Following a recipe, preparing your ingredients, know where you can sort cut or ad-lib with experience, yeah they're pretty similar. We do all our cooking and buy very little pre-prepared. We also bake all our own bread, including gluten free for our daughter (I've actually got a loaf proving now).
As my wife is a Medieval historian, we also do a lot of medieval cooking for fun - over an open fire, lashings of mead, great food. It;s a great way to spend an evening!
The food is blooming fabulous and not the basic crap you'd expect from that period. They actually ate pretty well, and a lot of the flavours and dishes are recognisable today.
That's egg-fried Bulghar-Wheat, Spinach pancakes, Spiced meatballs, I forget what the green stuff is off the top of my head, and orange chicken.
An added layout of fun is the fact that we're all Veggie, so we have to convert the recipes.
Yum yum yum... I'm hungry now.
Cheers!