I can make scrambled eggs and pork chops. Otherwise I just thaw.

I love cooking. At school we had to take 'Domestic Science', where we learned how to make pastry, cakes, various other things.

My mother never cooked - what we ate came out of a hen or a can. Beans on toast, egg & chips, occasionally fish fingers & chips. Or stew from a can, so it was mostly carrot, potato & gravy with a bit of gristly meat. Powdered mashed potato. Batchelor's Marrowfat Processed Peas.

I taught myself to cook and only really started properly over the last few years. My ex-husband is a very plain eater, nothing spicy, nothing adventurous, so it's really only since we split up that I've been able to experiment and learn, and also discover that I really can cook.

I love trying different flavours and new food. Just about everything I eat is cooked from fresh ingredients. I don't buy 'ready meals' - with one exception. Sainsbury's sell a foil tray meal containing two fresh chicken breasts, each one with sausagemeat and stuffing, with bacon wrapped round it. Just roast for 20 minutes.

It's two packs for a fiver, and I get four dinners out of it as one chicken breast is enough for me. It's like having a proper British roast dinner whenever I like, but without too much of an effort.

Bad. Luckily, Italian husband gets grade of great.

I'm slowly getting there, moving slowly from sad towards rad. My dad used to have a catering business, and my brother is a chef, so I was always the culinary black sheep of the family, but am slowly finding my own in the kitchen. Most importantly, I think, I know enjoy being in the kitchen, cooking, baking whatever.

But I'm still too often on the phone to my bro taking directions for whatever dish I'm cooking.

I'm a damn good cook and proud of it. It's the one area in my life that I don't get all modest about and don't feel weird about being complimented on - I have no idea why that is, but there you have it. My mother is a genius cook as well, but she's trained, very classic French and a true Julia Child disciple - she went to cooking school briefly; she taught cooking for a while; she came close at one point to opening her own cafe & kitchen store. So I learned from her, I guess, although none of it was formal and I rarely do French. My cooking is a big mix of different stuff.

I really learned when I was living on my own for the first time, which was when I was 16 in Spain. My hippie auntie whose house I was living in had a wealth of hippie books, including the Alices Restaurant cookbook. I credit that book with teaching me how to cook: I was alone, out in the country, couldn't afford to eat at restaurants any more (this is also how I discovered the horror and fear that is a restaurant/bar tab - yes, hon, you do eventually have to pay them, argh!) and so I read that book and started cooking. Alice tells you not to be afraid, to just go for it, and I did.

Then I started working for restaurants, learned a lot, had kids, made dinner every night, went in and out of vegetarianism, discovered Asian food, etc. I used to throw big dinner parties all the time, make Thanksgiving dinner for 50 people and stuff like that. It was fun. I would do crazy things like have 4 different kinds of pasta and 6 sauces, or make pizzas with goat cheese and good sausage out in the woods over a campfire.

Nowadays, though, I don't cook anywhere near as much as I used to. My son, for all that sushi was his favorite food at age 3, has turned into a total American teenager. He's overjoyed when I make steak & mac&cheese (that's mine from scratch, by the way, I've never made the boxed stuff) and steamed broccoli. Or pork chops/mashed potatos/collards/cornbread. Hey, I'm a Southern girl too and these days, alas for my waistline, I cook like one. Last week we had the aforementioned steak meal, a potato casserole with chorizo and mozzarella (not an unqualified success, need to work on that one a bit,) an adapted chicken Maryland with green beans & almonds and rice cooked in chicken broth and, hmm, what else? Ah, frozen pizza! And fried egg sandwiches one night! Time crunches happen.

What am I good at? I can bake like nobody's business - my breads and cakes and so on are excellent. I'm really good at soups. I make a lot of casseroles - I'm lazy and I like one dish meals. I'm trying to learn Thai right now but it's hard - for one thing the ingredients are almost impossible to find in Asheville, same problem with Indian, although there's a curry I've been making for years that takes like 4 hours that's fantastic. I mostly make up my own stuff - I refer back to cookbooks and the internet but I improvise, change, invent all the time. I guess mostly, I make American food - all different stuff all mixed up together: there's tamari in my collards and hoisin sauce on my Boston butt barbecue, chevre in my pasta primavera and tortilla strips & jalapenos in my chicken soup. Yeah. Food is good.

I've mainly got a few specialised dishes that I stick to - some Indian, Italian, Mexican, British, and a little French (recently). My forte is still Mexican, though... mainly because I can't get it here and I miss it.

To me, cooking is all about getting fresh ingredients, finding cool recipes, following instructions and tasting as you go. I'm not good enough to be hugely creative, so I still use recipes. Not that that's anything to be ashamed of. We cook 'from scratch' much more frequently than a lot of people, never touch fast food like McD's, and only do takeaways very rarely.

I made a huge pot of minestrone yesterday and it's all gone.

My kids had never been to McDonald's until they went there on a school trip. 'It tasted like sugar-coated cardboard' was the verdict.

Minestrone

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup minced white onions (about 1 small onion)
1/2 cup chopped zucchini
1/2 cup frozen cut italian green beans
1/4 cup minced celery (about 1/2 stalk)
4 teaspoons minced garlic (about 4 cloves)
4 cups vegetable broth (Swanson is good *note: Do not use chicken broth!*)
2 (15 ounce) cans red kidney beans, drained
2 (15 ounce) cans small white beans or great northern beans, drained
1 (14 ounce) can diced tomatoes
1/2 cup carrots, julienned or shredded
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley
1 1/2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
3 cups hot water
4 cups fresh baby spinach
1/2 cup small shell pasta
1-2 cups of red wine


1. Heat three tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat in a large soup pot.
2. Saute onion, celery, garlic, green beans, and zucchini in the oil for 5 minutes or until onions begin to turn translucent.
3. Add vegetable broth to pot, plus drained tomatoes, beans, carrot, hot water, wine and spices.
4. Bring soup to a boil, then reduce heat and allow to simmer for 20 minutes.
5. Add spinach leaves and pasta and cook for an additional 20 minutes or until desired consistency.
6. Makes about eight 1 1/2 cup servings.

Becoming rad.

My mother was never much of a cook. She had five or six meals that she rotated through. Spaghetti, Chicken and Rice, Beef Stew with Bisquick dumplings, Corned Beef and Cabbage, and tacos were mainstays. If it wasn't that it was something like Hamburger Helper. My mother never liked us in the kitchen, so I didn't learn a whole lot growing up. Although, I did read a lot about cooking and gardening even as a kid. I liked cookbooks for as long as I can remember. I loved Home Ec. My mom was patient and kind, but sort of frazzled when it came to getting dinner on the table. Besides, she didn't really know a whole lot about cooking anyway. She never baked. She hardly cooked from a recipe. My dad had to teach her to cook when the got married, and my dad isn't a good cook.

I became increasingly interested in cooking a few years after I met my husband. We were living together and I was in a very domestic mode. I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning, but now I'm a pretty good cook. I can follow pretty much any recipe without difficulty, with some exceptions, mainly candy and bread. I love cookbooks and food magazines, and the food network. I own a lot of the "big" cookbooks: a lot of Julia Child, Mark Bittman, the Joy of Cooking, etc.

I do need to expand my horizons a bit. I've never made a soufle, or a mousse for that matter. I've tried pie crust a few times with varying success. Bread is something I bake rarely. I would like to delve more into difficult techniques and dishes. I'm getting good at custards. Fudge is still a challenge, especially peanut butter fudge. Complicated desserts aren't something I care much about anyway. I rarely entertain and I'm a main course sort of person. I like to try new dinner recipes for the family.

See... here's a thing; about two-thirds of recipes end up having some ingredient like beef broth (chuckie d's recipe above), or chicken broth (this, all the damn time), and if I'm going to cook something with that, I have to make my own, which is my idea of cooking a whole 'nother meal, before I can even cook the meal. There is no canned broth in Greece, and I loathe those little cube things.

The closest I ever get is when I roast chicken and conserve the drippings to use in a dish the next night that wants "chicken broth" as an ingredient.

oops... that was vegetable broth in CD's recipe!

At one time I got all pumped up and decided I was always going to always have vegetable broth on hand, and cooked down a bunch of vegetables and froze the broth in water bottles since I didn't haven't anything else to freeze it in, and my broth was kind of yucky (I guess I should have found a real recipe for making broth, instead of playing it by ear), with a really bad delivery system.

I kind of lost my ooomph about making vegetable broth once a month after that. I need to be serious about making it, and find little containers that hold about two cups to freeze them in (and fill my teenytiny freezer with them so there won't be room for anything else)... and I don't think I'll manage it. Usually if I'm terribly set on a recipe that wants X broth, I just add a bit of soy sauce or worcestershire or something to add a bit of another layer of flavor.

I can mix stuff and make it taste good. I guess that should qualify as 'cooking'

I love cooking, but most of my (adult) life I've lived places with inadequate cooking space. I like to make things up on the fly and often don't have the space/tools/etc I need to do things "properly". So I'm very improvisational and consider recipes a jumping off point only.

When I was living with my father I was a latchkey kid left to fend for myself in a house full of teenage brothers who ate like locusts. I learned a lot of basic cooking there, especially cooking without using the stove (which was verboten because I was too young). That knowledge is useful to me now as I don't have a proper stove and only a hotplate thing.

From ages 10 onward I lived with my (single) mom. As the oldest girl I tended to be the one to cook for everybody else, (though my brother makes a mean french toast). I learned a lot of basic cooking, which involved heating up frozen things, opening cans, and a lot of following directions on packets. At school around this time they also made you take "domestic arts" in both grade 7 and grade 9. That's where I learned how to make omelets and what seems like a thousand other egg dishes, also a lot of baking techniques. I still know the baking powder biscuits by heart and make them for friends on cold winter days.

When mom was home and cooking she taught me a lot of from her New England farm-like background. Things her nana taught her like beef stew, meatloaf, a lot of baked goods, how to prepare most kinds of meat, how to stretch an ingredient/meal, how to make a meal out of whatever's in the fridge. One of her old favorites from her childhood was a mayo and mustard sandwich (sometimes with cheese if there was some to spare!). This always horrified us, the sandwich made of condiments. Now I can safely say I have been there.

In college I lived with three younger roommates and often was the house mom, teaching them how to cook and improvise ingredients. One year I had all our friends over who didn't have family to visit and make one big Thanksgiving dinner. It was tasty if slightly traumatic (hot gravy and cold potatoes, all the timing was off) but we were drunk so it was ok. My roommates last year were a foodie who was very adventurous and always making me try new things, and a girl who couldn't cook to save her life who I took under my wing and taught how not to burn broccoli. Both experiences helped me learn more about cooking.

I'm in the "anyone who can read and FOLLOW a recipe can cook" camp...though the last thing I made was matzah ball soup for chupahija when she had her hysterectomy about ten years ago. She praised it; then started ranting about how I wasn't doing anything with my life. My only failure was a flan I attempted without the proper utensils--it came out like scrambled eggs! My household things are still packed away, but I tear out recipes from the paper all the time.

So, why not tell me about your cooking skillz (mad? bad? sad? rad?), and how they came to be?

Mad, rad, and dangerous to know.

I'm taking a deep breath and dispensing with all modesty for a few minutes:

I'm a fantastic cook.

That was hard to write.

Ever since I can remember, I followed my mostly-stay-at-home mom around the kitchen, learning how a good cook improvises around the ingredients at hand. At about five, I bought a small light-bulb-powered oven at the fair jumble sale, and started making tiny casseroles in its itty-bitty cake tins, using up scrids and scrads of leftover. Often, my mother and I would have a tiny casserole each for lunch.

By six or so, I'd made my first family dinner. I don't remember it well, but I remember making a pound cake for dessert. In a few years, I was cooking for the family once a week, plus cookies and cakes and snacks, and by my teen years, my mother and I shared dinner duty.

Over the past few years, I've learned a bit about food chemistry, which has improved my cooking, especially when it comes to creating new baking recipes.

Lately, I'm trying to diligently record measurements, techniques, and results with an eye to perfecting my recipes. I'm working on a cookbook, though not necessarily with hopes of publishing it; I just want all the recipes written down in one volume, since friends and family always ask for recipes, and I have to squint up at the ceiling while I try to remember how much baking powder/nutmeg/saffron/whatever. I'm much more astute with a whisk in my hand than when we're sitting down to eat.

I didn't realize how many recipes I've concocted until last Christmas, when I made twenty or so different homemade goodies, each to cater to a family member's particular tastes. Everyone wanted to know where I found the recipe for (personalized dish], and I noticed that my answer every time was, "Oh, that's my recipe. I could write it down for you."

Sass, I bet you would really like Laurie Colwin's book "Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen"; I think most of the recipes in there are from when she lived in a tiny NYC apartment with only a hotplate thing. It's just wonderful to read, anyway, but I have a lot of favorite recipes from that book.

elsa, I was hoping you would weigh in - you are a person I'm jealous of (but nicely and sweetly so!)... I love reading your posts and comments about cooking.

At one time I got all pumped up and decided I was always going to always have vegetable broth on hand, and cooked down a bunch of vegetables and froze the broth

Totally unsolicited and possibly gross, here is my own habit for keeping vegetable broth (or the fixings) on hand.

On preview: Taz, what a perfectly lovely thing to say. As I often point out to my partner, a novice cook but a remarkably good one, I've been cooking over thirty years now, so it's second-nature to me now.

Oh, that's great, Elsa! I will do this!

Oops: the thing I often say to my partner came out all wrong here: when he frets because he's not as intuitive a cook as I am, I point out that I've been doing it about 30 years longer. I don't just randomly say, "Well, you're new to this; I'm an old hand. Genuflect, please."

He also frets about the potential for disaster when trying something new and challenging, and last week I finally reminded him that even experienced cooks have distasters sometimes. Then, as if to prove it, I had a series of minor kitchen disasters in one routine meal: the oven started smoking and scorched the popovers; distracted and vexed by that, I burned the roux for the bechamel not once but twice; when I finally completed a nice blond roux, I hurried the bechamel and ended up with a watery gratin; and something else I have wiped from my mind -- no doubt it was smoky and scorched, whatever it was.

Summoned by my muttered curses, The Fella stood anxiously in the kitchen doorway, shifting from one foot to the other, asking if he could help. "Yes," I said, "you can! Would you mix me a nice stiff drink? I'm going to sit with you for five minutes while everything cooks. Then we can see if we need to order a pizza."

In the end, dinner was okay. But seeing me very nearly botch a meal was refreshing for him, I think.

Heh. I must say that the husband and I are each very skilled in the helping department... we each always fix drinks for the one who is cooking.

Otherwise, though, we have agreed to disagree. We always bicker about each other's methods; it's part of our private mythology. I think the first time our upstairs neighbor met us, we were cooking, and she eventually said something like "oh, hahah, my boyfriend and I fight all the time, too" and we were completely confused, since we rarely fight at all... but yeah, get us in the kitchen together, and it might seem like a rumble. It's really just love... but he cooks love with way too much oil, and the heat too high...

Sass, you might also enjoy Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.

And, to answer the question: I love food, but I'm only an average cook--I can follow a recipe as well as anybody, and, partially because I eat a lot, and read cookbooks for pleasure, I'm pretty decent at thinking about food--how flavors and smells and textures relate, that kind of thing.

But put me in Kitchen Stadium, and I can be absent-minded, and inattentive, which sometimes gets me in trouble. And, worse, I'm a terrible baker--although I like math and chemistry in other contexts, they pretty much freak me out and terrify me, baking-wise. Whenever I have to make a dessert, I usually go for cheesecake, because anything else offers such high potential for disaster.

I'm a pretty good cook: I can follow any recipe thrown at me. I'm not the kind of cook to improvise a dish, mostly because I'm afraid it won't come out. Rarely will the food I'm cooking turn out terrible.

But I love baking a whole lot more than I like cooking, so that is where I try more things and spend more time.

I am a talented amateur cook who loves cooking. I am good with flavors and techniques but I have a hard time following a written recipe. I mean how do you know how much salt or sugar or lemon juice etc. without taking into account all the ingredients and their current tastes and freshness? In order to get the same taste from the same dish you may need to change things at different times of year.

I am not a good baker and about the only baking I do, is bread.

Hee! Taz, I was reading Laurie Colwin's follow-up, More Home Cooking just yesterday. My copy is water-spotted and obviously beloved in the way that a ragged teddy bear with one button eye dangling is obviously beloved. You can find the flourless chocolate cake recipe without the index, either by letting the book fall open to the natural page, or by opening where the chocolate smears appear.

I cooked for a family of 5 between the ages of 14 and 18. Now, I don't really cook at all. That makes my cooking skills a weird mix of great and poor. But I can pretty much cook anything and I don't have that fear of cooking that makes people into awful cooks.

I too am really bad with recipes.

I despise cooking, and there were no decent cooks on either side of my family, so I'm guessing it's genetic.

I'm ambivalent about cooking. There are a few dishes I can make without a recipe and they turn out yummy. And I can follow a recipe and have it turn out well. But I'd rather have someone else do it. The mister does most of the cooking at home (he's cooking a turkey right now) which makes me feel guilty (I'm home all day) but he enjoys it.

My mum is a good basic cook (my spaghetti is better tho') who has rarely spoiled a meal. I followed her around a bit growing up but never really got bit by the cooking bug.

mygothlaundy, could you share the mac and cheese recipe?

In my earlier life, I was a timid cook. I was living with a guy who was not encouraging at all. There were times I remember him coming home to a hot meal and yelling at me because it wasn't what he wanted (mind you, he'd told me "whatever" was fine with him). Forward to my ex-husband who never lifted a finger in the kitchen after we married (did before marriage), and never cleaned a dish, either. Plus, if I planned ahead, he'd get up in the middle of the night and eat whatever I was going to make the next day, and our finances were very, very tight.
When I was a single mom, time and money were tight again. We had boxed mac n cheese at least once a week, luckily it was a dream come true for my sons. Then I met my husband. I was lucky that he would cook often. He just knows how to throw stuff together and make it great. Thanks to him and his encouragement I learned to experiment and try new things. I still get stagnant once in a while, but then I grab recipes or magazines and start off on something new. On Tuesday, I'm going to make a Beef Wellington again. Got rave reviews last time. Now our only argument is on weekends. I just don't want to think about cooking, and most Sundays, neither does he.

I can cook well enough to avoid starvation. During my single parent days, money was incredibly tight for a period of a couple of years while I was unemployed and studying for a career change and I had a fixed weekly menu so that I knew exactly what I needed to buy to cook the whole week's food and how much it would cost.

Now, I just don't cook because my partner does it. I can, I just don't for no particular reason. Probably because the things I cook are boring and uninteresting so she would rather cook than eat what I make.

I love cooking, and have most of my life. My first word was actually "hot" because my mom was constantly screaming "NO! HOT!" as I tried to touch things on the stovetop. I was one of the only people I knew who could make a "real" meal when I was first out on my own, so I would often make it though rough times by telling friends I would make whatever they wanted if they would buy the stuff for it.
I did most of the cooking when I was married, and even before my roommate and I lived together after I was single again we'd have dinner together most nights.

I think it's because I come from a cooking family. Very typical Italian-Americans, where food is an essential part of any gathering, and a week isn't complete without a huge over the top home-cooked family dinner.

It makes me smile whenever my roommate says "no, no, I don't like X" and then I make it and he says "this is nothing like how my mom made it. You should make this again, it's great!" Poor thing was in his mid-20s before he realized turkey wasn't always dry by nature and homemade spaghetti sauce wasn't supposed to be watery and bland.

I'm semi ok at cooking. I generally follow recipes except if they have ingredients I don't like - then I delete them if they're not essential to the flavor.

Sometimes I make up things, like a filling for crepes that has ricotta, vanilla extract, and diced cucumber. And turkey rollups: we get sliced turkey from the deli and I put a glob of cream cheese and some alfalfa sprouts in the middle, roll and eat. It's quick, and relatively healthy. Mostly I just try to eat fresh unprocessed food as much as possible. I couldn't tell you the last time I ate at a fast food place.

My mom was a terrible cook, which she made up for with her sense of humor. She burned and over spiced things, and I still hate meatloaf. I would've hated lima beans, brussel sprouts, corn and peas regardless. Dad was good at grilling but that's about it.

I may have already mentioned this, but I dated a guy once that told me making hotdogs qualified as cooking because the water moved.

Whatever I know about cooking, I must initially credit the women I've lived with for instilling in me. To a woman, they were God awful in the kitchen, and one, I still think, was trying to poison me. I first learned to cook out of sheer self-preservation, and I kept at it thereafter, first for money, later out of rank suspicion, and now, finally, because I like to cook and I like to eat well.

For much of my adult life, I never really understood why my mother was such a dismal cook, since her mother was a very good central Nebraska farm cook. It wasn't until I was 45 that I learned my mother had been adopted, which explained a lot. And Mother worked, most of her adult life, too, which meant she wasn't up for making dinner at all, except on weekends. She really didn't even like doing that, and calculated the success of a meal based on how little time it took to prepare; she really liked Swanson's TV Dinners, because they were the low effort dinner solution of her time. She often said, as in several times a week, that if a meal took more than 30 minutes to make, including thawing, she wasn't ever making it. And with the annual exception of her shot at Thanksgiving turkey, she meant what she said, and kept her word. In later years, when she found she could, she took to ordering cooked turkeys she could reheat for an hour on Thanksgiving Day, she hated cooking that much. My father could scramble eggs when we were kids, but he rarely even tried cooking, preferring to take us out for hamburgers when my mother was away and dinner responsibility was his. Later in his life, perhaps because of my chiding and suggestions, he learned to grill a bit, and steam vegetables, and actually did most of the cooking for he and my mother in the later years of their retirement.

So, by the time I was 10, out of self-preservation, and to feed my siblings, I'd learned to make salads, and fry hamburgers, broil steaks, bake/boil potatoes, make cornbread, spaghetti, goulash, casseroles and other simple 1 and 2 dish meals. Like essexjan, most of our vegetables in winter were out of cans, frozen foods still being somewhat uneven in distribution in the late '50s and early 60s. Mom would buy what I asked her to, as long as I wasn't wasting food, but if I forgot to make her a grocery list, what came home in the grocery bags were TV Dinners, canned vegetables, potatoes, tuna fish, white bread, milk, breakfast cereal, and a couple kinds of pasta. Ad infinitum.

When we visited them once or twice a year, my grandmothers were both happy to let me "watch" them cook, and taught me the basics of gravies, and baking. And my father's mother served in courses, without help, all 47 years of her married life, so her methodical approach to meal planning, shopping, cooking, and serving greatly influenced me, at a young age. My mother's mother never bought a loaf of store bought bread until after my grandfather died, and her kitchen in Nebraska was laid out like a prairie kitchen, with tilt out hampers under the counter for 50 lb bags of flour and sugar, and always smelled of yeast. She canned like crazy too, often putting up more than 500 jars of their garden produce, jams, fruit sauces, and other things in a single season. So my grandmothers, as cooks, were fascinating to me, and their daily efforts in the kitchen set the pace of their days, and their kitchens were the hearths of their homes.

And then, one of the first jobs I got, in the winter months of high school, was working at the night grill on the Naval Air base where my Dad was stationed at the time. It was a minimum wage job, running the dishwasher, and swabbing floors, but when one of the line cooks found out I could cook a little, he saw an opportunity to work a lot less, and got me going as a grill man. I worked there for 3 successive winters, finally running the place at night. Just the usual range of simple grilled hamburgers, steaks, chops, deep fryer chicken, french fries, etc. but it did call for keeping 10 to 12 orders at time running, and honed my skills as a line cook, in terms of speed and consistency. I'd later learn it wasn't so good to be your own boss, for all intents and purposes, so young, if you wanted to really learn to cook. But by the age 17, I could put out 150 simple meals a night, without losing customers, and still get in a bit of studying for high school calculus, and get the dishes done and floor swabbed, and be clocked out by midnight.

When I left home for college, I worked as a waiter, at one of the top private clubs in that city. I had to pay for the job, with 10% of my tips to the maitre d'. At least that was the official rate the restaurant knew about, but the guy in the tux in that joint was a little mustached Nazi, and regularly screwed you over on table assignments and shifts if you didn't kick back extra on large parties, and extra bar rounds. In a lot of ways, that job was good in the sense of showing me something about the discipline of how a real restaurant is run, and exposing me to wines and cocktails, about which I knew nothing when I started there. But I hated the system and the people as much as I liked the money, and to this day, it remains, physically, one of the hardest jobs I ever had.

After I left college, I worked in kitchens several times, often as a second job, particularly when I lived in Nashville. For a single person, the common meal benefits of working a restaurant gig add up, not so much in money, as in chances for real food that you might not regularly make, if you lived alone. For one place, I did prep on weekdays, and took line cook shifts as needed, or covered other people's vacations and sick days. Again, I didn't like the executive chef at the place, nor the head shift cooks, but I did recognize that I was learning a lot. It didn't really make up for all the attitude, in the end, however, and I quit when the bullshit began to regularly outweigh the pay/benefits. When I quit, one head shift cook told me how "disappointed" she was that I was quitting, as she'd thought that if I really applied myself, in only 4 or 5 more years, I could have been considered for any position, such as hers, that came available. I was kind of speechless, at the thought of that dismal future, but at least the shock of that prospect kept me from saying anything really brutal before leaving.

After that gig, I didn't work in a kitchen again for several years, until a friend of mine, who was the baker at a pretty well known down home joint off Music Row, got phlebitis, and was told he couldn't be standing all the time, any more. So, I wound up taking his job for awhile, to "keep it warm for him," as he worked through some treatments, and I liked it. Basically, it was a pie and cake operation, with daily sheet cornbread as a menu staple. They did have good ovens, and a big 100 pound industrial mixer, and a line roller which hadn't been used in a while, so one Saturday, after doing some research, I did a batch of Parker House rolls, in place of one of the usual sheets of cornbread, and they went over pretty well. After that, I had a pretty free rein to try additional things, so long as I turned out the pies and cakes, and a reasonable amount of cornbread. I did that, as a second job, for about 6 months, and it was probably the most fun I ever had at a restaurant job, primarily because I was working alone, most of the time, unless my friend came by. The rhythms of that job were never those of the line, locked to individual orders, and the demands of waitresses, but instead, were a daily metronome of processes that took hours; it was actually something of an oasis for the regular kitchen help, who often chit chatted with me, on their way out and back for smoke breaks and deliveries. I left the job when my buddy came back full time, but I think he never fired up that big mixer thereafter, either, which was kind of a shame.

At home, I like to cook, and about 95% of the time, I make evening dinner for my brother and me; the rest of the time, we eat out. On weekends, I'll make hot breakfast, too, or on week days, if we have house guests. Because he's chronically forgetful, my brother is restricted from using the stove, so he doesn't cook at all. He's slow with knives, and not very accurate, and frankly, things go much smoother in our kitchen when he stays out of the way. But I don't mind cooking with others, if they know what they are doing.

Unfortunately, most home cooks I've ever met don't really have good basic skills. In some cases, I think it's just a matter of training and equipment, but I do think having powerful hands and good arms is important, if you're going to be cooking for many people. I think nothing of grabbing a 10" knife and hacking up a couple heads of cabbage and half a dozen carrots for cole slaw, but I can see, just in terms of hand size and strength, why many people hesitate, or tackle the job with a hand cranked vegetable center, or a food processor. And if you don't like using knives, I can see that you won't buy good ones, or learn to keep them sharp, or have good, safe cutting boards, and enough of them. Likewise, if you're afraid of flinging hot grease all over yourself, because of a weak grip on the skillet, you may never learn to saute one handed, or make classic omelets.

And I think a lot of home cooks never get the hang of serving in courses. Family style, for them, means piling everything on the table at once, or spreading out ingredients for self-assembly by eaters in what they loosely call a buffet, or offering a lot of one dish meals. I guess it seems simpler to them, doing things that way, but it draws focus from every dish, and turns kitchen routine into a race to sit down at table, which doesn't seem nice, to me. That's the way my sister generally cooks, if she cooks. She doesn't own a single pot or pan that isn't Teflon coated, or have a knife that doesn't have a serrated blade. Accordingly, when we visit her, I take her family out for dinner, and when she visits here, I suggest that she "take a night off" from cooking, and let me do it. And every time, reminding my niece and nephew of basic table manners is a delicate balance between biting my tongue until it bleeds, and having a meal with them.

Sorry about the double post, don't know what happened there. Admins, hope me.

And I think a lot of home cooks never get the hang of serving in courses. Family style, for them, means piling everything on the table at once, or spreading out ingredients for self-assembly by eaters in what they loosely call a buffet, or offering a lot of one dish meals. I guess it seems simpler to them, doing things that way, but it draws focus from every dish, and turns kitchen routine into a race to sit down at table, which doesn't seem nice, to me.

I admit, when I have dinner parties, I serve like that.
But then, it's often a matter of necessity. I don't own enough dishes to serve three or four courses to people, and my dining table seats six if we cram in there. So if I'm having, say, fifteen people over for thanksgiving it's just easier to pile everything onto the dining room table, set out stacks of plates, and let everyone eat in the living room, where that many can sit easily.

I am an excellent slop-cook. Blame a lifetime of vegetarianism; there aren't many vegetables that just don't go together. That, combined with the adventurism of a little thing I like to call "Stoner Gourmet," which includes dishes like "Nacheroni and Cheese," means that no matter what I find, I can knock it together into something not just edible, but generally tasty.

Surprised Fuzzbean isn't here—Amy and I went over to her house on Wednesday, and the food was fantastic.

Ah, I love to cook and it's a good thing too, because my partner hates it. I recently upgraded my stove which was wonderful because I can now fit all my big pots on there at once!

I rarely cook from recipe books though, I just like winging it, finding interesting ingredients and working out what I can do. Since I cook almost every night, there are quite a few standard meals I can whip up in no time, with one shopping trip on a Sunday evening to stock up being my entire shopping time.

Heck, I even cook for my dog. I currently have bags with `dog stew' (for dog, not of dog) to last me for the next two months, and it cost less than $50.00 to make it all.

I have always enjoyed just random cooking, as in digging around in cupboard to see what I can find. There's always something you can make, and I have had some happy successes at other people's houses producing multi course meals from a barely stocked fridged, pantry and freezer.

I used to suck a lot. After making dozens of horrible dishes, I finally picked up the gist of it. Apparently, there is such thing as "too much [insert ingredient here]."

I love cooking. I started cooking because I became a vegetarian at age 9, and one of my mother's stategies to combat this was to not cook a vegetarian meal for me, so it started as a necessity. Also, my mother started working longer hours so by the time I was 10-11, I was cooking the (vegetarian - ha!) evening meal for the whole family.

I also don't really use recipes, except for baking (and then I will only follow recipes exactly the first time so I can then modify them appropriately). I will look through cookbooks for ideas and then adapt depending on what we like and what's in the cupboard/fridge.

I started cooking meat four years ago, when I started living with my meatatarian boyfriend (I took 'food' in the division of labour, he took 'money'). It was surprisingly easy to adapt vege recipes for meat - but I recommend a good meat thermometer for the novice meat cook, it takes all the guess work out when you can't taste what you're cooking!

I love to cook, and I'm getting there.

Four years ago I moved out of home into my own place when I started university, and three years ago I realised that instant noodles or spaghetti with grated cheese wasn't a tenable long-term plan. Since I started cooking I've been amazed with how much I've improved, but there's still a way to go.

Money has always been an issue in terms of the ingredients I can buy and the skills I can get, but it's also useful. I can impress my friends and family by transforming cheaper cuts of meat and pedestrian ingredients, but at the same time I'm quite timid cooking a good steak or most seafood since where I am it's too expensive to experiment with. That said, I can still make a meal that my girlfriend and I both agree is tastier that any of the restaurants we can afford to visit.

One of my favourite cooking things is what kellydamnit said, which is when you can prepare ingredients that people don't like in a way that they'll enjoy. The highlight was my sister -- she claims to hate olives, garlic, and anchovies, yet she couldn't get enough of my olive tapenade. Hah.

I started cooking meat four years ago, when I started living with my meatatarian boyfriend (I took 'food' in the division of labour, he took 'money'). It was surprisingly easy to adapt vege recipes for meat - but I recommend a good meat thermometer for the novice meat cook, it takes all the guess work out when you can't taste what you're cooking!

I'm the opposite, often substituting soy or tvp for meat in traditional recipes. Not that that's a surprise.