My name is Igor and I work in a laboratory. I'm a neuroscience research assistant by day, and a budding chef, mostly on weekends. I find working in a kitchen to be very similar to being in a laboratory, filled with predictable (sometimes not) complex synergistic chemical reactions, gently balanced under the critical scrutiny of an investigator.
I've slowly been delving deeper and deeper into the culinary arts and cultivating my own culinary aptitude over the past... oh... five years. Right about the time after I moved away from home and finished my first semester at SUNY New Paltz, when I could finally move off-campus and separate myself from the mandatory meal plan.
Actually I started a little earlier. I remember when my "flexible" meal plan in which I had a set amount of dining dollars to spend on food had run out prematurely because I was using it to buy excessive amounts of Sushi. I had to invest in a small electric heat plate and a small skillet and started buying semi-perishables like eggs, potatoes, onions, and cooked sausages to start clandestinely (it was against some fire codes or something) preparing sustenance in my dorm room.
Anyway, I slowly discovered all the benefits and joys of cooking over a long and fun process of kitchen experimentation which is still on going. Briefly, cooking offers obvious health benefits because you know what's in your food (mostly) and avoid processed foods and preservatives which carry with them a great deal of long-term health uncertainty (for the record, I don't specifically cook healthy, but by merely preparing your own food, healthiness to some degree is an unintended consequence, and a welcome perk); it certainty enriches your understanding of food, gets you more in touch with what you eat, and making eating at restaurants or friend's dinner parties all the more interesting as it presents a curiosity and challenge to analyze and reverse engineer the foods you love to recreate them at home; it's an easy way to impress friends and loved ones; it builds social bonds, to cook for someone, to nourish them, is a very intimate way to connect to someone and to build trust -- not to mention all the recipe exchanges and food technique discussion opportunity with other cooks; it's a very rewarding exercise in which you can start a project and get results and feedback that same day -- quite a contrast with working in a research lab. Of course, the real reason why I go into it in the first place is because of the incredible economic savings of cooking at home. It has evolved into somewhat of a hobby since then!
Recently I started cooking high volumes mostly because of time constraints, browsing the internet for cool recipes, and expanding my culinary repertoire by talking to friends and trying out new foods and new ingredients in cooking. I was recently gifted the book "Cooking for Geeks" by Jeff Potter, which is taking me to the next level of cooking nerdom -- which I highly recommend to any nerd cook. I've also been somewhat inspired by the movie "Julie and Julia" -- a delightful true story of Julia Childs rise as an influential chef paralleled with her influencing a girl in modern times to engage in cooking every recipe in Julia Childs "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" over the course of a year, and blogging about it.
ANYWAY, welcome to my kitchen notebook, and join me as I evolve my mastery of food prep.
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