I started cooking this year. Nothing too fancy. Primarily so that I have three meals to eat every day. The work is busy, so the time I can spend is limited, too.
For most of my life, I never really cooked. I just didn’t need to. My wife stayed at home. The kitchen was her territory. But TBH that has always felt like an excuse. I suppose I always felt a little ashamed about my inability to cook.
For the last few years, our daughter has been going to a college in Tokyo. Lately, my wife is spending more time over there, which means I’m spending considerable time alone at home. So I decided that this was the time to learn to cook.
I started with a cooking recipe book for children. My wife also gave me a few easy recipes. But pretty soon I found out that Gemini is great at giving me recipes.
It turns out cooking is just like any other making activity that I enjoy doing. So in hindsight it wasn’t a surprise that I got hooked. I follow the process blindly first, and I get to a certain outcome. I then look at the outcome and look back at the process. Sometimes I have some things that didn’t quite go well that I want to do differently, or sometimes I develop questions. I use those as a guide to take the next step. If the first attempt doesn’t produce a great result, that’s actually great, because there’s only one direction from there and that’s up!
And so I kept on.
For example, say I want to figure out how to cook a certain vegetable, say taro. I tell that to Gemini, I ask for a recipe, and it gives me a few options. That then becomes my project that evening. I ride my bike to a grocery store, I pick up what I need. Usually I make a double batch so that one cooking lasts for a few meals.
On weekends, I often take on a bigger project. The other day it was oysters I wanted to learn to cook. I learned to cook fish. Mapo tofu became my passion project. I even went out to a Chinese super market to get “proper” ingredients.
Going to supermarkets became fun. I have so many more angles to explore now. Are there any ingredients that I haven’t worked on before? What are people buying? What can I use those for? Getting answers to any questions is practically free and instant, thanks to AI.
Sometimes it is my turn to go to Tokyo and take care of our daughter. I very much enjoy cooking food for her. When it’s not easy nor obvious to figure out what I can do for her, cooking gives me a way to express my love & affection. Besides, the stuff I can get in supermarkets in Tokyo are so much better for Japanese cuisines. This probably sounds boringly obvious, but cooking and food is fundamentally intertwined with the land. And that in turn makes me wonder what dishes are uniquely Californian – just like that, I have another project to work on.
In 2026, I plan to continue cooking, and I’d like to up the game in a few ways.
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I’d like to invite my friends and serve them my food. That’d be a major milestone for me. That’d give me more opportunities to see friends, too. I think the trick is to set the bar really low. We’ll see.
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In order to improve, I need to measure. I need to record how different input leads to different outcomes. I need to write down what I noticed. I’d like to get a more precise weight measure, and a temperature sensor.