Can you cook?

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I can cook in the microwave or the oven if needed. I cannot cook on a stove.

I recently got really into cooking because I realized that if I found good recipes and followed them precisely I could make food that was just as good or better than what I could buy at a restaurant for a fraction of the cost. For example, I got a used bread machine off Craigslist to make pizza dough and now I make pizzas at home for about 1/6 of the cost of buying one at the pizzeria on the corner.

The real trick to cooking well is learning how to use spices at the appropriate times and in the correct measurements. My wife raves about my cooking now.

I recommend a book called "Cooking for Geeks" which explains cooking in a very logical, scientific way that I found appealing. Cooking can be a lot of fun if you can develop an interest in it.

I can't really cook at all. I can make really simple stuff only, like ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese.
Surprisingly though, I can actually bake pretty well. I can make all sorts of cookies and pies.

I used to work in a kitchen. So yes I can cook few things. But I hate cooking. I would eat out everyday if I could...

I can boil pasta (then I add bottled spaghetti sauce, and frozen meatballs), and I can steam my broccoli. Other then that everything else is microwaved frozen dinners, or reheated take out food.

The reasons for that are 1. I just can't cook that well. Anything that I cook myself will probably not taste as good as a microwaved frozen dinner. 2. The clean up is just not worth it. Cooking and cleaning up from it is just too much work.

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I would recommend starting with eggs or brownies.

To some extent I can cook. What holds me back is the challenge of synchronizing several saucepans and an oven - the dreaded multi-tasking. Superficially it doesn't seem very different to the job I used to do - science - but the difference is that with science everything is precisely calculated and predicted, and the incubators and time / temperature controls are much more accurate. So are the "recipes" - precise protocols that specify exactly what to do. With cooking, a lot of things are pretty imprecise, and that fazes me because I never know what kind of tolerances are acceptable. I try to get things too accurate, too perfect, and in doing so I leave the path of conventional cookery, which seems full of intuitive guesswork.

Somehow I muddle through using a compromise between scientific precision and winging it, but it can get pretty stressful, especially if time is limited. If I get to cook the same meal a few times, under the same conditions, I can get quite good at it and the stress goes away.

Mostly I live on salads, bread (home-baked), simple "just add hot water" powdered soup, scrambled eggs, and mashed potato. Those are all simple enough for me to prepare and I rarely feel the need to eat anything more complicated. I really don't know why anybody bothers with more complicated cookery, unless they've got some spare time and want to try their hand at something a little more challenging.

Cook in one pan recipes were made for you, TD! There are lots of varieties. The easiest for a non-cook might be a simple risotto, (I'm happy to post fairly foolproof instructions if anyone wants the recipe) or a stirfry (ditto). Stirfrys are a bit harder to get just right, though (like life!) you learn a lot by trial and error.

Some non-cooks start with microwave cooking because it is fast and easy. One tip: If you want to bake a whole potato in the microwave, prick it several times with a fork before cooking, otherwise they explode; if you forget, you will only forget once given the mess to clean up.

I am a cooking anarchist. It drives anyone who lives with me crazy.

I don't time anything in the oven (I HATE the sound of alarms, scares me). I just smell when it's done and take it out when it smells right (much more accurate if you ask me, since ovens differ). I don't measure things according to recipees. It's more fin to me to see how flexible a recipee is by altering things this way and that. I like looking at what random ingreedients I have, or what looks fresh, and going from there. I don't like planning and shoping with a list (I always miss something).

Tonight's dinner was a veggie & tofu stir fry over jasmine rice, followed by vanilla ice cream topped with blueberry/blackberry/roasted walnut sangria compote.

I have a automatic rice cooker that keeps the cooked rice warm until I'm ready to eat it.
These days I'll often cook one thing at a time and eat it as I cook it so I don't have to multi-task.

I used to go by timers--now I go by smell and a thermometer.

I can cook. Family members refuse to eat what I cook.

I burn water and scorch air. the microwave oven is my friend I get lotsa those precooked brown rice packages that nuke in 3 minutes, and pour a can of soup over them and call it a meal. I make myself eat rabbitfood [salad] 4 times a week, even though i'm sick to death of it and have to pry open my mouth to get the spoon in.

Actually, it's the final internal temperature that matters, not the cooking temperature, and pork only needs to cook to 137 degrees to be safe. I regularly cook it sous vide in a 135 degree water bath and finish it on the grill or in a saute pan, and no one has died yet.

Incidentally, for people who hate to multi-task but want to cook, a sous vide machine can be had for about $150 these days, and is pretty much foolproof and requires no skill at all to use, and turns out excellent results.

I am happy to have a wife who helps me with it. We usually make a family dinner each Sunday. She helps me to make some dishes. I really love her and her patience.

Can I cook???

Let me see. I bake three kinds of breads, rolls and loaves (same recipe), crumpets, and biscuits, I've made lasagna, with both ground beef and tofu, meat loaf, and pizza, and fried fish, liver, and veggie burgers for a quick list off my head. I'm allergic to eggs now but when I could eat them, I made a lot of omelets.

So YES!

I'm not great at cooking but I guess I would consider myself decent. Cooking can be hard for me so I often turn to microwaveable food that takes no effort to prepare. I am able to basic food such as rice and grilled cheese but I am no professional chef.

I get food and recipes delivered to me which makes cooking easier because there are step by step instructions with pictures on how to make it. Having a recipe to follow certainly makes things easier and less harder to mess up.