You can self-teach. I guess it depends on your confidence with knives, but watch videos of how to do knife work, and don't go totally overboard trying to chop as fast as a professional chef, as fingers are valuable. Do the motion the way they do it, but slowly enough to be sure you will not hurt yourself. As you gain practice, you may feel comfortable naturally speeding up.
As for cooking and baking. Look up recipe on the internet. Do exactly what the recipe says. Do you not know what a step means or how to do it? Google it, watch videos, try to follow the directions as precisely as possible, and see if the result is any good. If the recipe is good and you follow the directions, you'll get something good. Cooking, especially baking, is like science, just follow the directions, and you can get close to the desired outcome.
If you're kind of a natural you can learn to spot problems with recipes before you make them, or improvise your own flavors and make them better, if you're not, that's ok. There are a lot of techniques you can learn but dipping your toes into cooking is not that hard, and a non professional can make excellent meals, it just takes more time. If you find a big passion for it then there's a whole world of resources about how to do things out there :)
Look to see if there are food or cooking clubs in your area -- a lot of times members will have information classes or get togethers.
I also had a great experience taking some classes in turkish cooking at a turkish cultural center where I used to live. Here's a link if you live near west haven ct:
http://turkishculturalcenterct.com/turkish-cooking-classes-go-ahead-full-speed/
I grabbed a 3 year old item because that's me rolling out some bread dough in the picture, but they still do these.
If you live anywhere near a decent sized city or college town, ...
What can I purchase with $100 that will be the best thing I can buy to make my life better?
I've decided to budget some regular money to improving my life each month. I'd like to start with low hanging fruit for obvious reasons - but when I sat down to think of improvements, I found myself thinking of the same old things I'd already been planning to do anyway... and I'd like out of that rut.
Constraints/more info:
Background:
This is a question I recently posed to my local Less Wrong group and we came up with a few good ideas, so I thought I'd share the discussion with the wider community and see what we can come up with. I'll add the list we came up with later on in the comments...
It'd be great to have a repository of low-hanging fruit for things that can be solved with (relatively affordable) amounts of money. I'd personally like to go through the list - look at candidates that sound like they'd be really useful to me and then make a prioritised list of what to work on first.