My my mother-in-law comes from Malta (as does my husband). Here are a few things I learned from my mother-in-law about cooking.
1.) Fried eggs on a sandwich make a great picnic lunch
2.) Learning to cook (at least a few) meals without a recipe will save you massive amounts of time and frustration, and will help you learn how to adjust other recipes to your liking.
3) Make dinner preparation easier by starting to cook early in the afternoon. Cut up potatoes and put them in a bowl of water — add a clove of garlic sliced in quarters to really make them yummy. Cut up veggies and put them in water (if they will keep). Make soups or salads ahead of time so they only have to be served at dinner time.
4.) Adding some cut up garlic cloves to boiling veggies gives them a great taste.
5.) There is liking to cook and there is LOVING to cook. My mother-in-law LOVES to cook. It can reach over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in a Maltese summer where most people don’t have air conditioning and she is still in the kitchen cooking soup. I like to cook, but I can guarantee that my family would be eating sandwiches and cereal all summer if I had to cook in that heat.
6.) You can make baby food from scratch. This idea had never occurred to me until she mentioned in passing that she was making my niece’s baby food. I did it for my son. It wasn’t that much work, it got him used to eating “normal” food, and it saved us a lot of money.
I like cooking most things from scratch with minimally processed foods, so for the most part the most processed food you will see in any of the recipes is canned or frozen food.