My two are:
Making sourdough. I personally always heard like this weird almost mysticism around making it. But I bought a $7 starter from a bakery store, and using just stuff in my kitchen and cheap bread flour I’ve been eating fresh sourdough every day and been super happy with it. Some loafs aren’t super consistent because I don’t have like temperature controlled box or anything. But they’ve all been tasty.
Drawing. I’m by no means an artist, but I always felt like people who were good at drawing were like on a different level. But I buckled down and every day for a month I tried drawing my favorite anime character following an online guide. So just 30 minutes every day. The first one was so bad I almost gave up, but I was in love with the last one and made me realize that like… yeah it really is just practice. Years and years of it to be good at drawing things consistently, quickly, and a variety of things. But I had fun and got something I enjoyed much faster than I expected. So if you want to learn to draw, I would recommend just trying to draw something you really like following a guide and just try it once a day until you are happy with the result.
Cooking. A lot of really delicious foods have extremely simple recipes and as an amateur you have time on your side. You don’t have to rush anything for most recipes. A lot of times I measure and cut everything before I even turn on the stove and this makes cooking super easy. Sure it takes a while to cook when you are just starting out but you can just go at your own pace. I really feel like anyone can cook almost anything. You don’t even need fancy tools. I got started with a $12 wok and a wooden spatula. These days there’s a huge amount of resources to teach you how to make just about everything. It’s also really rewarding since you get to eat what you make and you get to make things you want to eat. Needless to say it’s also a very important skill.
Cooking is much easier than it looks. Recipes are just suggestions and after looking at enough of them the commonalities to play around with it
Except baking. Unless you exactly know what each ingredient does.
Never baking. That is different from cooking
Baking is about ratios. You absolutely can mess around with baking even if you don’t really know what to do, you just can’t mess up the ratios - and I mean liquids/wet ingredients, dry ingredients like flour, then eggs and of course the important baking soda/powder.
Like regular cooking, once you get a good feel, you can do a lot.
It won’t let you make your own recipe, though. That does take a level of knowledge above just substituting or changing an ingredient or two.
Gathering, cutting, measuring all the ingredients before cooking is actually a very well regarded French method called mis en place so you’re basically already classically trained 😜