So, yeah, totally random question, but it has a source. I'm in the middle of a huge Social Security Disability fraud case ongoing for the past year and a half. Defendants out the wazoo and clearly some inter-office complicity. The case has me translating a bajillion SSA-3373 Function Report forms in which the applicant indicates the things that his/her malady restricts him/her from accomplishing. One of the questions is if their malady restricts the person from cooking. If the answer is No, then they are to explain what keeps them from cooking if not the malady. The answer from male applicants (the defendants are overwhelmingly male, not female) is invariably "I don't know how to cook." This would seem the logical response if the malady isn't causing the restriction, but additionally, the applicants almost never mark that the malady is at fault. The default answer is nearly always that no, it's not the malady, but simple lack of knowing how, never mind that just one page prior they indicated that they can't brush their own teeth for the biblical pain it causes in their (fill in the body part). So, come on, fellahs. Is this just part of the scam to get Disability or do y'all, in general, as a gender, not know how to cook? Be honest.
I can cook if there's a recipe I can follow. Or if it's a simple pasta dish or something like that. Assuming you're not making a gourmet feast, cooking's actually fairly easy. I think men are just lazy.
Both my son and my brother do 90% of the cooking in our respective households. I do the baking, however
I can cook at a reasonable level. When I was a kid I hung around in the kitchen and my mom explained what she was doing. I make pretty good chili, I can roast chicken, I make a really good chicken gumbo (!), I grill steaks, make shepherd's pie, etc. etc. I have even been known to make my own pasta from scratch and my own alfredo sauce!
I am competent in most areas of cooking. And if I don't know how to cook something, I am very capable of reading and following directions from a cook book.
Simple stuff, yeah. I mean you're just burning stuff until it is what we define as "cooked." But so long as there's a recipe it's just following instructions really.
When I left for college, the boys' and girls' dorm shared a lobby with a washateria. We (the males) found it amusing how much more domestically adept we were. After dorm life, that trend continued with the guys doing all of the cooking.
I know how to cook, but personally my disabilities prevent me from not always being able to cook either because I can't always run to the grocery store whenever I need to, I don't always feel like cooking because I might be going through a bout of depression, I can't stand there long enough to cook because my back is killing me that day, etc. I think there are a lot more factors involved that disability judges don't always take into account that they should.
That's amusing. There might well be some men that make excuses to not cook but pretty much everything I learned about cooking I've learned from male partners and friends—certainly wasn't from my mum, that's for sure. Her idea of cooking was to boil everything to mush. Almost all of my male friends are decent cooks, and some are quite gifted. My dad had never cooked a day in his life until my mum took ill... I was a kid at the time. I remember him in the kitchen when he came home from work, leafing through her cookery books. In no time at all, I was sitting down to a meal, the likes of which I'd never seen outside of posh restaurants. He'd picked a book by a Michelin starred chef and executed it to perfection. As I was tucking in I asked how he did it, never having cooked before. He said it treated it just like a chemistry experiment.
Almost all my male friends can cook. I can cook very well. Many of my female friends however had no idea how to fry and egg.
Yes. I get a tad annoyed when people attribute messiness/kitchen-hopelessness to men in general. My mother was never crazy about cooking, so I ended up cooking most of my meals before I moved out. I cook all of them, now, of course. My household never had regular meals, and my bachelor life isn't any diffs (a big problem with me is missing meals, which is a fast track to diabetes). Of course, I live on cases of pasta, cereal, beans and vegetables--cooking that stuff isn't rocket surgery. I think you'll find that more women can bake than men. Baking requires a bit more preparation, patience, and recipe-watching, and it's a lot easier to boil pasta or fry an egg because those are more by feel than regiment. I just can't be bothered with it most of the time. Women might also be slightly more habitual with their cooking than men, meaning that they use foresight to cook before they're hungry, as opposed to when the rumbling starts.
I wonder whether it's a generational thing? My bloke is an excellent cook and most of my male friends love their food and cook well.
If my dad and I didn't catch enough fish to feed the family, we would purposefully stay on the lake later than expected in order to avoid my mom's cooking.
It just wasn't seemly - back in the day for a fella to be interested in't scullery and the larder. Back from pit and he were buggered and we all knew it was women's work to bake scones and fix man's snap for next shift. If you remember rightly, she'd boil his bath, scrub his back, all the easy work and raising kids. Man had his pipe of course for solace and maybe a paper. Now all blokes are kitchen slimy types and we think there's life in slicing onions and eating bolognaise. All proper industry's gone China. Modern man grows double backside squatting at the call centre: debt collecting off our brothers and PPI. Which is better?
I wonder if that could be because executives have such a superiority complex that they only feel powerful by ordering around other men to do their bidding. I don't think they would get the same type of sensation if they were treating women in the same type of way.
I cook. I enjoy it, and I get creative with it. Most of my culinry victims seem to enjoy the experience, even if they suddenly seek ways to cool their palates after some of my spicier offerings.
I had to teach a British girl in my flat how to make pancakes for Shrove Tuesday. I guess it's a cultural thing.
