Kitchen skills

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I know many on this site are very concerned with personal relations and technological accomplishment but I am pretty much a loner and enjoy fooling around with inexpensive experiments. And I enjoy eating and have no money to spend on expensive restaurants. So I do a lot of cooking and baking for myself and for a club I belong to that gives me free lessons in Finnish. I have been doing this for quite a while so I have picked up a few techniques beyond what I learned as a kid working in the kitchen with my mother. Does anyone else enjoy this this type of stuff?

Not sure if this is what you mean, but i like it when i find out some new combination of tastes or a good way to prepare something.

Like lemon juice and coriander with roast lamb, and leave it open in the oven to get really scrumptious. Or how to cook red lentils so they come out perfectly fluffy. Or to add a dash of olive oil, and cumin seeds, and NO salt until the end to brown rice, or to cook split peas with bacon bits.

I tend to keep things simple, so what I appreciate are things like that rather than long complicated recipes or complex constructions and doses of ingredients. But I love eating them if people do do that stuff. I can taste the tiniest of ingredients and love working out what's in things.

I enjoy cooking, but not really for myself. I like cooking for other people mostly. I have to be in the right mood though. I also have food allergies so many of the more common ingredients are kind of out of my "good to eat list". so bah.

I also like languages and one day just up and decided to learn German. haha. Well, I took 2 years of it in high school and loved the course, so I just went from there. I tend to go crazy about things for about 2 years then it cools down a little. So I spent 2 years learning German and then just kind of fell out of it for a little. I am thinking of picking it back up some though, I can read, write and speak it enough to "get by" but my oral comprehension is horrid.

Although I spent most of my life cooking and enjoying meat I saw a very brief scene on TV showing a cow on broken legs trying to flee its executioner in a slaughter house and it destroyed my capability to work with meat. But I understand and appreciate your enthusiasm for meat as a food and make no judgments about other people's habits.

At the moment I am doing a great deal of baking and have worked out simple and flexible recipes in the area. I modified a recipe for Blitzkuchen so that once the basic cake batter was complete, a matter of about 15 minutes, additions could be made to convert the basic recipe from a simple lemon flavored cake to a chocolate cake or a spice cake or various kinds of fresh fruit cake.

cooking savant!! :D

well, I don't care for cooking, but I LOVE to bake :D

One of my early inventions was to cook raw rice in a deep frying pan in oil until it turned brown. It has to be watched carefully as it burns quickly if it's not stirred but then dump in bouillon a cupful at a time until the rice is al dente and then diced celery, diced tomatoes, diced green pepper, diced broiled fish or other meat (this was before I stopped eating meat), chopped parsley, and perhaps a tablespoon or two of oregano. It is also possible to add a bit of honey, diced oranges and pineapple and even some ground cinnamon and grated fresh ginger. The process is similar to risotto but the raw rice is roasted brown in the hot oil to give it a nutty flavor. I didn't know about risotto when I first made this but it is a bit different. I tried using small macaroni instead of rice but it didn't come out nearly as good.

i love cooking, i find it relaxing. washing up on the other hand

I love to cook myself, I actually control my eating in part by only keeping food that needs preparation in my home. It also keeps my non-cooking room mate out of my food, but that's another story. The only problem I have with cooking is that most of my recipes are meant for 4, and cooking for 1 isn't much fun. I usually just halve my recipes, so I get two meals out of each effort. One of my favorite parts of cooking is the presentation and garnishing, but when I'm just cooking for myself, there's not really much point in making it pretty.

I also cook for one. I've gotten really good at cooking and baking. I'm a formulation chemist at work, so my job entails knowing the functionality of raw materials and how they interact with each other in a formula......that's basically what cooking and baking are. I enjoy making different pasta dishes, different salads, broiling salmon, making casseroles, grilling, making stir fry's...I love seafood too....I also know how to make my own pie crust, and do all my baking from scratch....only think is I have to be alone when cooking or baking....no one talking to me or getting in my way......

I only usually cook for myself. I scale down recipes to make only one or two servings. I have a little tiny casserole dish, and smaller pots and pans. It's actually not that hard to cook for yourself....same as cooking for four, only you use lesser amounts of ingredients.....the process is still the same....

I used to really enjoy cooking. I'm spread too thin these days though and am too distracted to cook much and cook safely. LOL! Unfortunately, we eat out way too much- unhealthy and expensive. If my AS husband would take over care of the kids for an hour before dinner, I could cook more, but it's really hard to drag him away from his work or his gaming. Ugh. He'd rather run to the store and pick up something to eat or take us out than manage the kids for an hour. Good thing he makes good money.

There is one philosophical point about cooking.
Almost all philosophers contend that language is essential to thinking. I do not know, of course, how most other people think but I have a very strong suspicion that autistic and AS people do not initially think in words but use words to convey their thoughts rather than basically manipulate their thoughts. I am mostly a visual artist and a designer and think mostly in images but I enjoy words as I have written quite a lot of reasonable poetry. But my thinking mostly takes place in the manipulation of remembered sensations.
But it is almost impossible to use words to think in cooking. I can add or subtract flavors in my head to an experimental dish and the results almost always turns out as my non-verbal thoughts worked out which is why cooking is such a pleasure and of course the eating is a great reward. Words can never convey flavors and their interactions and are totally useless in culinary thinking.