I am not a fancy or gourmet cook, but I can definitely feed myself (and others, given half a chance - for which I have been granted honorary membership in several ethnic groups not my own :-). I've got some of my recipes typed up, if you're interested.
My mother is a wonderful cook (and still one of my best sources for recipes). I got used to eating well. I didn't know how to cook much more than scrambled eggs the first time I had to cook for myself regularly, so I got busy and started learning. This was a little tricky since I was eight thousand miles away at the time (in Birmingham, England) so had to deal with 1) a different way of measuring ingredients (the English weigh flour), 2) different things available at the store and 3) no telephone for the last resort option of calling Mom and asking for advice even if the time zone thing worked out. I started out with tomato sauce for pasta and worked my way from there. I still think using a mix for cake or cookies is cheating, big time.
Of course, when I got back to northern California, the Goat Cheese and Baby Vegetable Revolution was getting started. I didn't much like most of the political and cultural things happening during the nineteen-eighties, but I like stuff like goat cheese, balsamic vinegar, and aragula a lot. And since I grew up in a Mediterranean-like climate, I think that the food of that region is swell.
Berkeley and the surrounding towns are a foodie's shopping (and eating) paradise: We've got the Cheese Board, the Berkeley Bowl Market, Monterey Market, Andronico's, Peet's Coffee, numerous specialty delis, bakers (I don't make my own cakes and cookies very much any more, *grin*), and butchers, farmer's markets galore. For kitchen gadgets of all descriptions, there's Sur La Table on Fourth Street (and Williams-Sonoma in SF). Trader Joe's is right next door in Emeryville.
And we've got some great restaurants: Picante Cocina Mexicana, Fatapple's, Raleigh's, the Homemade Cafe, Won Thai, Cha Am, Vegi Food, and for special splurge occasions, the mothership of California cuisine, Chez Panisse. (My only complaint is that it's tough to find dinner out past 9:30 in this town.
If you like to cook, check out the recipe links on Mimi's Cyber Kitchen, and consider joining the divine Mimi and the free-wheeling foodies on rec.food.cooking. (Warning - if you have a low tolerance for jokes and chatter, please subscribe to one of the other cooking groups instead. We're a really talkative bunch.) Mimi's page has links to the rec.food.recipes recipe archive and other interesting sites, although one she seems to have missed Mardi Wetmore's terrific low-fat recipes (and coming from a high-fat low-life such as myself, that's pretty good).