to cook" and spent the reminder of our time back in the classroom, sewing and stuffing fuzzy little American footballs. With all of two things done, one of which just required opening packaging and squishing the dough a bit, we had nothing else lined up for the rest of the year, and never did home ec again once we left for summer vacation. At peak boredom, towards the end of the school year, it became something of a game for the boys in the class to see how much of their fuzzy football they could sew to their hands before the teacher noticed and made them undo it.

I didn't get home ec, but I had a life skills class. It was about half budgeting and half cooking. And it was actually shockingly in depth, I remember we made donuts and stromboli from scratch. But, each recipe you only got one of a few roles in so the person frying the donuts didn't learn to make the dough, etc. While the recipes were good and cheap, they weren't really the sort of everyday meals that would have been better.

Do you mean coddled?

Definitely could be different for OP but I grew up in a place where almost no one had an oven in the kitchen so I did have to learn how (admittedly not difficult to learn)

So, why were they dumping all of that food?

No, some people are too stupid. This dude never paid a single damn attention at home, clearly, and there’s a decent chance he thinks his mom will talk forever with nothing important to say even though this kid needs weeks of intensive training on how to be a sorta functioning adult.

Some people need to be shamed.

The amount of photos i have seen of frozen pizzas 'melting’ through the oven racks when people cook without a tray makes me beleive 100% this is real.

Yeah its not even a bad thing to do as long as you have a tray for the juices and you rub oil on the meat so it doesn't stick to the grill.

Some people are just assholes.

Right, older generations never made mistakes they would learn from!

The leaded gas generation failed them, yes.

I vote you an idiot.