Iv gota cook!

What are you good at cooking? Can you follow a recipe, or do you prefer to improvise? Does anyone you are cooking for have any food allergies, religious dietary requirements or strong food preferences?

Haha, iv never really cooked anything befor. So, probley a reciepe would be best, and as for all the other things, no.

Ah, then you want to cook pasta. It's easy (the directions are on the box), it fills up a lot of people and it's inexpensive. You can buy a decent refrigerated kind (Buitoni is one maker) and it tastes better and cooks even faster, but even good old dried pasta only takes about 15 minutes at the absolute most. Just boil lightly salted water in a large pot and toss the pasta in. If it's a long pasta like spaghetti or linguine, you may need to break it in two before fitting it in the pot. Let it boil a few minutes, longer if the pasta was dried when you got it as opposed to refrigerated. You want it al dente which is not completely soft. Just take a fork or a spoon, stick it in there and fish out a piece, and taste it after the pasta has gotten a chance to cook for a few minutes and soften. If you taste raw, crunchy pasta, or if you bite into the piece and it's white and dried inside, the pasta needs to cook for another minute or so. Once the pasta is done, drain it in a colander. If you don't have a colander, put the lid on the pot but leave a little space and, holding it tilted away from you, dump the water into the sink. Be careful as cooked pasta can slide out of the pot and end up down the sink if you're not careful. Be sure to use pot holders or oven mitts for this. It also gets very steamy so if you wear glasses like I do you'll get foggy lenses doing this.

For sauce, there are also refrigerated kinds, it depends what people like but alfredo sauce is somewhat heavy whereas a marinara or a primavera would be lighter. Sauce is cooked in a pot on the stove top, cook it until it bubbles, make sure to cut the heat then so that you don't get anything burned on the bottom. You can jazz it up a little by sprinkling in powdered garlic or oregano. Don't add salt as most sauces have some salt in them. Buitoni also makes sauce, so does Newman's Own, Ragu and a lot of other companies. It's really what you think will taste good and fits in your budget. Where I live, there's a supermarket brand, President's, and it's pretty tasty (I tend to make my own sauce but sometimes you just need to eat fast so I've got the jarred stuff at home, too).

You can provide a jar of grated parmesan cheese to go with the pasta. Kraft and 4C make this; I prefer 4C but it's a matter of taste. The pasta should be served hot in a large bowl or platter. Provide tongs if it's a long pasta like spaghetti or a fork and a tablespoon if it's anything else and people will serve themselves. The sauce should be kept separate as some people don't like sauce, so serve it in a bowl with a tablespoon. Also provide butter or margarine separate, with a spreader.

On the side, you can also have Italian bread, if you butter it and put garlic on that, you can cook it on a cookie sheet very briefly in a warm oven until it's toasted and -- voila! -- you've got garlic bread. Serve it on its own plate with a sharp knife to cut the bread.

You should also provide a salad. You can buy them in a sack in the grocery store and it's already washed. Just toss it into a bowl with some cherry tomatoes and baby carrots (these are also already cut and washed, you should wash the tomatoes but the carrots will be fine, so just dump them in and mix it around a bit). Buy a few different bottles of dressing like a ranch, a vinaigrette and maybe something like a French dressing and put them on the table, too. The salad can either be eaten on side plates or on the main plate with the pasta.

Provide drinks for people, or ask them to bring wine. Have water or soda for whoever may be driving.

For dessert, you can have a store-bought cake or cookies. Cookies allow you to have an assortment but cake usually looks nicer. It doesn't have to be a cake with icing or something written on it. Serve the cake on a plate with a sharp knife for cutting it. Cake servers are easiest but if you don't have one, a knife and a couple of forks can work. Keep in mind that even experienced people with a cake server can often really mangle cake serving, especially the first piece. So laugh about it. Cake and cookies should be served on little plates, if you don't have a lot of these you can wash salad plates before having dessert. Plus you'll need forks, of course.

This will be easy and will please most people. It's not the most elegant meal in the world but it gets the job done and it's not costly if that's a consideration. And, once you know how to do this, you can -- amazing! -- cook for yourself if you need to. Self-sufficiency in this area is a very cool thing.

Oops I just realize you wanted something new. Hmm. Pasta can still be kinda new if you use a different kind of sauce, maybe something with seafood.