I enjoy baking, but I’ve never had much interest in cooking.
Oh, I have a few recipes up my sleeve, but it’s never been a case of ‘put me in the kitchen and I’ll jump for joy.’ Perhaps it was a couple of cooking fiascos in what would have been my formative, late teens/early twenties cooking years that put me off cooking. all these years later, I still clearly remember pot roast and onion flake soup (yum!), and Swiss steak pummeled to mush in the pressure cooker. (How could it have been that I never noticed – after all those years watching my mother turn green broccoli yellow - that when the pressure cooker began to hiss and spin, you turned the heat off? )
Certainly, I had an occasional baking incident, most memorably the baking powder biscuits where I absentmindedly substituted baking soda for baking powder. (The biscuits tasted like pretzels.) But never enough to put me off of baking.
I chalked my attitude and ability up to my being the natural heir of my grandmother Rogers. Maybe when she was younger she could put something edible on the table, but by the time I was around, you just plain didn’t want to eat at Nanny’s. Unless you wanted a chaw of the mystery meat she fried up in the black cast iron skillet in perpetual residence on her stove top.
My mother was a reasonably good cook, held back by my father’s being a meat-and-potatoes-man. (One time for her own birthday, she experimented with chicken jambalaya. No one – including my father – would touch it.) Liz was especially good at hearty fare: soups and stews. My mouth still waters for her pork chop potatoes, and, for a German girl married to an Irishman, she made a mean spaghetti sauce.
Both of my sisters became excellent cooks. Me, meh.
When I worked full time, my husband and I went out pretty regularly. Restaurants were too crowded on Saturdays, so that was the night I cooked.
When I no longer worked full time, we didn’t go out quite as often, but I rarely cooked. We fended for ourselves. I ate salads.
In the last year or so of Jim’s life, I did cook more often, but it was the basics of what appealed to him. I scrambled up an awful lot of cheesy eggs and stirred up an awful lot of ground meat and rice.
I have had occasional fantasy flashes in which I one day turn my attention to mastering the art of cooking, but at this point I’m ready to admit that this is unlikely to happen.
But I do like to eat, so I was intrigued by an article in The Economist about what I can only call an excellent approach to cooking, introduced by Mark Olyenik, a London-based engineer. He’s come up with:
… a robot cook that is as good as a Cordon Bleu chef but which can be installed in an average house. A prototype of his idea, unveiled this week at an industrial fair in Hanover, Germany, has been demonstrating its culinary prowess in public, by whipping up an excellent crab bisque. (Source: The Economist)
Unlike existing robotic cooking devices – “essentially food processors with bells and whistles” – Oleynik’s robochef is a robotic pair of chefs hands working with regular appliances and utensils.
A pair of dexterous robotic hands, suspended from the ceiling, assemble the ingredients, mix them, and cook them in pots and pans as required, on a hob or in an oven. When the dish is ready, they then serve it with the flourish of a professional.
The robochef “learns” its way around the kitchen by borrowing from human chefs. The human chefs wear special, sensor-equipped gloves and whip up their special dishes. The data picked up here is augmented by videos shot from different angles. Put all the data together, and now you’re cooking.
The robochef, which is expected to hit the market in 2017, will cost about $15K. The recipes (including the moves) will be kept in an online repository and used as needed. Initially, the recipes will come from celebrity chefs. In the future, home chefs will be able to input their own favorites. (I don’t think I’ll be uploading my recipe for pot roast soup any time soon.)
Also in the future, capabilities that will be enable robochef to:
- Prep ingredients. (As of now, it requires a kitchen helper to cut and chop.)
- Make trips to the fridge.
- Clean up after itself.
Despite the fact that I don’t cook, I do still want to redo my 1980 kitchen – worthy of an exhibit in the Smithsonian, with it’s almond-tone cabinets with oak trim - with something more up to Beacon Hill’s implicit code. My husband and I used to talk about a kitchen makeover, but our plans were a bit off-beat: we talked about converting it to a sun room where we could hang out, read and take naps
But I wouldn’t want my robochef to work in an out-of-date kitchen.
I now have a hard stop date for kitchen construction: 2017. Just in time for my new live-in cook.
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