For reasons I realise I don't know[1], the primary meaning of "cook" for me is to make nontrivial changes to food by means of heat. (Consider the word "uncooked" as applied e.g. to meat and eggs.) So, for me, scrambling eggs counts as "cooking" even though it's not exactly a difficult task. Other forms of food preparation shade gradually from not-cooking to cooking as the effort expended and the extent to which the food gets transformed increase. So putting together a sandwich or a simple salad isn't (usually) "cooking"; grilling cheese on toast just barely is because heat is involved; making (say) ice cream is just barely "cooking" even if you do it without making a custard, because you're doing something quite nontrivial to the ingredients (I guess applying cold is a bit like applying heat); etc.
[1] It looks as if the OED largely agrees (most of the senses it lists explicitly or implicitly give preference to the application of heat) and also doesn't really know why (it says "cook", v., is derived from "cook", n., and says nothing more about the etymology of the former; the latter has always meant anyone whose job is preparing food, without any particular preference to doing so by applying heat).
Interesting! I realized now that I consider ice cream making cooking, because it is a higher skilled thing. My wife makes several no-heat cakes and I consider it cooking.
My mental image of cooking is stirring something with a wooden spoon, a something made from multiple ingredients. Probably because my ethnic culture is sauce-oriented.
I should also add that in my native language to cook and to boil are the same words and I never fully grasped the difference in English. So I would cook a soup but roast a chicken.
This is an extension of a comment I made that I can't find and also a request for examples. It seems plausible that, when giving advice, many people optimize for deepness or punchiness of the advice rather than for actual practical value. There may be good reasons to do this - e.g. advice that sounds deep or punchy might be more likely to be listened to - but as a corollary, there could be valuable advice that people generally don't give because it doesn't sound deep or punchy. Let's call this boring advice.
An example that's been discussed on LW several times is "make checklists." Checklists are great. We should totally make checklists. But "make checklists" is not a deep or punchy thing to say. Other examples include "google things" and "exercise."
I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of boring advice. If you can, provide evidence and/or a plausible argument that your boring advice actually is useful, but I would prefer that you err on the side of boring but not necessarily useful in the name of more thoroughly searching a plausibly under-searched part of advicespace.
Upvotes on advice posted in this thread should be based on your estimate of the usefulness of the advice; in particular, please do not vote up advice just because it sounds deep or punchy.