Do you have significant money? If yes, I always struggled to figure out how to cook/bake until I got a Thermomix. It’s not just the “it’s able to chop / simmer / steam / etc”, it’s the recipe ecosystem around it, and how that integrates with the machine seamlessly.

Basically: I select in the app some recipes I feel able to tackle, it adds the ingredients to a shopping list so I go buy the right groceries (which I also didn’t ever use to do), then it tells me how much of what to put in at what time and with what settings, and voilà! Basically it’s the fact that it does the thinking for me.

Caveats:

• It’s expensive. Like, no joke expensive. There’s no good excuse for how expensive it is. I only got it because I went at a friend’s place for brunch, and he did everything with it and I was super impressed, and he convinced me; and of course because I’m comfortable money-wise. I don’t regret buying it at all, but damn.

• It does almost everything, but not strictly everything. I used to be a “if it’s not 100% feasible with the one Thermomix machine, it’s not a recipe for me” kind of guy; but that turned out to be a bit limiting. Eventually I took the leap and started doing Thermomix recipes that finish in an oven or on a pan, and yeah, there’s a lot more I can do now. But I would not have been able to take that leap a year ago, and now that I’m used to the rest of it, it ended up being pretty painless now.

• If your goal is to start cooking, obviously there are simpler (and cheaper) solutions. But I tried a few other things and there was too much to ramp up on that felt daunting, and nothing motivated me enough to get through that ramp up, this is the one that worked for me, and now I can’t stop using it all the time. It’s a lot of fun. But yeah, there are different ways to climb that hill, and you can think of this as just the luxury path, and there are a lot of other paths.