Every kitchen is a little different. Every oven has different hot spots, and every stove heats up at a different speed. This can make following recipes difficult: a recipe might say to cook something for five minutes at medium heat, but you might find that your food is still raw when you do that. Learning how your particular kitchen works is integral to understanding your cooking.
On my stove, for example, there is one burner that is hotter than the others - so I use it to boil water for pasta, but not to saute onions. My oven has a hot spot in the back left, so if I make a cake I need to rotate it to make sure it cooks evenly.
There's no sure way to figure out your kitchen. It just takes a bit of time and patience and awareness. So when you start cooking, don't count completely on the recipe to tell you exactly how long to cook things. Take it as a guideline - when you bake, bake for a few minutes under the listed time - if your oven runs hot, it might be done already. When you cook on the stove, keep your eye on your food to make sure that its not burning and that its still cooking properly.
After a little while, you'll get used to it. You'll start to know which burners to use, and how to place things in your oven, and it won't seem like an issue any more.
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