What type of cook are you?
Posted 19 July 2009 by Paul
In March 2009 I was in an apartment in Alicante, Spain with 1 friend plus a group of 9 other people who I had only just met. We were out there on a rock climbing holiday. As the first day was wet, we had retired back to the apartment early in the evening and had picked up some food for dinner. The food was a mixture of salad, fish, bread, ham, cheese, sausage, etc. I don’t think it was very well planned, but there seemed to be a quite a bit of everything so certainly nobody would go hungry.
Dinner time was still a couple of hours away so the majority of the group were huddled downstairs, sitting and reading in front of the wood burning fire when someone asked me one of those ‘getting to know you’ questions which was “can you cook?”. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was new to the group (the others all knew each other) or because nobody had actually volunteered to cook that nights meal yet. As I haven’t cooked for a group of people before and I didn’t want to give anyone food poisoning at the start of the week-long holiday, my answer was that yes I do like to cook but I generally only cook for myself, because I live by myself.
I then went on to explain that I am into fitness (sporting activities) so I generally cook healthy meals, I get a lot of use out of my George Foreman grill, I generally choose to purchase organic based food (both for what I like to put into my body and for the welfare of the animals) and I am pretty good at cooking salmon.
As well as what I actually cook, I have an interest in cooking, in particular I like to really pay attention to the food and service of restaurants that I go to and I like to watch various cooking programs on television, in particular ones like:
- Hell’s Kitchen – seeing how people cope and develop when being thrust into a kitchen environment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell%27s_Kitchen_(UK), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell%27s_Kitchen_(U.S.))
- Jamie’s School Dinners – that challenge the way in which groups or organisations think about the real value of food (http://www.jamieoliver.com/school-dinners)
- Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares – where the workings of a restaurant are scrutinised and re-worked (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsay%27s_Kitchen_Nightmares, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Nightmares)
- River Cottage – which really reminds you where food comes from and how the best food comes from natural sources. (http://www.rivercottage.net/)
- I could go on...
The other people in the room were older than me and most had families, so for most of them they cooked for their families, which I guess is a very different mentality and discipline from mine. I can eat what I want, when I want, but if you cook for a family there is generally a set meal-time, the main meal and dessert come one after the other (I often have dessert 1-2 hours after my dinner) and everyone usually has the same food.
Some people in the room admitted that they couldn’t really cook. They could cook simple things but nothing complicated. One person who said they really didn’t cook much at all said that they only really get excited about cooking when they cooked on barbeques – and everyone agreed, there is something about cooking with flame and charcoal!
Some people said they cooked mainly out of necessity, one person said that they liked to cook pastries.
I found it interesting that in a group of only 10 people, the attitude and familiarity to cooking was so diverse.
By the way, I didn’t have to cook that night in Spain, some of the others stepped in did a good job.
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