I really enjoy cooking. More than just plain cooking, I enjoy baking. Cooking is the only real way I can be creative – I’m just not artistic enough to do anything else, but cooking is the one thing where I can be creative and imaginative. Plus, I find it incredibly relaxing.
I love to cook.
I find it to be an enjoyable, relaxing activity. At the end of the day, I just like being in the kitchen with my wife, having a drink, putting a meal together while most other people are watching TV waiting for their frozen pizza to finish. Its the time that we catch up, chat, joke, hug each other, help each other do things, and all that jazz.
I like trying to make something new and alter recipes that I know by heart.
I also feel that since people basically eat 3 meals a day, every day, for the rest of their lives, it’s just logical that you should do it yourself.
And I’m no health nut, but I just dislike putting “weird” things into my body. By “weird”, I mean partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup, annatto extract, niacinamide, folic acid, sodium ascorbate, pryridoxine hydrochloride, reduced iron, etc. etc. etc. All those things they put in soup and frozen dinners for flavor, preservation, to avoid separation, color, whatever.
Even if some of those things aren’t killing you, or making you fat, I don’t know what the hell they are and I don’t like eating them.
Are there days when I just want to grab some McD’s on the way home? Sure. But I consider cooking the most rewarding thing I do and I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
I don’t bake. Primarily because I don’t care for sweets.
I LOVE cooking. My wife also believes that I missed my calling, but as far as she’s concerned it’s never too late to attend culinary school. I don’t know about working as a chef though. I’m with Flickster, what if cooking for a living is like the candy store owner and candy? And having just finished Kitchen Confidential, I don’t know if I can make that sort of time commitment.
Interesting that I have a love for it, considering that my mom (who is Korean) told me that if a man steps into a kitchen his penis will fall off.
In retrospect, I think it was natural. I have a very keen sense of smell, which I believe lets me appreciate food on a level different than other people.
In the beginning, I uses to approach recipes like chemistry experiments. Now I have graduated to modifying on the fly.
I generally cook Italian and Chinese with a smattering of French and Korean.
I have spoiled my wife completely. She no longer likes to eat at places like Olive Garden, because now she can tell that the pasta is not ‘al dente’. Can’t eat at what passes for Mexican food here in Mississippi, because she has tasted my fresh salsa. Her co-workers wonder what sort of super-huband she has when she heats up Tuscan Chicken Cakes in the microwave
My food budget shows, because my monthly expenditure for food is $600, which I understand is unusually high for a just me and my wife.
Have a nice collection of Cooks Illustrated back issues, and Wustoff Grand Prix knives.
Next on the list is getting a nice set of All-Clad cookware, and growing an herb garden so that I can have things like cilantro and flat-leaf parsley on hand at all times.
I go on and off. I do enjoy it, but I hate the clean-up, and I get frustrated with making the same things if I don’t feel inspired. I’m a throw-things-in-the-pot, experimental cook, and I find fridge-prowling and creating dinner more exciting than planned meals. I love, love, love ahopping for food, though. And I like the act of feeding people.
Especially when they do the dishes.
I usuallu have a few dsihes I’m particularly interested in at a time, so we’ll eat several variations on them, and then I’ll move on. I’m a cookbook junkie, particularly chatty writers like John Thorne, Nigel Slater, and Nigella Lawson. Really fancy cooking intimidates me. Baking bread and making stew is about my speed.
That would be shopping, not ahopping.
I really enjoy cooking, but not every night; my wife and I both cook, and we go through stints where one of us cooks more than the other. It’s just a very satisfying, creative, sensual process.
Daniel
I love to cook. Of course, I spent 20 years as a professional chef, went to culinary school and all that. I just don’t like cooking for a living . So for the last 4 or 5 years, I only cook at home.
I love to cook. I don’t like the cleaning up afterwards, since, like FCM and calm kiwi, I’m a messy cook. If I’m doing something for a dinner party or something, I’ll clean up as I cook (mostly because I need the same utensils or pans more than once), but usually the kitchen is a disaster area when I’m done.
I don’t cook as much as I’d like these days, because my GF and I have different schedules (she works the night shift), so Friday and Saturday are pretty much the only days we can eat a home-cooked meal together. Only one of the ways in which having different work shifts sucks. 
Hey, me too! Well, last week, but you know what I mean.
Hi; I love to cook…as long as I have lots of time…interestingly enough, I have found that people who enjoy cooking can cook, but good cooks generally don’t make good bakers - mainly because, when you cook, it’s a pinch of this, a little of that whereas baking requires exact measurements which cooks struggle with.
At least that’s my theory, anyway.
Yet another victory against the forces of culinary malfeasance.
Stranger
Hmm, I wonder if there might be a trend here: I don’t mind cooking, but I don’t really get anything out of it (besides food :)) … but I’m a musician and a writer, so I wonder if my ambivalence about cooking is because I have other creative outlets and don’t “need” that one.
Are there folks who find cooking to be relaxing/creative/an outlet and also have other creative pursuits?
I’m also a semi-pro musician
You may have something there. Cooking frustrates me, because I can do everything right, but it still comes out wrong sometimes. Baking is much better. Bread from scratch is one of the most satisfying things to me.
Now, I like cooking and I like baking, but I just don’t do it as much as I used to. It makes me appreciate the times when I do get a “home-cooked” meal, though, much more, because I know the effort that went into it.
Definitely. If you’re cooking and you want more garlic, throw it in. You can’t make a cake and decide to throw in an extra egg - you’ll end up with a brick.
I’ve got a couple things I do well baking wise (like cheesecake!), but I very much prefer cooking.
I dunno. They’re two different skills (baking and cooking), but I definitely enjoy both.
It may be easier to move from baking to cooking than vice-versa: I started off baking, and it took me a long time with cooking before I was able to relax enough to experiment with recipes. My wife still laughs at me for doing things like (for example) measuring out the pecans precisely when making a pecan-brown-butter sauce. But I like to be exact the first time I try a recipe, so that I have a benchmark from which to experiment.
Daniel
For me, baking and cooking are two sides of the same coin. If you have some knowledge of how ingredients combine, you can be just as creative with baking as with cooking. For instance, chocolate covered espresso bean cookies, and contreau flavoured chocolate cake. Both of which I adapted, via a bit of experimentation, from other recipes. Or maybe its just the scientist side of me trying to take over in the kitchen.
To some degree that’s true, and I certainly tinker with my baking recipes (my rabbit punch cookies have been described as "a spiritual experience); but experimenting with baking IS a much more scientific process for me than experimenting with, say, soups.
With a soup, I can throw in an extra stalk of celery if the celery looks good, or if I think the onion:celery ratio is too high. With a cake, I can’t just throw in an extra couple tablespoons butter if I don’t like the batter’s color: I need to consider all other ingredients carefully and make adjustments according to fats, flours, sweeteners, etc.
Bread is an exception: bread is forgiving.
Daniel
I agree with you totally – baking experimentation is far more scientific than cookery experimentation.
Rabbit punch cookies? I’m intrigued. What are they?
Pecan brown butter sauce?
Cointreau chocolate cake?
Soup with, uh, fresh vegetables?
By the way, to all the cooks/bakers in the thread, I’m willing to sample the goods, so to speak. In the interest of science and eliminating ignorance and all that. 
Yup, deliciously rich, orangey, dark, and decadent.
You’ll have to get in line then.