What is your level of cooking ability?

I chose Confident.

I got my first job working in a popular family owned Italian restaurant. AT 14, I started as a bus boy and a couple of months later moved into the kitchen. I started at salads and ended up working the line. I am pretty sure OSHA will no longer let a fifteen year old run the deep fat fryers but it was different then.

I went on to a few more restaurants after that and learned a little at each one. This does not make me a professional by any means, but I am very confident in my home kitchen.

According to what Athena posted, I’d say I’m tiptoeing into the 3rd stage. I never don’t follow a recipe but I certainly combine elements from many. I’m noticing trends and I’m paying attention to textures. Like with choosing what clothes to wear, I don’t want things matchy-matchy, I want things to “go” with one another. But I don’t think I’ll ever reach stage 4 for a long, long time, if ever, because my interest is in cooking solely to my palate (and the similar palate of the SO) - which is hot, flavorful, spicy, often ethnic. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pull off a good chicken 'n dumplings. Stage 4 is also pulling off a dinner party I’d imagine.

Hijack: Athena, the recipe I use for spicy noodles is this. It would be good with fish sauce and I found using only sesame oil (for the quantity of peanut oil + sesame) was quite good. Also, I use that quantity of sauce (only 1.5tbsp srirachra) for 8oz of noodles and tons of vegetables - the latest were matchstick cukes, carrots, snap peas, radishes, mung bean sprouts - and garlic and ginger too. Chicken breast works well too. The rice vinegar (ha!) adds a really nice touch to it.

Did a couple years at culinary school and can cook pretty much anything you want…although my lentil soups have been problematic lately.

I was a pizza cook in college, then learned my way around a kitchen until I was a professional chef in Beverly Hills.

And now I do coporate travel in Cleveland, go figure.

But you ARE good at mixing metaphors. :wink:

I chose confident, but now I am having second thoughts. I am an excellent home cook if I have a recipe. I am not confident enough to just grab some ingredients and cut loose, unless it’s something very simple. I have no trouble making complicated dishes and meals from recipes.

Confident. The highest compliment my husband can give to a restaurant is “I don’t think you could do that at home,” and it’s pretty much reserved for places that use exotic ingredients or techniques. I’ve never been professionally trained, but I am pretty damned good.

I’m pretty confident. I didn’t learn using recipes, I learned by doing. My mother was extremely ill when she was pregnant with my brother, when I was 8, so I learned to scramble eggs and generally do a lot of food prep for my father. As I got older, I cooked my own meals a lot of the time because my mother didn’t believe that I was REALLY getting an upset stomach from whatever she’d made (turned out that I have IBS), and she didn’t want to make any adjustments to accommodate me. So I learned to cook out of self defense. When I got married, my husband would request dishes that I’d never made, so I consulted cookbooks and experimented.

Today, I’ll examine the ingredients in the pantry and fridge and freezer, and decide what to make of them. I’ll also experiment, cautiously, with new things, and take notice if I can eat them, and if I WANT to eat them again.

I find that if I don’t make certain things regularly, then my skill level with that technique will deteriorate. Mostly this is stuff that I shouldn’t eat anyway, like pastries.

I’m somewhere between Fairly Capable and Capable.

I can follow a recipe and if it’s a good recipe, I’ll get a good dish. Thing is, I usually don’t want to follow a recipe because I’m picky and lazy. So, for example, I don’t know enough about cooking and flavors to understand what tomatoes are doing in the recipe other than making things kind of tomato flavored (which I don’t like) and adding an unpleasant tomato texture to the finished dish, so I’ll leave them out. And then, the food ends up tasting weird, but at least not tomato-y.

Also, often when I actually do intend to follow a recipe, I can get absent minded. So, things end up cooked too long or too short. Things get chopped instead of diced. Liquids boil instead of simmer (or vice versa because I get sick of waiting). etc. Usually, I’m just cooking for me, for one night, so I’ll eat it anyway.

But if I’m actually paying attention and making food for other people (especially food that I don’t intend to eat) the results turn out very well.

Former pro. Very good home cook. My kids generally prefer my cooking to processed or fast food, which is how I really like to test myself. Kids are hard to please.

Confident: I am an excellent home cook. Give me an idea of what you want to eat and I’ll run with it from there.

My family also has a lot of those same type of recipes w/o amounts written down. My mom taught me to cook pretty much that way, altho there are times I will consult a cookbook for particulars about how long to cook a roast for example. Other recipes get tweaked until they don’t have much in common with the original dish any more.

In contrast I am a LOUSY baker and have no idea what to do with a grill. No feel for flour, et al. That’s what Marsh and Kroger bakeries are for, and I let friends do all the meat-sacrificing to the fire gods.:smiley:

In a nutshell I am absolutely godawful.

Cooking for me burning the gas in my car to go to Wendys.

Not for nothing, but re:

I worked as line cook in a restaurant in college, too. I wasn’t a great line cook, but I was a competent line cook.

It didn’t take.

I’m confident. Once I’ve done a technique a few times I don’t need to resort to cookbooks to make similar dishes, and even override cookbooks when they’re wrong or I like to do things differently.

One of my happy moments in the kitchen was when my girlfriend was making rice pudding from a book, but it wasn’t coming out right. I checked the recipe and the proportions were all wrong. I added enough rice to match the amount of milk, and salvaged the pudding.

Being confident in the kitchen is understanding enough about what you’re trying to do that when something is starting to go wrong you can look at it and try to fix it (or at least know what happened) instead of looking helplessly at your recipe and saying, “but I did everything it told me to!”
ETA: and if my girlfriend reads this, I am not intending to imply that she is helpless in the kitchen, which I sort of made it sound like. She cooks for me often and is pretty darned good at it. :slight_smile:

I declared myself an excellent home cook, though I don’t really cook very much. If I’m trying to make a specific dish I haven’t made before, I’ll usually consult a recipe, then modify it on the fly to suit me. Otherwise, I can make familiar dishes without support, and can generally manage something tasty with the “see what falls out of the fridge” approach. I season by smell and taste, for the most part. People other than myself generally enjoy my cooking, and sometimes rave about it.

I make an exception to my usual haphazard approach when it comes to pastry and bread; I tend to measure much more carefully there, though I still tweak things as I go.

My biggest problem as a cook, I’d say, is that whenever I do any serious cooking, I make a cataclysmic mess of the kitchen. Every work surface gets covered with something, no matter how much I try to clean as I go, and I’ve occasionally had to mop multiple times to make the floor safe again.

Confident. I’ll tinker with recipes and come up with my own. I’ll have something at a restaurant and come home and try to make it from memory.

The closest I came to cooking professionally was working at a pizza place in college. We made fresh pizzas and cooked them in slate ovens. We made our own dough, sausage, sauces and dressings, using only fresh local(ish) ingredients

I’ve catered my SILs baby shower/party for 80+ guests, and was asked by some friends to come up with and prepare appetizers for 50 guests for a “progressive dinner” their church was having. I’ve also been “hired” to cook for other parties as well, though I never accepted payment for any of it.

This about where I’m at.

I’m a lot like your husband in this regard. Every time I cook something new I keep notes of exactly how much I use, exactly how long it cooks for, etc. But I’m a chemist, and that’s just how I work.

I’m also into home brewing and experimenting with new mixed drinks. I like mixing things up and seeing what the result is. My best food so far is southwestern burgers, my best beer is over hopped stovepipe porter, and my best mixed drink is the apple pie milkshake.

I picked capable. I start with a (printed) recipe that sounds good, and usually make it that way the first time. Then I rate it, and write down suggestions to myself of what would make it better.

Actually, I’m getting to the point where I make revisions the first time I make it. I write them down too, so I can try to duplicate what I made if it turns out good. I also have a slew of dishes I make from scratch that are in my head. Southern staples like chicken fried steak and chicken and dumplings don’t need a recipe!

I get inspired by recipes and pick and choose ingredients to throw together, particularly ethnic dishes like Mexican and Cajun. I’m not that adventurous with “odd” cuisines like Thai and Indian. I don’t eat that food in restaurants either.

Baking is another story. I follow the recipe to the letter. I prefer mixes and premade pie crusts!
And I am the grillmaster in my house. My husband can cook a little, but the grill is mine.

I would say that I’m fairly good, but nowhere near proficient. For instance, I hate raw onion and thought that I hated cooked onion as well and so it took me the longest time to realize that onions and olive oil are so often a necessary first flavor building step of any dish. It’s simple things like that where a gap in knowledge can lead to a real handicap in the kitchen.

The other issue is both a strength and a weakness: I rarely make the same dish twice. My dishes come not from a pre-planned idea where I went to the grocery store and got all the components. It came from getting hungry and seeing what ingredients I have to combine together.

Take last night, for instance. I looked in the fridge and saw we had pork loin. OK, what can go with that? I looked through cubbards until I stumbled across the peanut butter. Cool! What about a massaman curry? I found our curry paste and went to town. Added in vinegar, fish oil, milk, a bit of flour for thickening, and, tada! An awesome curry sauce.

I boiled up some small yellow potatoes, cooked the loins in half the sauce, covered it all with the other half when it was all cooked, and added in a side of peas. All in all a successful meal and one that I didn’t plan on at all when I first went into the kitchen.

But there were problems. For instance, the pork needed to marinate in the sauce longer and it would have been more helpful to slice the loin into pieces so they could be individually coated with the sauce when cooking. But since this was a dish made on the fly just using ingredients lying around, it’s doubtful I’ll make the same thing again. So I’m never going to improve this particular dish. I just have to hope that I’ve learned something that can carry me through to the next time I make something from scratch.

Confident. I can handle Thanksgiving all on my own, and usually prefer to. I rarely use recipes and never measure things unless I’m looking for a specific chemical reaction. I read cookbooks for pleasure but almost never make stuff out of them.

I am, however, lazy, and tend to eat a lot of frozen foods.