On the joy of cooking and pasta...

While I'm never a cook, I love food. I love to watch cooking show. My husband credits me for a sensitive taste buds, which help me pick out what ingredients are used in a dish, usually with pretty good success rate. Since he likes to cook and to experiment with dishes, it's a perfect match. We would go to a restaurant, we order new dishes, we taste it, and I make out the ingredients, and we discuss how it might be made, then he would go home and try it out.

(Of course, I'm sure restaurant chefs have their own secret recipe that makes the dishes taste good. That, plus the nice service and environ, makes eating out justifiable.)

He attacks cooking with gusto. He treats it like the lab experiments he did during his Ph.D and postdoc years in biology. He thinks there are alot of similarities between cooking and science - you have a hypothesis, you set up the experiment, and you try it out; if it fails, you keep tweaking the experiment, one parameter at a time, until you have it just right.

But I don't really cook. Not that I don't like cooking, but given the full-time workload, and the graduate study, and the chores at home, I'll have to delegate the cooking duties. He sometimes jokes that I would starve to death if he doesn't cook for us (me and the kids), but that's not the reality. Before he accepts the charge to all the cooking at home (and by proxy, doing grocery shopping regularly), I used to cook all the time. I do admit that I'm a kinda happy-go-lucky cook, and quality of my dishes are not very...shall we say...consistent. Maybe I go the fast way, and he takes the more meticulous way in dealing with the method of cook.

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The other day I read the article on cooking pasta. I know how to make pasta, but I have always dislike the starchy cooking water after the pasta is taken out. I have never in my wildest dream, considered saving that water, and use it as the sauce. After I read it, I said to myself, it makes so perfect sense to use the leftover cooking water for making the sauce since it's already quite thick, with much flavor from the pasta itself.

I told my husband about it. Maybe he'll give it a try next time, when we feel like cooking Italian at home. :)