Echoing that the best place to start is to get a handle on programming as a concept. Not because we're trying to gatekeep the good stuff behind the scary programmer voodoo, but because otherwise you're basically attempting to edit a book in a language you don't speak (and the reader is very picky about grammar).
That said, you can absolutely teach yourself to code! Hell, if you figured out self hosting I'm willing to bet you've probably already got a handful of transferable skills.
In the interest of disclosure, I learned programming as part of my degree (took a Java class as a resume booster my first semester and ended realizing that I preferred coding to calculus and switched my major), so I'm not exactly a wealth of knowledge in the self study department. However I would recommend a course that has labs/ challenges/ projects to practice what your learning. Everyone learns differently, but I've personally found that I picked up programming concepts better when I got hands-on and applied them in my assignments.
The programmer's open secret is that generally once you know one programming language, it's pretty easy to pick up another. For example, Java and Python might write them in different ways, but at the end of the day a loop is a loop and as long as you know you need to repeat some code until some condition is met, it's perfectly acceptable to Google "loop in Python" or "[Java concept] in Python". In other words, it doesn't super matter which language you start with; just pick something and stick with it (bonus points if you can turn around and tinker with an OSS app with what you're learning).
Twofold answer, if I learned one thing in my high school culinary classes it's that you're more likely to get food poisoning from the produce on your plate than the protein. Generally it's pretty easy to tell if your burger is cold in the center, but it's much harder to know that the lettuce and tomatoes have been washed and stored properly. (I may also be slightly traumatized from the assignment where we had to pull the heath inspection records for local restaurants).
I don't necessarily mind trying something once or twice, but the part where I get really picky that there are certain foods that I just can't do the texture of. Tomatoes are probably the biggest one, something about the wet squishy crunch; I just can't (plus the acid tends not to sit so well with my stomach). Lettuce is the other, similar wet crunch to tomatoes, but with the added bonus that chewing/ swallowing a wad of wet plant mass sets off a gag reflex. Plus, it's my belief that lettuce as a vegetable is kind of pointless, I'd much rather sub in any other greens that pack more flavor/ nutrients, like spinach or arugula (still can't take a massive bite of just leaf, but decently proportioned it's fine).