Cooking Myself Thin?

If anyone remembers, I got a Barnes & Noble gift card from work and used it to buy my Shantaram and Les Miserables books last month. Well, I finished it off recently with a cookbook. Aside from the overall necessity of needing to learn to cook, especially since I'm on my own, I have really started to like cooking, when I know what I'm doing or it's simple enough for me to figure it out. Combine that with my recent calorie counting, and naturally I would buy the below:



What I really like about it is all the info on good substitutes to make meals healthier or with less fat or sugar, etc, and that each recipe comes with the calorie count.

Well, I finally went through it today to mark recipes to start trying, and I ended up really discouraged by the end of it. I'm not sure why. I don't know if it was all the ingredients for even 1 dish (I can keep a pantry full of rice and vegetables and a few other sub-staples like soy sauce and honey, but what a bill I'd rack up going to buy cumin or thyme to just add a pinch). I mean, I've learned a few of my own quick dishes that I love that are easy enough, like steamed vegetables and rice with garlic salt and peanut sauce, but it would be nice to make something I'd be proud of or be able to serve to other people.

Cooking seems like such a task, so expensive, and needing so many things! If I cooked even one complete meal every day for a week, I feel like I would have to spend my whole paycheck just going to buy everything, or keep the supplies handy. And I just felt so lost, like I didn't know how to make anything, and how the smallest dish could contain so much effort! I've learned that cooking may seem overwhelming but it's not as bad as it seems, and just doing it once can be enough to be able to experiment and remember.

I just don't know what it is, but I closed the book feeling like such a culinary failure! If the goal of it is to lose weight, I'll probably do a better job by not cooking at all...