I’ll go at the premise here, do you want to learn how to cook or make recipes? Either’s fine, honestly, just asking whether you wanna be able to whip up like a banger Spaghetti Bolognese or whether you want to integrate cooking into your life.

If the latter, pick a recipe, read it thoroughly and fully before you do anything else and look up what the weird words you don’t understand mean via Youtube Tutorials so you know what they want you doing, then prep all the stuff you need according to the recipe beforehand, then do the steps. If it’s not to your liking, pick a different one and have a go until you find one you like and stick with that. There’s one major pitfall to be aware of here, mostly to do with equipment, which is times given in recipe can be wildly off compared to your equipment, maybe whoever wrote it has industrial kitchen grade burners and you got the landlord special, maybe your pans are a bit out of whack and don’t conduct heat so good, so keep that in mind.

If the latter, after learning a few recipes you’ll probably want to go more into understanding cooking as opposed to following recipes so you know what you’re actually doing. Why you’re sautéeing onions, putting alcohol in a tomato sauce, stuff of this nature. For this I’d recommend nigh everything J Kenji López-Alt has done, as he offers explanations on why you’re doing it and the Flavour Bible which also offers helpful tips on how to make something out of “nothing” by teaching you tried-and-true combinations, why they work and how flavour works.