IME, it really helps to cut and sort all ingredients beforehand when you’re cooking something quick and “intense”. It doesn’t really matter when you’re doing tomato sauce or stews that needs to simmer for a while and you can add ingredients fairly slowly, but it’s hard to do a stir-fry or multiple dishes efficiently if you have to chop up ingredients at the same time.
Also, from watching Master Chef on the BBC, I gather that professional restaurant kitchens prepare (chop, wash, fillet, mix) pretty much everything they can beforehand so that the time between order and serving is as short as possible. Most TV chefs have worked in professional kitchens and are probably just used to working that way.
One of my favorite cookbooks is the Three and Four Ingredient Cookbook. It has some great recipes for cooks who are just started or just strapped for time/ingredients. I have a few staple recipes from here that I use often, like the Scottish rolls and the avocado soup. My husband loves to cook and this is one of his favorite books.
Alton Brown is totally awesome as well, I like knowing the whys of cooking, it definitely helps you get a feel for when you can be slap-dash and substitute, and when you have to stick close to a formula.
Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and The Best Recipes in the World have lots of simple recipes. Most of the recipes we’ve tried from there have come out well.
Some books that don’t have recipes, but that he’ll find interesting, are Harold McGee’s books On Food and Cooking and The Curious Cook. Lots of stuff there about kitchen lore that isn’t actually true. It’s a good cure for any fussiness in cooking that comes from traditional kitchen lore, not science (like the idea that you should never wash mushrooms).
My husband is also an engineer and is a great cook, although I do most of our cooking. However, I often delegate the tasks that benefit from precision to him. When ingredients need to be cut into even pieces, his are a thing of beauty! I did have to explain to him that chicken salad, for whatever reason, just doesn’t work real well with evenly cubed pieces of chicken :).
Just out of curiosity, does he (or do you) pay attention to the recipes on such products as cereal, canned meat, canned veggies, flour, sugar, other staples’ packaging?
I’m sure we had a Campbell’s Soup recipe book (I’ll skip looking for an online reference) where you could fix anything from salad dressing to Peking Duck with just some soup and a tabletop of other ingredients.
I mentioned in another recent thread how one of my regular dishes is to open a can of No Beans Chili and a can of Niblets corn kernels and dump them in a Corningware bowl and throw in some chopped onions and some chili powder and cayenne pepper and put it in the microwave on high for six minutes and sit down with my wife and scarf it up.
That doesn’t make me an amateur cook by any stretch, but it is simple and there are few ingredients.
Another phase in my cooking life was doing as much as I could find recipes for on wok cooking. And hibachi cooking. Got pretty good at that, too.
