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I highly recommend subscribing to a meal delivery kit for a few weeks, I think they’re fantastic for beginners. Reasons:
- Grocery shopping and ingredient portioning is already done for you, allowing you to focus on the cooking
- Ability to try new ingredients without committing to buying a full quantity of the ingredient. It sucks when you buy a specific sauce for a new recipe you want to try, only to realize you’re never going to want to use it again.
- Enough choices in recipes but not an overwhelming amount; there are so many recipes and resources online that that’s all you need to learn, but it can be overwhelming and hard to know where to start
- Recipes are generally standardized, well-tested, and don’t require special equipment or advanced techniques
I definitely don’t recommend doing this long term because it starts to get repetitive and is ultimately more expensive than doing your own shopping and planning, but it removes quite a few barriers to entry. Home Chef was the one I enjoyed the most personally but Blue Apron is also reliable and liked by many. Once you are comfortable with the basics you can really just search any recipe you’re interested in and just go for it; follow your interests and the skills will come with experience.
I'm going to second this idea having used a couple meal prep services in the past.
Similar idea to this is to look at CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in your area. Each are a bit different but the ideal would be one where you can do a smaller share that will let you get a wide variety of produce in weekly pickups. I'm subscribed to one this summer I'm quite liking. Each week it's a different variety of fruit and veggies with recipe recommendations. They give out pack lists in advance so you can do your shopping to make sure you have what you need for cooking (because it doesn't give you everything like a meal kit).
The big thing is it forces you to figure things out and just try things to a greater degree than meal kits in my opinion. Like recently summer squash and zucchinis were in season so I ended up cut them up together and throwing them in butter and oil really lazily due to some random recipe suggestion I found. Had too much zucchini left over so tried out zoodles which is surprisingly trivial. I've even now done quick pickling because they gave me so many fucking mini-cucumbers, which also is surpringly easy as long as you have glass jars. I liked that especially as it gives me much more of a sense that I actually made something VS something immediately eaten.
It's only about a year ago I started making any attempts at cooking, having the CSA has done a lot more for pushing me into the deep end than anything else. I tried meal kits in the past and it never really stuck with me or felt less overwhelming. Starting from an ingredient just seems to click more for me, but it'll definitely depend on what is it about cooking that's a problem for you. For me I knew the basic mechanics and have no problem grocery shopping but how ingredients combine and why was a mystery that following a complex recipe roboticly didn't help with.
I know not everyone has the same availability for access to local farms and it can be an upfront cost that's difficult for people. But if you look around you might be surprised what's available, some farms will really go out of their way to make things convenient since CSA can be a huge way for them to stay in operation. And you get a lot of the freshest food possible over the course of months.