My beef with cooking...

Lately I've been trying to cook. This is big for someone who only just learned how to make macaroni & cheese (instead of instant) like, 2 years ago.
My problem with cooking though, is this: Once you buy the 12 obscure and random ingredients needed for your dish (fennel pollen? Swiss chard stems?) you've already spent more than if you went out to a nice restaurant. And that's without doin' the dishes afterward! Also, many of these dishes ask for ingredients you wouldn't typically use, but they don't sell them in individual-use packaging. So now you're stuck with this big container of God-knows-what, that you will never use again.
Not to mention, the cookbooks I've looked at (and there have been many) are all written as if you work for Emeril Agassi and know your way around a kitchen. Ahem! Not all of us do! Are there some beginners cookbooks out there that doesn't use pro-chef jargon please? While on this quest at my trusty Barnes & Noble the other day, I found "Raising Chickens for Dummies" but no "Cooking for Dummies" anywhere in sight.
Until then, I'll be trying to figure out what fennel pollen is.