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It's not a "cheat sheet", and is rather too big to stick to your fridge, but I highly recommend the book The Flavor Bible, which is an encyclopedia of exactly these associations. What ingredients does any particular ingredient go with? How do you cook it? Absolutely terrific book!

This is a really difficult topic to approach, and I think the only reliable way to identify flavours is through years and years of practice using those flavours in your cooking. To start with, I think the easiest thing to do would be to understand the different types of flavours. Those are: Sweet Everybody knows this one. Sweet is the taste of sugar, ...

One thing that my mother suggested to me when I first started getting interested in learning to cook beyond blindly following a recipe was that I try making scrambled eggs with one single spice in them to see how that flavor affects the taste of something I know well. It's actually a pretty good way to train your tastebuds to understand what flavor a ...

In addition to the other sources people have offered, I'd recommend watching Good Eats. You can find it on Food Network, Hulu, and YouTube. Update: Hulu appears to now offer full shows, even if only a few at a time.

Like many crafts which originated in Japan, their sushi training more or less creates sushi artisans. If you just want to make a snack, you'll have plenty of ability given a basic review of techniques. You should focus your learning on understanding food-safety, getting the rice right, and making the roll not fall apart. The rest is just levels of mastery ...

Learning through repertoire is a good way to build standard skills in nearly every discipline. If what you want is to be able to create a variety of good meals then cooking out of books will serve you well. That isn't to say that the book you choose doesn't matter, of course it does! A book full of accurate facts and procedures does not a good teacher make. ...

First, trust your nose. Smell the food you're cooking. Open the spice and sniff above it (but not too close, and don't sneeze!). If they smell good together, they usually taste good together. If you're working with products you can't taste test (like raw meat), either wait until the food is cooked to season, or be very conservative in your early experiments. ...

The best dish that I can think of to start out with is soup. You get a whole realm of ideas from this and cooking soup opens the doors to other dishes that involve reductions. Your knife skills will improved because your chopping all the vegetables and learning basic techniques. You also will get different shapes and sizes to test your skills on.

There a several types of cooking. I recommend picking one type to start learning, then branching out as you get more comfortable. This is especially helpful if you don't have access to a kitchen full of every conceivable piece cooking equipment. Types: Baking (breads, many desserts, casseroles, pizza), Roasting/Broiling (chickens, turkeys, pot roasts, ...

You could certainly get a cookbook of side dishes and learn some new favourites, but what might be more useful is a book that teaches you about flavour combinations and menu planning. I would suggest Culinary Artistry as one such book. It's not about specific recipes (you can find those elsewhere or make them up), but rather it addresses the kind of skill ...

To piggyback on Tim Gilbert's answer, my wife will actually open two spice jars and hold one up to each nostril at the same time, to see if they smell like they would go together. More often than not, she picks out good combinations. Since there have been some great comprehensive links I don't think I have much more to add to your specific question about ...

I have one of the Betty Crocker books which dedicates several pages in the back to exactly this. I highly recommend getting something like this. Here are a few good ones online also: http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/yf/foods/he198w.htm http://www.joyofbaking.com/IngredientSubstitution.html http://lancaster.unl.edu/food/ciqsubs.shtml

Books can get you a long way, but they can never become a teacher. Cooking is not just something you need to know about, it's a craft that you have to practice. A teacher can Spot flaws in techniques. Judge the result based on years of experience. Give you the tips and trick that you need. So while you can learn from a book, getting to a high lever will ...

I disagree somewhat with the advice that you 'start with the basics' in terms of technical knowledge, or consult particular books or references. The only way to become a good cook is by cooking as much as you can, and doing it 'mindfully'. Look, feel, listen, smell, and above all taste - your ingredients before you purchase them, as you prep them, and while ...

Several approaches, all complimentary: Cook. Start with your favorite dishes. Play with them. Eat. Go to new restaurants, read menus closely, explore different cuisines. Learn about food. Go shopping. Read labels. Take a tour of the entire market and see what's there. Go to a farmer's market. Smell the food. Find out what makes ingredients ripe ...

I make sushi with friends about once a month, and it's not too difficult. The thing that took us the longest to get right was the rice, and we got that down after a few tries. It'll probably take a while to figure out the amount of vinegar you like in it, and how long to leave the seaweed in it while it's cooking. For nigiri, I've got a little plexiglass ...

Keep in mind that whipping cream or egg whites by hand may take longer than you expect. That said, there is a proper way to whisk egg whites, and it is quite likely that taking breaks due to your fatigue is interfering. See this site for detailed instructions. In particular, see below for an excerpt on one possible problem (although there are numerous ...

I don't think there are any shortcuts to trying the individual spices. If you only want to figure out that Indian dish, you could practice with just the typical range of Indian spices. It is often helpful to close your eyes while tasting and try to really imprint the flavor in your mind, and associate with the name and appearance of the food you are tasting. ...

Cooks Illustrated has a couple of great videos (subscription, or free trial, required). Basic Knife Skills More Basic Knife Skills

To be a professional, yes there are schools in Japan that take several years to complete including lengthy apprenticeship requirements. That said, I've taken a 3 hour sushi class and I can make sushi rice, maki, nigiri, and hand rolls just fine. They sometimes lack a little in the appearance department though.

I second Harlan's recommendation for the The Flavor Bible. And a blatent plug here: http://www.spicesherpa.com is a site and blog dedicated to providing small bits of fun spice information and pairing guides. :-) For example, I just released a post on 10 Awesome Coriander Combinations. It's a way to get learn about spices, flavor combinations a little bit ...

Experiment. Experiment, experiment, experiment, experiment! Recipes and cheat-sheets can give ideas and guide your experimenting, but nothing else will help you really get to know the tastes of the spices and develop your olfactory imagination. Even experiments that fail can be well worthwhile. Once when I was camping, the lid of a pepper container fell ...

I learned how to cook from a book, and I could barely make toast when I started. While cooking classes can be very useful, I'd suggest nothing more than supplementing your own journey with them. If you cook out of a good book 7 nights a week, you'll learn quickly. My recomendation would be The Best Recipe. The advantage of this book is that there is a ...

To continue with smell: much of the flavor of food is the combination of tastebud sensation (sweet/sour/etc mentioned previously) and the fragrance of the ingredients. Many herbs have tiny bit of bitter or sweet, or even a little sour perhaps, but they have radically different fragrances. Something you can do is close your eyes and sniff herbs and spices ...

I highly recommend the book, "Taste What You're Missing" by Barb Stuckey. She's a 'supertaster' and a professional taster, and her book includes suggestions for testing and improving taste bud tastes (salt, bitter, umami, etc.) at the end of each chapter. She also covers how we taste and why some of us taste things differently than others. Lots of great ...

Make meat "not the main feature". Having it as the main feature is a piece of history when meat was the most expensive part of the meal, and it also seems to have become an unhealthy piece of history. Meat is significantly cheaper nowadays, so you can spend more on other things and make them the main part of the meal, not just side dishes. It is a mental ...

With the possible exception of knife technique, I don't think a teacher is necessary. What you need is curiousity and willingness to play around in the kitchen. Aside from that, the occasional book, internet search or chat with someone more experienced is a great way to learn. At heart, cooking is something you learn by doing, not by reading or by ...

I would recommend getting the Better Homes and Garden cookbook. Its been out forever and that is the book that both my mom and I keep coming back to. Each section starts of helping you so the meat section tells you what each section of each animal is called, the canning section tells you how to can, etc. So it tells you what to do and has awesome recipes. ...

I always recommend Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. In addition to providing good recipes that are easy to comprehend, Bittman has pages in every section devoted to technique. Everything from how to properly chop an onion to diagrams showing where the different cuts of meat come from on an animal. The recipes do, in fact, encompass a little bit of ...