How did you learn to cook?

[gerardj]

I washed dishes in a french cafe, started greasing molds and doing prep work.
7 years later I was the executive dishwasher.

50 years later I just retired after a career as chef, owning a french bakery, cafe, restaurants and catering companies. Also worked in a few hotels as exec pastry chef.

Anyone wanting to learn, youtube beats TV any day,.

 

[Termy]

I may have mentioned I was shamed into my first thing, which was a ham and egg sandwich.

Later I made burgers. Then I discovered the infrared broiler I never knew we had before and then each one was flame broiled, but its own grease was the fuel for the flame.

So much is a blur, maybe hypnosis would do it but I doubt I am susceptible. I made things in the middle of the night and Grandma lived with us. She told me "Don't leave evidence".

She made most of the good stuff. Later I went to live with the olman and he expanded my whole world of it. That started in the early 1990s.

Like I said it was a blur. I had a career in electronics and didn't take to it at first, but later I got interested. He worked, job shop machinist, not production, he worked with engineers, for example they made the first machine to produce floppy disks. THE first, meaning those big old huge ones, like 8".

Then he had a stroke. It affected his dexterity in a way he couldn't work, but he could do other things - like cook. Then he really got into it. Went to the grocery store almost every day, all that.

Later I learned how to make m own sauce, not his. Pizza. A few other things.

Still a blur though.

T

 

[Bitser]

In 1972, my friend Mitch asked if I'd work as a campjack for our rancher friend Roger, whose herder had gotten badly burned when a propane space heater blew up.

I prepared by getting books on horse packing and camp cooking. We spent a couple months high in the mountains in a canvas wall tent with a box stove. I learned to make tortilla on the stovetop and round loaves of bread in the dutch oven.

The ranch owner, Roger's dad, was pretty cheap and our supplies were the basics: flour, rice, cornmeal, canned goods, potatoes. When I ordered fruit, he brought a sack of rhubarb from the ranch: that's as good as fruit, he said. So I had to learn cooking from scratch, or starve.

We'd kill a sheep every ten days or so and I'd cut it up and keep it hanging out at night and wrapped up in canvas pack covers by day. So I learned how to skin and butcher as well.