When you’re busy with essays, homework and final projects, sometimes you forget that there are great life skills that most schools do not teach. One of them is cooking. Whether it’s to cut down costs, to impress a date or just for your own amusement, cooking is something you’ll always be glad you learned.

It’s easy to start – just pick a simple meal that you like. It can be anything: soup, spaghetti, mashed potatoes, eggs… You already know how to make a sandwich, but grilling some of the ingredients can make it extra tasty and once you know how to do it, it won’t take very long. If you’re feeling ambitious, pick your favourite meal and see if you can make it. Ask people for help. Someone in your family will probably love to give you a few tips and walk you through some recipes. If not, pick up a cookbook or find a recipe on the internet. It can be hard at first, but it can also be a lot of fun if you’re willing to learn.

Whether you’re moving out for college this fall or you’ll be at home for another few years, now is a great time to start cooking. When you get to college, it’s expensive to eat out even if it’s just one meal a day. You can stay home and make Kraft Dinner all the time, but that gets old pretty fast. You’ll save so much money and feel a lot better if you learn to make things yourself. Once you know how to make a few meals, you’ll start to pick up some general techniques and you can start to substitute things and add the spices that you like. Before too long, you’ll start to have your own cooking style and specialties.

If your cooking style involves more than peanut butter sandwiches, it will be a really great tool for impressing people. If you start dating someone who comes over to your house, think how stunned they’ll be with a casserole or a homemade soup or whatever else you want to make. And it doesn’t just work for dates! Every time you have a party, you can buy a bag of tortilla chips and some canned salsa or you can make your own salsa and guacamole. There’s nothing wrong with canned salsa, but it’s a great feeling to have people eating and complimenting something you’ve prepared yourself.

The best reason of all to learn to cook is that it can be a lot of fun! You might set off the fire alarm once or twice and that’s always stressful, but it will be worth it. It’s easier to get going now when you have the time to learn than to get thrown into an apartment one day with a pan and no idea what to do with it. So just start making something you like. Offer to barbeque for your family or work on perfecting a batch of cookies. Once you start to cook, you can only get better!