Cooking cures obesity, facilitates bonding with our children and passes family culture down to future generations. Is it the answer to global warming, too?

Someone has surely made the argument. And yet fewer and fewer Americans are cooking. We have too little time and too much to do. We have grocery stores stocked with ready-made casseroles already bagged and ready for check-out. We have drive-through chicken tenders and, in cities, fleets of custom restaurant-delivery services.

Our history has taken us from three square meals made from scratch on the farm just a generation or two ago, to boxed mashed potatoes and frozen TV dinners zapped in the microwave, to — finally — UberEATS dialed up on a smartphone. Somewhere along the way, many of us forgot how to cook. But all is not lost: It’s not too late to learn.

Here’s the goal: Don’t just learn to follow recipes. Learn to cook without them. That’s key to weeknight cooking if you’re a parent. I love Julia Child. But following her tedious instructions is hard en famille, with kids playing, fighting, whining — or, heaven help me, “helping.”

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The first time I made a soufflé (bear with me; it’s just eggs and air), I followed “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” faithfully. I even passed over my stand mixer with the whisk attachment to whisk my egg whites by hand, just because Julia said I could.

She said a lot of things: The recipe is seven pages long. I figured out that first time, though, that making a soufflé involves a few simple techniques: making a béchamel sauce, beating egg whites, and folding to combine the two. It’s really simple. Now when I make a soufflé, I still pull out the book, but now I turn straight to the page with the chart that tells me the proportions of butter to flour to milk to eggs to cheese.

It’s the numbers I have to look up. I already know the techniques.

Experts suggest that when you’re learning to cook, you should focus on techniques, like making stir-fry, pasta or bread. Once these are mastered, they’re adaptable to different ingredients, said Elizabeth Winslow, a food writer and founder of Kitchen Underground, an Austin company that coordinates innovative cooking classes in meaningful locations. “Once you learn them, you can work with what you have.”

Master each technique as you learn it, whether it’s boiling pasta water, cooking an omelette or kneading bread dough that might be baked into a sandwich loaf, a pizza crust or calzones. If you want to get good at pie, said Winslow, “make a pie every week.” Soon, you won’t need a recipe to make a savory pot pie, individual hand pies or a fruit pie for a special dessert.

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Haley Peck is a chef and in-home cooking instructor trained in French cooking. “It feels like it could be really complex, but really it’s very simple building blocks,” she said. “For me, the base of most of the things I cook is a roux, which is equal parts flour to fat. It’s usually the base of most French sauces.”

Indeed, it’s the base of béchamel — that first ingredient in the soufflé that has become a Friday night tradition at my house. To my roux, I add milk, then egg yolks, cheese, salt and pepper, and maybe a little mustard and a shaving of nutmeg, if I remember it.

Meanwhile, egg whites whir in the stand mixer, eventually taking on air and standing tall. I slide a tray of frozen french fries into the oven just before I fold the whites into the sauce. The soufflé bakes while I open a bottle of wine, prep a green salad and remind a child to set the table.

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It wasn’t an easy meal the first time I fixed it. But each subsequent time I made it, I had to turn back to the cookbook to check the recipe less often. Now, after several months of near-weekly soufflés, I only reference the book once at the beginning of the process, to get my ingredient quantities and oven temperature. The cooking, itself, is a pleasure.

Best of all? It tastes really good when it’s done.

Beth Goulart Monson writes about food from her home in Austin, Texas.