An article in the Boston Globe last spring cited “Cooking 101: Three recipes every college student — in fact, everybody — should know”: Chocolate chip cookies, quick tomato sauce, and Caesar salad. I’d like to extend this list to include it, not only as cooking class options for in home cooking Personal Chef Service, but also to try to train my eldest son, who will, in fact, be a college student sooner than I like to admit (and he’s useless at the stove).

A couple of years ago, I did a crash course of 10 Go-To Recipes for a client. She feeds a teenage boy, a preschool girl, and a meat-loving, vegetable-hating husband. We tried to hide veggies wherever we could. Her “necessities” were:

1. Turkey dinner (with mashed potatoes and gravy)
   
2. Chicken (or turkey) pot pie (made with the leftover turkey from the first lesson)
   
3. Chili
   
4. Beef stew
   
5. Baked haddock
   
6. Fettucine Alfredo with shrimp (or chicken or whatever)
   
7. Chicken (or shrimp or pork or whatever) stir fry
   
8. Macaroni and cheese
   
9. Healthier chicken fingers and fries
   
10. Steak au jus
    
11. Spaghetti and meatballs

I forget how it happened that she got the 11th lesson, but it was so satisfying to me when she raved about having been able to make chili or beef stew or a Thanksgiving turkey for her family.

Another client was a newly engaged woman. She and her fiancée try to eat healthy, and she was interested in being able to recreate things they typically order out. She wanted:

1. Chicken breasts stuffed with asiago and asparagus
2. Chicken pot pie (everyone seems to love this one)
3. Barbecue chicken in the crockpot (she wanted more crockpot recipes in her arsenal)
4. Penne a la vodka
5. Wild rice salad
6. Beef stroganoff (their guilty pleasure)

So, what would you include in your list of must-know recipes?

What are your basic go-to recipes, the ones you can remember the ingredients to, so you can pick them up when you’re running through the grocery store at 5:30 pm, without a list?

What was the first thing you felt you had to learn to cook?