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Something I have noticed, being a realtor in an engineer town - engineers usually cook well. Doesn't matter if it is the husband or the wife - whoever is the engineer usually cooks for the family and is the main one interested in the kitchen, when looking for a house. My son is also an engineer - and cooks in a major and inventive way, while my DIL doesn't do such a great job (but she does clean-up, which is more than fair). There is a connection there. Makes sense - since food prep itself is a science using proportions and heat time.
Also makes sense, since when I look back on my childhood and realize my mother (who has no math ability AT ALL) could not boil water (the steak as shoe leather sure brought back too many bad memories). Also the stories of bloody chicken rang too true. UGH. Her main staple was Velveeta, which she slathered on everything.
I think engineers are good at following recipes. But are not necessarily intuitive cooks. I am an intuitive cook. I don't really measure, taste as I go, and modify recipes if I even think of following them. For that reason, I tend to skip baking. Baking requires measuring, and it is much harder to experiment.
For intuitive cooks, exposure is critical. For those people who follow recipes, it is "easier" to expand your repertoire.
Engineers are good at following recipes, but also at estimating stuff. They are also into problem solving. If they screw something up, they'll figure out what went wrong and fix it next time. Whereas a lot of people would just get embarrassed and never make another attempt.
Over the holidays my mom made sausage for breakfast that was way too crispy.
If you are talking about sausage patties, that's my kind of sausage! I like it very brown and bordering on crispy. I can't stand undercooked pork. I like link sausage well browned too. And I like the thin breakfast pork chops fried in a pan and well browned and the fat crispy!
I think there are a few things engineers can recognize: 1) Cooking is science. How the food comes out is a physics/chemistry/psychology experiment.
No no no no, hell no. Cooking is an ART. I'm 66 years old and I only just learned this a few years ago. Come stand by me while I'm cooking a pot of Guinness Stew and you might get this. Or not.
The rest of your post makes sense.
my mom "thought" she could cook but she's a very minimum kind of cook. my MIL cooks w/ all her heart and you can see and taste the difference. unfortunately i'm just like my mom. i dislike cooking and do my 5 rounds of various dishes to get the family fed. my husband (engineer also) is an excellent cook and he enjoys it. i wish he had more time to cook for the family but at least he does all the meals on the weekends.
My mom is a decent cook. Everything is edible, except maybe steak. My dad is an engineer who has some very good but painstaking recipes that sometimes require expensive tools. His margarita recipe has version control and a bill of materials.
My mom was a boring cook. We basically had baked split chicken breast, carolina white rice and frozen peas or green beans every night. When I moved out on my own, I started cooking new and exciting dishes, and quickly realized that I was pretty good at it. Whenever my husband and I (and eventually our kids) would visit my mother, she'd have me prepare the meals.
I'm also an intuitive cook, rarely measuring things (except when I'm baking) and just eyeball it and taste as I go along. I very rarely follow a recipe exactly, usually adding my own spin to things. I'm trying to teach my kids to cook this way, and my oldest, who has been living in an off campus house for the past two years seems to be doing very well at it.
Does anyone else have a terrible cook for a mother? Any holiday cooking horror stories?
On the positive side, when your mother is a horrible cook you find airline food and school cafeteria food quite palatable, actually. Everything my mother cooked was bland and usually came out of a box (just add water!) or the freezer.
When people in movies or on TV would say they are looking forward to "some home cooking", I had no idea what they were talking about. It seemed phony, to look forward to that.
When we were kids and we'd go to a restaurant that advertised "homemade" dishes, we would groan and ask why we couldn't go to a restaurant that served restaurant food!
Homemade chicken soup was the worst. It tasted like dishwater.
American Chop Suey was a standard. Boil some egg noodles then strain them. Add ground beef and a can of Campbell's tomato soup, and wallah! Give it to the kids.
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