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When I was four years old my mom lifted me onto the kitchen counter, handed me the old measuring spoons, pointed at the various spices and told me to measure them out while she rolled the pie dough. I could read so this was certainly possible and I, with lots of help from Mom, helped make my first pumpkin pie. This continued with apples (peeling and coring them at age 5 using a peeler and a small knife), to making the crust by age 6. By the time I was 10 I'd perfected most sorts of baking I'd attempted, including solo chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies, and even made the perfect copy of McDonalds french fries. I needed help dealing with the hot oil. I should point out that I've always been "bright" and while I was pretty retarded in some social skills areas I was always way ahead of my peers at these sorts of scientific experiments (cooking is chemistry, after all). I kept cooking every once in a while, when I felt like it. As a latch-key kid my brother and I ended up cooking for ourselves more often than not, particularly since Mom's cooking wasn't always to our taste. At age 11 I was in the boy scouts and learning to cook over camp stoves, over and in camp fires, and learning all the skills necessary to manage natural heat (fires are a skillset all by themselves) and as the years passed I learned more and more, perfecting recipes of old standards like Cornbread. By the time I was in college and cooking on our geology field trips I learned how to bake in a dutch oven, from chocolate or lemon cake to pineapple upside-down cake (a true accomplishment in the desert, let me tell you!). When I finally moved out of the parental domicile I was a fully capable amateur chef able to make anything I saw on TV or read in a recipe or tasted in a restaurant. Once I met my wife and we moved in together I was accomplished enough to make multiple meals from raw materials which baffled her. I love her dearly but when we moved in she'd claimed to be a good cook herself and when I handed her a whole, plucked chicken and said "roast this" she looked completely lost. I had to show her and she understood what I was going on about the very first time, a fact pointing to a high intelligence despite her dishonesty. She still tries new things or pushes me to make stuff she read about somewhere, often dozens of things I'm not particularly enthusiastic about, usually because they require exotic expensive ingredients, won't keep at all, and make more than we want to eat in one sitting. There is such a thing as too many olives and pickles in the fridge, after all! Ahem.

Anyway, at this point in my life, finally owning a proper kitchen scale, I am now able to work my way through the CIA Cookbook, which is highly detailed and LONG. Lots of fun stuff I've never played with because well, you just don't wake up one day with 5 pounds of sweetmeats you plan to eat and go to the trouble of turning them into food instead of broth or toss them into the trash. That's an extreme example, however. I'll be cooking more stuff, using spices more effectively, working out all sorts of technical problems that would make even Alton Brown pause to consider.