Hey, hair-twin! 
Now I feel loved!
Anyone who knows me knows I loooove to cook. My family and friends tease me about my collection of kitchen gear and cookbooks, and it’s probably a good thing I don’t have more space, or they would multiply. I live alone, and though I don’t understand the people who say it’s too much trouble to cook for themselves, I love potlucks and parties because they give me the opportunity to try new recipes. (I cook for myself all the time, but most of the time it’s not good to have, say, an entire flourless chocolate torte in the house.)
I CAN cook. I have to cook. I cook every day. I can be pretty good at cooking.
But, bleah, I really don’t like it.
I don’t like planning for it, shopping for it, keeping on top of supplies so they don’t go bad, making it, or cleaning up after it. And I especially don’t like having to do it all over again the next day. Day after day…
I love restaurants! That is the only thing I ever want for a gift. Take me out!
I will never be a great cook, but I am a good cook and find it very soothing, as well as that ‘small every-day miracle’ that Veb describes. I appreciate subtle and complicated dishes, but I myself am not that sophisticated in the kitchen.
I am in the position of not being crazy about red meat, but I have a husband and 15 year old boy who are, at least the kid is. So I do end up cooking stuff that never touches my lips, but that’s not the end of the world. Also, I like to use only the freshest ingredients so I end up at the grocery store all the time. But that’s okay. The only thing I really get tired of is, you guessed it, doing the cleanup.
I like to bake (pies, chocolate chip pumpkin bread, cranberry-orange bread, etc) in fall and winter, but so much not during the spring and summer. Husband and I used to bake yeast bread together and in recent years, with the kids older, have begun doing this again.
I agree that it would definitely not be too much trouble to cook for myself alone, I did it for years and was quite content.
Some favorites: paella, jambalaya, crab bisque, Julia Child’s roast chicken, insalata caprese. Favorite flavors together: arugula, olive oil and fresh mozzarella, chocolate and orange.
I like to cook and to bake, and I’m pretty good at it. I will admit, though, that I am a total loss when it comes to veggies. Aside from the occasional bunch of fresh steamed asparagus, pretty much any vegetable served in my house came out of a bag in the freezer.
Count me in as one of the hate-to-clean-afters, too. And I am capable of using every dish in the house when I cook. No one else in my house likes to clean either, so there’s almost always a big pile of dishes or pots in the sink, and they’ll stay there 'til someone loses their temper - and yells at someone ELSE to load the dishwasher!
I love cooking! I have more cookbooks than I know what to do with, even after frequent culling of my collection. For presents, I ask for specific kitchen items to improve my gear. I have a decent taste memory and sense of scent, plus a good ability to put together ingredients in my head and figure out their taste, such that I can typically cook without having to taste the food in the process - nice for when this vegetarian is cooking meat, which I do nearly every day for my husband. It also helps me adjust recipes on the fly should I be out of an ingredient. I even enjoy cooking for parties/guests, and have impressed even my father-in-law with my cooking.
My problem is that if I’m just cooking for myself, I find it hard to be bothered to whip up anything decent. I tend to revert to packaged foods or boring stuff.
I hate cleaning up, too. Well, I don’t mind it so much if the sink and dishrack are totally empty, then I can manage some. Fortunately, my husband loves my cooking enough to not complain too much about doing dishes.
It seems to me that when one person in the family does the cooking for everyone else, someone else should have to clean up.
I agree.
Sadly there are only 2 in my family and the child protests far too much if he has to wash AND dry (it’s not fair mummmmmmm!). I hate drying, so I have to cook and wash.
POO to cooking!
Both my husband and I love cooking. We spent a stupidly large amount of money on kitchen gear and now have all the knives, pots, pans, appliances and gadgets I could ever possibly need. That makes it more fun to cook, for me, since we had pretty dreadful knives when I was growing up. My parents both loved cooking and got me started young. It’s second nature -though it’s still a bore sometimes to come up with something every night of the week, plus lunches for me for work.
Regarding cleaning up: I absolutely don’t mind it. I’m a natural cleaner-upper, whether I created the mess or someone else did. Like others have mentioned, when I cook I clean up after myself as I go: it started as a necessity when I was living in apartments, because there just was never enough room for everything if I didn’t clean up as I went, but now it’s a habit and I’ve found that it saves time (and makes me a little less stressed, as well). You folks without dishwashers scare me, though … I won’t live in a place that doesn’t have a dishwasher!
Well, DUH, you’re supposed to make two! 
…and then send one my way … yeah, that’s the ticket…
You know, that thought had crossed my mind.
We have a dishwasher. We call him “Dad.”
I love to cook, although part of that is that I’m a fairly brutish-looking guy and so it impresses people that I have a grasp of flavors that go together. To that end, though, it’s usually more impressive that I can mix girl drinks without actually being a girl-drink drunk.
I generally follow recipes along the lines of Rachel Ray’s 30-minute meals, especially because I’m in law school and am a bit short on time. If I can whip up a good-looking, good-tasting meal in less than an hour, I’m my classmates’ savior.
Eh, cooking is something you gotta do if you’re going to eat anything besides PB&J. I don’t mind cooking, really, provided it’s something pretty simple, but it’s not exactly something that makes me dance around and clap my hands with joy. It’s just another job to do, like laundry or changing the litterboxes.
I love cooking. I just made enchiladas this afternoon, and made pizza with swiss chard and spinach a few days ago. I live alone, so unfortunately doing the dishes falls squarely on my head, but there’s nothing I love more than having people over for dinner so I can spend a few days planning a menu and finding exactly what’s going to go well together. I feel proud when I make something complicated and delicious, and I love being able to prepare a meal for friends and family.
I like to cook.
I especially like to shop for the week’s groceries after I have planned out the dinners. My wife does most of the cooking during the week, but the weekends are me.
But the process of opening the wine and starting the conversation as I chop or slice or lay things out and begin assembling is special. And when we have guests to dinner, they wind up in the kitchen anyway.
My big thing now is pie crust. I need the practice, so we are eating lots of quiches and tarts and so forth.
But nothing beats the feeling of making something, setting it on the table, and watching the people I care about most wolf it down. And now it is grilling season, so we can sit on the deck and devour.
Good times, good times.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m another bachelor who loves to cook. And I enjoy a well-cooked meal. But as a bachelor, I find it unfulfilling to cook for just myself. So I do a lot of quick and easy things.
I enjoy cooking for all the reasons that others have mentioned previously in this thread, and now I have the extreme joy of sharing it with a student! My eldest son has discovered that he, too, loves to cook. I am deriving great pleasure from sharing my tips and techniques with someone who views the whole experience as an adventure. Plus, I get the thrill of not only haing my family compliment my cooking (and gobbling down the food), but having them compliment my son! It’s a mother’s pride thing, I guess. So far he’s mastered homemade salsa, grilled cheese sandwiches, and he made an awesome coconut creme pie (with crust from scratch!) for this past Easter.
Woah there, hold on a sec!
Why dry dishes that will perfectly dry themselves when left alone long enough? If you think about it, we probably benefit from the extra humidity in the air, right? Or maybe not having to wash and dry all those extra dishtowels is good for the environment?
I’m trying to teach my son the perfect Zen stacking method for the dish drainer that will hold an entire meal’s worth of stuff and still allow good air circulation, he’s 12 and more prone to lego-style fitting in of all the pieces but I’ve got faith.
I came to cooking relatively late in life; I really started to enjoy it at about age 30. Now I do 95% of the cooking in our house, and generally enjoy it a lot. I also clean as I go, and do the dishes as well. Perhaps that needs to change… . I enjoy asian and hispanic influenced cooking, particularly entrees. Baking is not something I’ve ventured into yet. There’s something particularly soothing about spending a Sunday late afternoon preparing something yummy for your family.
I accept your challenge Yoda