I love to cook as well and get a lot of joy from feeding people. So I understand where Antares is coming from.
It's ethereal, it puts us on a loftier plain, and truly separates us from every other species on Earth. It's the only art form that stimulates every one of our five senses. I truly feel sadness for anyone who hasn't learned how to cook. Froham mentioned Anton Ego from
Ratatouille, and to quote from that film again, Gusteau's mantra
"Anyone can cook", is not just a throw away piece of dialog. All it takes is a little understanding of the science of heat and what it does to your ingredients, alongside a little experimentation with herbs and spices and ANYONE CAN COOK.
I can't really cook. I mean, I can if I need to, but food has always just been something I've appreciated. My grandfather was a chef, so that side of the family is well fed, and my dad has always had a knack for cooking. If I was wealthy you can bet I'd be much more a food connoisseur than a cinephile. There is nothing in this world that can make me feel more alive than a well cooked meal with the right amount of love thrown in.
No one is born an Emeril Legasse or a Wolfgang Puck, even they started out with zero knowledge. To become a good cook, you have to be willing to experiment with basic ingredients and different spices, and then be willing to eat it. The only way to become good at cooking is to make mistakes and learn from them. I started out helping my mother when she was making the family meal. She would let me pour in the spices and would tell me when I had put in enough. One time, when I was eight, she was making a tomato sauce and I was putting in red pepper flake. She went looking for something in a drawer, and I kept shaking the container. Finally, I said,
"Is this enough?", she looked in the pot and saw the pile of pepper and screamed
"Stop!" She got a good amount of it out, but that night we all ate extremely spicy spaghetti. But I learned what a powerful spice red pepper flake was, and have never made that mistake again.
If you really want to learn, then find a good cooking channel on YouTube. Here's a couple that I like...
http://www.youtube.com/user/foodwishesIf you want to learn Asian...
http://www.youtube.com/user/ltkman