Who wears the Chef's hat in your house? (ingredients, grills, meals)

[daddiesgirl]

I love food. I love to cook and I love experimenting with ingredients, shopping for that perfect bowl or plate, decorating the kitchen table, or getting that perfect utensil or splurge on the latest innovative kitchen technology. I just love the sensation of taste. I am also a man.

So when we have guests over for dinner and they compliment my wife for the food where she laughs loudly with a "Oh no, no. I don't do food. Talk to him," I get this really odd look like my wife's the butch and I'm the b*tch.

My wife really cannot cook. She even screws up on scrambled eggs it's a pity. Am I the only guy that cooks for his family? And is it unmanly to do so?

So who cooks in your family by a show of hands?

[sirron]

My hubby also is the cook in our house. He does so well that I now need to go on a diet.

[arsbadmojo]

I do the majority of the cooking. My wife isn't a bad cook, but she doesn't have the greatest kitchen instincts and tends to be a recipe follower. If I follow a recipe at all, I deconstruct it and look for the 'why' so it makes sense to me. I'm also much better at multitasking.

[Capt. Cave Man]

I do alot of the cooking and I like doing it. Wife doesn't like to cook, when she does it's always "plain jane" or boring stuff(my opinion).

Most of the meals I cook are on the grill/smoker, meat, veg, and anything that can be made in the oven. If I cook too many meals in a row the kids start asking for "normal food". Daughter says I'd smoke spaghetti if I could......so I now have a challenge.

I know alot of guys who do the cook'n, my generation anyway(30-50yr olds). My parents generation has mostly the women cooking, in our area anyway.

[7G9C4J2]

While both my spouse and I can and do cook, he does the vast majority (probably 85% or more) of the cooking in our family.

I'm a plodder. I'm "Old Faithful." The chicken-fried steaks and lasagna and stroganoff that I make can be counted on to come out the same way each time. I don't dislike cooking by any means, but it is not a passion, or an art form, to me.

In contrast, my spouse is perpetually looking for new things to prepare, new seasoning combinations to explore, new methods to try. He doesn't ever prepare the same thing the same way twice: there's always a new twist. And he is truly passionate about cooking; for him, cooking represents one of the greatest pleasures in life, and is the way he expresses his creativity and love.

Since we both have full-time professional jobs outside the home, it is no more fair for him to both cook and wash up afterward than it would be for me to do both tasks. So the agreement we've had for decades is that whoever cooks is exempt from the KP duties after the meal. That means that I wash a lot of dishes, but I consider it a reasonable trade-off.

We both had parents who were born in the teens and twenties of the last century, and of course the model we both had was that the mother ALWAYS cooked and washed up. That was true whether or not she enjoyed it, whether or not she worked outside the home, and regardless of what the outcome tasted like. A father's place was in his easy chair in the living room with the newspaper. I'm glad to be living at a time when it's culturally acceptable for the person who most loves to cook in the family to do so, regardless of gender.

The spouse has passed his love of cooking on to the next generation as well. We have a son and a daughter, both mid-20's, and they are both very proficient cooks in their own right. The son, who is still in college, has an arrangement with four of his female friends, whereby the five of them go grocery shopping together, he tells them exactly what to buy, they pay for it, then he prepares a gourmet meal that they all enjoy together. And the girls clean up afterward, too.

[LaceyEx]

Me!!! Main chef and bottle washer!

[movingtohouston]

Me now. It used to be hubby when we were first married. I couldn't boil water to save my life. Hubby then took a job working nights so it was either starve or learn to cook. I'm still hear so I guess I have learned enough to not kill my family with botulism. LOL

[diertac]

I can cook, but it puts me in a foul mood. And I'm not a good cook.

My husband loves to cook. He doesn't know how to clean for crap, though. So the deal is that he cooks and I clean.

[Debsi]

I am the one with the passion for cooking, so I do most of it. I get to do most of the dishes, too.

I like experimenting - either by buying a vegetable I've never seen/prepared before, or learning to make favorite international foods at home. I reserve that cooking for weekends, mostly, and prepare simple reliable things during the week.

[Ohiogirl81]

I cook. He grills.

He grills unless there's actual snow on the ground.