Cooking and Engineering, HUH?
There are only 2 things that I can consistently remember being on my mind since I was a child, how things are made, and cooking. You may say that those are completely disconnected. I didn’t even see the connection until I was an adult.
I was that kid that took apart the toaster to see how it worked. I went on side “jobs” with my father, an electrician, who taught me how to wire a house before I was 10. By the time I was a teen my Dad had me doing the schematic drawings for the jobs and making the stock lists for when we went to the supply house. I was all-in on all things NASA. My room was filled with every kind of car, plane and boat model I could get my hands on. I read science and physics books… for fun… on vacation (still do).
I was also that kid who ran in from the backyard to watch my idols, Julia, Jacques, Yan and Graham on PBS. And yes my little friends thought that was weird, as did most of the adults. I was obsessed with these cooking characters and this new thing called a cooking show. I don’t know at the time if I understood the impact, but they shaped my future in ways that have only become clear to me in later years. It took a while, but I realize now how this all ties in.
Cooking is MAKING food.
Cooking is about taking raw materials, the ingredients list, and using a well-understood process, the prep and cooking, to make a delicious dish.
Cooking is about taking the right combinations of “stuff” and applying science to the “stuff” until you MAKE something amazing to eat.
So yea, cooking and engineering, that’s a thing.
The Cooking Journey
I guess it did start with my PBS heroes but if I think back it was all around me. I grew up in a suburb of Boston, Medford MA. At the time Medford was a VERY Italian neighborhood. In fact, I thought I was Italian until my teens. After all MICHALSKI ends in a vowel, Italian right?
You couldn’t go to a friends house without a meal being made, by both the mothers and fathers. Being the skinny kid, they would look at me and say, “whatsa matta for you, yo mama not feed you. Sit eat”
And that was not a suggestion, it was an order.
So I sat with my friends in their kitchens, watched a parent cook and well… ate. In my teen years, my friend Mikey and I would time our visits to his house on a Saturday so that we could catch his father making the meatballs and gravy (that’s red sauce for those of you who do not know how to speak northeast US Italian). This was the stuff of which legends are made. I just got the recipe from Mikey’s brother Dom. You’ll never see it. I was honored when he told me he would give it to me “cuz your like family”. I also told him, “you will not see this out on the web, this is special”.
My Mom was a pretty good cook. She made mostly “American” food. Things like well… American Chop Suey, Tuna Casserole and crazy good stuffing and gravy at Thanksgiving. She was French but never really cooked French. She did, however, learn some Polish food from aunts on my father’s side. Things like Kapusta, Galumpki, etc. She was really good at it, but if you wanted a master class you sat in the kitchen with my aunts. I wish I had done more of that. My sister, who is also a great cook, says she has most of the recipes, even so, I doubt they would taste the same. There was a lot of “I cook, you eat” in those days. I suspect many of you can relate.
Training? Well sort of.
My culinary training is a hodgepodge of observation, books, television, cooking school, a few internships, a job at William Sonoma, etc. Mostly I learned by living it in the way a non professional does, I cook, I learn.
I talk about my influences and what got me started but… there’s that… and my theory that DECIDING to learn something is the first and MOST important step to learning. It is true of how I learned to be an engineer, how I learned to dance, how I learned to make this website…
and how I learned to cook.
When people ask me how to learn to cook, I tell them,
“FIRST YOU NEED TO DECIDE TO LEARN”
This website is about us learning…together.
Let’s talk about Lynn
Lynn and I have been together over 33 years. We met at a tech company many years ago when we were both starting our careers. Lynn is from the midwest, Michigan to be exact, and because of that she is terminally nice. She lights up any room she is in. Because of this, I am usually just “Lynn’s husband”
Also, thanks to her Midwest upbringing she had no idea how to deal with the Boston kid (me) and the food that we ate. The good news is that over the years she has embraced food of all types… and has done so with gusto. I remember her first sushi experience, and not in a good way. At the time, fish in Michigan meant lake white fish or frozen fish sticks, so raw fish on rice, huh? But she stuck with it and now raw fish is a true love and if the sushi has “those pop rocks” (tobiko) she is in heaven.
We actually plan our vacations around food. We once went to NYC just so we could eat at all the restaurants owned by the judges from Chopped (by the way the polenta at Scott Conant’s former restaurant Scarpetta still sets the bar for how polenta should taste).
I knew I was in love when we first started dating. Before Lynn, I knew and dated some women who were either massively picky or ordered food like they were dieting for a fashion shoot. On our first official, go out to eat date, Lynn ordered a prime rib the size of your head with all the sides and pounded like it was the last time she would ever eat. I looked at her and said to myself, “I gotta marry this woman.”
When I want to make Lynn’s day special, I run through the list of food she loves and that is how I plan the menu. And while she eats almost anything now, her first love is meat and potatoes. A bowl of mashed potatoes is the equivalent of a dozen roses.
She is the person who has inspired and supported all that I have done in my life that matters… and sizzle&STEM is just the latest.
One Last Thing…
If you read this far… THANK YOU.
I never intended this page to be so long but when I started writing it the flood of memories was overwhelming.
My most vivid memory about “the process”, and likely the most important, comes from my grandmother. One afternoon sitting in her kitchen she asked what I would like to eat. I was a kid so french fries seemed like a good answer. She hauled out a cast-iron skillet and a tub of lard, Crisco. While the pan was heating and the lard was melting she cut each and every french fry by hand, with knife skills that would make a CIA graduate jealous.
When it came time, the pan was right, and the lard just the right temp and she knew by looking at it, she only cooked maybe 6 or 7 fries at a time. When done, again by eye, she put them on some cut up shopping bags strategically placed on the old stove where they would stay warm. Then she cooked 6 or 7 more. Given I was only about 9 years old, this was painful. I wanted to eat NOW and she would not go any faster and would not let me eat until they were all done.
Impatiently I asked her when we could eat and she said, “when they are done”.
ARGGGGH!
And then finally, when she decided, no one else… they were done.
The most memorable fries I have ever eaten made their way to the table. All the things we say about great fries… all on a single plate. Crisp on the outside, beautifully soft on the inside, perfectly salted so that one more grain of salt would have made them too salty, one less grain not salty enough. Works of art. I can taste them as I type this.
At the time I didn’t get it. JUST GIMME THE FRIES. When I got older I thought about that afternoon many times. I was an adult when it came to me. It was the process that made them great. She would have never called it science or engineering but she knew exactly how hot the pan needed to be, how long the lard had to sit before it was the right temp, how the lard shimmers when it is ready to go. How many fries, and what they look like when they are done. No timer, no thermometer. Just her senses. She did it naturally and with purpose, for someone she loved.
To this day I say those same words when asked how long will dinner take.
“The food will be done, when it is done.”
The food will not be rushed. It’s a process. It must be respected. Yes, it’s a science thing, and like physics, it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.