You can turn your vested interest into a hobby with our top tips for beginner cooks, writers, collectors and more.
If you’re looking for a fresh approach to life then you’re probably due for a new hobby to dig your hands into
Not only can they serve as excellent icebreakers, but hobbies also serve as venues for meeting people, be it at salsa lessons or Star Trek conventions.
So develop your ideas with our beginners guides.
Improve Your Cooking
A beginner’s guide to the culinary basics.
What has TV cookery come to? Forget television/ celebrity chefs and go online. Producers’ obsession with celebrity, gimmickry and fast-paced editing have made telly just about the worst place for beginners and improvers to learn anything.
But don’t hang up your apron just yet; there are websites that explain cooking techniques and ingredients in-depth at a sensible pace that today’s television executives would deem ‘boring’. Head to the superb Masterclass and learn from the likes of Thomas Keller, Gordon Ramsey and Yotam Ottolenghi.
Buy good ingredients
It’s a culinary cliché, but it’s true – if you buy dreary ingredients, you have to work hard to make them taste good; if you buy great ingredients, you can do the bare minimum.
Take a pavé rump steak from grass-fed beef, fry it for a couple of minutes each side, let it rest – Michelin stars. Take cheap supermarket braising steak, fry for a couple of minutes each side, serve immediately – Michelin tyres.
Follow the recipe and pay attention
If a professional recipe writer is telling you to do something, it’s usually for your own good. This is particularly true for baking and desserts, where results are based on chemical reactions and the incorporation of air, rather than simply the application of heat, but it applies to fairly simple tasks too.
Let’s say you’re toasting pine nuts – the recipe says to stir them constantly and transfer them to a bowl as soon as they’re done. That’s because you want the pine nuts to brown evenly and if they’re left in the pan, they’ll continue cooking in the residual heat even if you turn the stove off.
Instead you leave them in the pan while you take that call from your mother. Then you have to open a window, bin the burned pine nuts and find some more.
Take a class or four
If you’re a beginner or serious about improving, don’t bother with demonstration classes; yes, they are often cheaper, but you’ll come away with little more than inspiration.
Instead go for hands-on classes with spacious, well-equipped facilities, and look for those with a high teacher-to-student ratio.
We recommend Rosalind Rathouse’s Cookery School at Little Portland Street – cookeryschool.co.uk in London and Leith’s Beginners Cookery Skills evening classes – leiths.com. Outside London there is Ashburton Cookery School in Devon, the School of Artisan Food in Nottingham, Northcote Cookery School in Lancashire. Google is your friend here, there are many schools in all corners of the the UK offering courses from beginner to professional standard.
Begin a stamp collection
With artists such as Steve McQueen and Jimmy Cauty designing anti-war stamps, this deceptively tame hobby has rarely seemed so controversial.
Begin with a small collection and soon you will be a master philatelist. Get started with Warwick & Warwick, a great site for beginners with advice on displaying and valuing your collection.
Indulge in retail therapy at Stanley Gibbons, where you can also register your stamps online. Finally, if you’re really serious, you can work towards joining The Royal Philatelic Society London – RPSL.org.uk. Established in 1860, it is the oldest philatelic society in the world.
Novel writing
Follow the steps below to produce your first masterpiece.
Write every day
Even if just for five minutes, write every day. A page a day is a novel in a year. A thousand words a day is two novels the length of War and Peace. In other words – don’t get it right, get it written.
Find a reader
Find a constructive – but candid – reader for your book. Someone whose taste you trust who isn’t related to you, who will tell you the truth. Try to avoid punching them when they deliver bad news.
Be a ruthless editor
When you start editing, be ruthless, particularly when it comes to the bits you like the most. Slash and burn. Cutting may be the most creative bit of the whole novel-writing process.
Write what you don’t know
Making stuff up is a major part of a fiction writer’s job.
Attend an Creative Writing course
They really work. Time spent working with other writers without worrying about everyday concerns such as children, spouses, work or the internet will push you on faster and further than you ever thought possible. Check out Meetup for a global community of like-minded people exploring ways to express their writing skills. For more structured learning there are some fantastic courses on Future Learn and Open University.
Learn Origami
Get technical and creative with the ancient art of paper folding, which can conjure up anything from a hungry bat to a Jedi knight. The British Origami Society – britishorigami.org has practical tips, contacts for supplies, and more than 700 members worldwide.
Learn An Instrument
The inside track on adding strange strings to your bow.
Uilleann Pipes
A kind of proto-bagpipes, these customisable tubular clusters are ideal for the ‘Scrapheap Challenge‘ aficionado.
It’s one of the more sociable instruments – the best way to pick up the basics is to join a local ceilidh band playing penny whistle, before graduating to the full uilleann pipe set later on.
See Pipers.ie for some tutorial videos and a guide to buying your perfect pipes.
Ukulele
The ukulele is London’s fastest-growing instrument – in terms of number of users. If you’d like to be part of ukemania, head to popular East End uke epicentre The Duke of Uke.
Not only will you be able to find your perfect pygmy guitar, you can also take part in the weekly workshops to sharpen your ukuleleing skills for free. See also Ukulele Tricks.
Bouzouki
Perhaps you’d like to learn a sophisticated ethnomusicological instrument, while at the same time retaining street cred. In that case, you want to take up the bouzouki.
This mandolin-style instrument is the mainstay of rebetika, the Greek equivalent of gangsta rap. For more information visit the School of Greek Bouzouki website st-panteleimon.org.
Didgeridoo
You might think that learning to play the didgeridoo is easy, well, it is. You basically just do an impression of someone playing a didgeridoo down an actual didgeridoo and the rest takes care of itself.
To learn more visit the Aboriginal Arts area in Stratford at aboriginalarts.co.uk for lessons at £20 per hour.
Be disciplined
When you’re learning new skills be prepared to try, try and try again.
Involving other people is a great way of staying motivated in your new hobby. Find out if there is any kind of local or national organisation. Your parents could contact them to see if a group meets up near you.
If you enjoyed Taking up a hobby – creative ideas for mature minds, you’ll find more hobby tips on our Home and Lifestyle channel.
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