Is shopping your basement like shopping your closet?

We've been looking at couches recently, after making do with a lumpy love seat since May. The mid-century styles that are popular right now are kind of fun, especially with our other (real) mid-century things. For actually sitting on, though, the ones we looked at weren't the right fit. Plus, obviously, couches are expensive.

We bought our rec room couch ten years ago, and it wasn't used terribly hard (yes, narrating is hard, but it doesn't wear couches out). So we switched them. (Thank you, Apprentice and Lydia.)

New and improved living room:

What are the really basic cooking skills?

This is not a new post, but I'd never seen it before, and the comments are interesting (and I don't think there are any really rude ones). What should everybody (that is, not every cook, just every normal person) know how to do in a kitchen?

I agree with the one comment that everybody, no matter what their circumstances or food style, should know how to make three different main meals more or less from scratch, something simple but decent enough that they could also feed a friend or two. It's a reasonable-enough don't-leave-home-without-it goal, and it's one that they could probably learn from just one issue of a family or food magazine. If you have and use tools like a slow cooker, this can be even easier. Our Treehouse classic: open lid, put in sauerkraut, put in meat, put on lid, plug in, turn on.  Cook.

What's your personal survival list?  What do kids need to learn so that they don't end up like this poor guy on the Possum 911 line?  (Fast-forward to 13:27.)