Who Does the Cooking In Your Home? The Results May Surprise You

Who does the bulk of the cooking in your home, and how did you decide?

Recently, I asked this question to my Twitter followers (follow me!), and I was stunned to find that in about 80% of cases women still do the vast majority of the cooking at home.

Admittedly, this was an anecdotal sample. But it turns out that most of the respondents found themselves in one of two situations: either the female partner simply enjoyed doing the cooking more (or in some cases she hated it less), or the female partner had more abilities in the kitchen when the relationship began (which says a lot about the value of feigned incompetence).

It appears as if dividing cooking responsibilities along gender lines is a more comfortable and productive arrangement for both parties.

Here at Casual Kitchen, however, I do almost all of the cooking. I suspected it was an atypical arrangement, but I never guessed it was that atypical.

And to my female readers: I wouldn't read this gender-based division of kitchen labor as proof that feminism failed. In fact, from what I've seen, men are involved in the kitchen more than ever, even if they don't prepare the majority of household meals. In quite a few cases, for example, men shared in the cooking, took responsibility for weekend meals, or were willing to take on the dreaded kitchen clean-up duties.

Phew. I don't think we're heading back to the 1700's just yet.

So, readers, here's your chance to hold forth: Who does the cooking in your home, and how did you and your significant other decide?

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Capitalize on Your Cooking Core Competencies

This is the fourth and final part of my series on How to Team Up in the Kitchen. Be sure to take a look at Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

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Part 4: Capitalize on Your Cooking Core Competencies

Today we’ll cover the final step that will help you leap across the threshold from kitchen friction mode into well-oiled machine mode. We can reduce it into one simple concept: Pay attention to who does what well.

There are so many specialties and subspecialties in cooking that anyone can find cooking tasks or recipes they are drawn to. Do you have a natural gift for preparing certain favorite dishes? Does your significant other have a personal interest in learning how to cook certain types of ethnic food? Perhaps you are a Zen-like machine at prep work with a spouse who takes naturally to leading teams?

As you and your cooking team come into contact with new recipes, cooking styles, and food preparation tasks, all you have to do is watch what happens. I know it sounds almost too easy to be true, but this is the first key step toward developing everyone's core competencies in the kitchen. When anybody finds a type of dish they particularly like, or a cooking skill they show aptitude for, it's your job to encourage it. You’ll get the vicarious pleasure of watching your kids or your significant other instinctively develop skills and talents in the kitchen. As they develop their palette of core competencies, they’ll get the pleasures of becoming enthusiastic and skilled cooks!

In our home, Laura's core competencies are grocery shopping, clean-up detail, crockpot recipes, fish dishes, Indian food, and, most unforgettably, pie crusts. My core competencies are micromanaging, delegating, and most importantly, being king.

Whoops! That was the old Dan. Actually, I tend to specialize in high-speed prep work, soups and stews, vegetarian meals, and general menu-preparation and cooking idea generation.

Keep in mind that your core competencies will develop gradually and organically. That's what happened with Laura and me. We didn’t force things; we just gravitated to tasks we were good at and dishes we enjoyed making. It wasn't long before we had a pretty keen sense of each others’ strengths and weaknesses. Don't try and oversteer the process.

Let's face it, there is a simple truism at work here: the more you do something, the better and faster you’ll get at it. Seems kind of obvious, right?

Well, it's less obvious than you might think. In fact, if you take this truism a logical step or two further, you’ll arrive at four significant conclusions:

1) It is a heck of a lot easier to divide and conquer your labors if each person on the team can lean toward the specific tasks they enjoy or do best.

2) Once you figure out who is best at which types of labors, then it becomes easy to determine who should be the king, and who should be a serf for any given recipe.

3) After you've made a recipe a couple of times and have established a routine for who does what, you and your cooking team will see more and more opportunities to play off of each other’s core competencies. You'll be surprised how everybody quickly settles into their respective workspaces and gets right to work.

4) Finally, and best of all, taking advantage of this process will not seem like work. On the contrary, it will be fun as hell, and you’ll eat well, enjoy quality time with your family, and even become a good cook in the process.

If you make a habit of developing your team’s core competencies, it will bring together all of the various tactics and strategies we've been discussing in this four part series. This is the process by which enthusiastic cooks are made, and it will mark the beginning of your family team’s ascent into "well-oiled machine mode." You’ll truly be teaming up in the kitchen.

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I hope this series will be useful to readers out there who are trying to make cooking a bigger part of their lives. As always, I appreciate your comments and suggestions. Good luck teaming up to tackle your next meal!

Three Strategies to Create Personal Space in Your Kitchen

We continue our four-part series on How to Team Up in the Kitchen with Part 3. Be sure to take a look at Part 1 and Part 2.

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Part 3: Three Strategies to Create Personal Space in Your Kitchen

Okay. You’ve decided on a dish to cook, you’ve chosen your King, and you’ve figured out how to divide and conquer the various tasks that need to get done to complete the meal. Congratulations, you’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting towards teaming up and getting dinner on the table!

However, you’re still left with a key potential source of kitchen friction which comes (both literally and figuratively) from everybody trying to get at the same counter space or use the same tools at the same time. Instead of cooking, you’re climbing all over each other and getting in each other’s way.

Once again, the crown weighs heavy, as it is the king’s job to solve this problem of too many cooks and not enough space. So today I’ll share with you three strategies to help make sure everybody has plenty of room to work in the kitchen.

1) Establish Separate Workspaces

Let’s face it: you can’t add a lot of value preparing dinner if you're waiting to use a given cooking tool, or if you’re spending all your time and energy getting in and out of the way of other people. If you are king, you must be mindful of this when you delegate cooking tasks to your team.

First, you should give each serf a dedicated workspace, even if it’s not technically in the kitchen. Second, why not lay out tools, cutting boards, or whatever equipment each job requires, in each of the separate locations for each person? If you follow these two steps you’ll right away pre-empt a lot of crowding.

Most importantly, however, you should think about how best to break down the work such that it can be done well at separate workstations. And this brings us to our next strategy:

2) Keep the Tasks Discrete

Before you dole out any tasks to your team, you should make sure each task is specific, clearly defined, and has an obvious beginning point and ending point.

Good examples of clearly defined, discrete tasks would be things like “make the salad,” “set the table,” “prepare dessert” or “wash/rinse the produce and set it out to be prepped.” These are classic dinner building-block jobs that can be divided up easily among a duo or even a team of cooks.

Granted, I know some of these tasks may seem a bit mindless, but that that can actually be a good thing, depending on what kind of serfs you have working for you. I know I have days when I really want to leave the higher-order tasks to somebody else--let me do something mindless like cutting up veggies! Therefore, be sure to think about what kind of temperament your cooking counterparts have and plan accordingly.

What you don’t want to do is allow tasks to blur into each other, or give one task to two people unless it can be easily and obviously broken down. For example, don’t assign two people to do prep work unless you have two sets of knives, two cutting boards, enough room, and an obvious way to divide up the produce that needs to be prepped. And don’t try to have multiple people washing or rinsing produce, unless of course you have two or more kitchen sinks (which we certainly don’t!).

One other thought: If your serfs already know a lot about cooking and are ready and willing to handle more complex tasks, consider delegating the entire prep work process. Give your serfs the whole job and endow them with wide latitude to complete it the best way they see fit. This is a surprisingly good example of a discrete task, although depending on the recipe it can be an admittedly big and complicated task too. See if your serfs can rise to the challenge.

Also, if you have older children who are truly beginning to display some skills and interest in cooking, delegating complex responsibility like this is a great way to engage them creatively in the cooking process.

Let’s move on to our final space-creating strategy:

3) Use “Temporal Space” If You Have a Shortage of Physical Space

In the New York City metro area where we live, kitchen space comes at a premium. If you have a small kitchen or cooking area, I encourage you to think of workspace in both spatial and temporal terms. What do I mean by that? I simply mean you don’t necessarily have to have everybody working at exactly the same time in exactly the same place.

Instead, have one serf do a task, set it aside, and then have another serf complete the next task immediately afterward. Repeat as needed. Your team does the work in the same physical location, but at different space-time coordinates (for lack of a better term). The jobs thus get done in series, rather than in parallel.

Remember the example I gave in the previous article, where one person does some of the preliminary work, another person does the rest of work, and then the king breezes in like a TV chef and finishes off the meal? That’s a perfect example of using temporal space. Each person effectively has his own workspace by working in series in the same physical space.

Result? Dinner might take a bit longer to make, but it will be ready with zero crowding and zero friction.

Stay tuned for the fourth and final installment of the "How to Team Up in the Kitchen" series: Capitalize on Your Cooking Core Competencies.

How to Divide and Conquer Your Cooking Labors

This is Part 2 of a four-part series on How to Team Up in the Kitchen. If you haven't already, please take a look at Part 1.
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Part 2: How to Divide and Conquer Your Cooking Labors

As you'll recall from Part 1, being King isn’t always fun and games and ordering people around. There is a weight of responsibility too, as the king’s duty, in addition to choosing the meal and getting it on the table, is figuring out an effective way to divide up the work. What is the best way to designate the responsibility of meal preparation so that everything is done well, the serfs don't revolt from overwork, and the meal is ready on time?

Ah, the crown can weigh heavily on the brow of the king. But don't get discouraged. There are lots of ways to divide up the workflow of a meal in an effective way. Here are a few highly typical examples that we've used in our kitchen:

1) One person creates the grocery list and goes to the store, another person plans the menu and makes the meal.

2) One person cooks everything, another does clean-up duty (sometimes the idea of cooking AND cleaning up afterward is just too much to bear).

3) One person washes/pre-preps the vegetables and sets everything out on a cutting board ready to go, another person blasts through all the actual chopping. Then, the King breezes in like a TV chef and makes the meal with the bulk of the manual labor already done.

These are admittedly generic suggestions. Since much of the division of labor depends on the nature of the recipe you're making, a highly specific list of labor division ideas would probably be infinitely long. Also, you can use combinations and permutations of these ideas, depending on whether you have one spouse-serf or a team of children-serfs at your disposal.

But don't worry so much about specific details just yet; my goal is to get you thinking about general and logical ways to break down dinner into something managable. With practice, you'll come up with the best solutions for dividing up workflow as you develop a feel for the core skills and task preferences of your serfs. We'll go deeper into how to optimize everyone's core skills in Strategy #4.

Let's face it; cooking isn't always a blast, especially when you have a family to feed every damn night. Sure, there are plenty of cooking shows, cookbooks (and even blogs like this one) that try to make cooking seem like some kind of consistently glorious act of personal expression. The real truth is that sometimes cooking is an obligatory, and occasionally a truly depressing, job.

But remember, you are king! If you use the suggestions above as a framework to think about logical ways to break down dinner preparation, you’ll be surprised how quickly everybody completes their tasks, and how even highly complicated meals get whipped up in no time by a well-oiled family team.

For additional thoughts on issues surrounding doing prep work, outsourcing, and teaming up to do kitchen tasks in parallel, see my Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking essay.

We'll be back shortly with Part 3: Three Strategies to Create Personal Space in Your Kitchen.

How to Team Up in the Kitchen

The purpose of this four-part series of posts is to help you collaborate in the kitchen with your significant other (or even your entire family) with a bare minimum of friction.

Let me start by stating my personal qualifications on this matter. Like most married couples, Laura and I have had our fair share of turf battles. And in years past, our kitchen was a truly unique theater of war on which we've had some of our greatest fights. I'd tell you some war stories, but in the interests of time let me summarize by saying they mostly had to do with me being a micromanager and Laura chasing me out of the kitchen with various sharp objects.

Fortunately, we emerged from this dark era of conflict with a healthy awareness of how to team up in the kitchen. We learned to decide who's in charge, how to share work and divide up the workplace in a sensible way, and how to take advantage of each of our individual cooking skills and interests. Cooking suddently started to require a lot less effort, and it wasn't long before it grew into something we actually do for fun.

Cooking is one of those activities that the whole family can get involved in, and there is no pleasure greater than spending quality time with your family creating and enjoying great food.

Over the next two weeks, I'll share the four key strategies that have helped us team up in the kitchen.

Part 1: Choose Your King
Part 2: How to Divide and Conquer Your Cooking Labors
Part 3: Three Strategies to Create Personal Space in Your Kitchen
Part 4: Capitalize on Your Cooking Core Competencies

I hope this series of posts will encourage you and your family to team up in your kitchen too. We'll start today with Part 1.

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Part 1: Choose Your King

The fundamental problem most kitchen collaborations suffer from, and the fundamental problem Laura and I always had in our early days, was a battle for control. Maybe we'd successfully agree on what to cook, but once we actually began cooking we'd both attack the recipe full-force, giving out instructions and orders to each other. It was chaos. Two kitchen Napoleons simply cannot coexist in the same kitchen at the same time.

Eventually, one of us would win out and start controlling the direction of things. And of course the other person would usually be annoyed and feel like a second class citizen. Nobody was in charge, there was no succession plan, and we wasted a lot of energy fighting out a battle for control before we ever got down to cooking.

Finally, after staring one too many times at the business end of a paring knife, I came up with the "King" idea. "Hey," I said, "let's decide ahead of time who's the boss here. And don't worry, I'll just be King for a day. We'll take turns and you can be king the next time we cook."

What exactly does it mean to be "King" then? Think of the king as a kind of all-powerful general contractor for dinner. The king decides what to cook, and how it's going to be cooked. The king is responsible for completing the dish satisfactorily at a time agreed upon in advance with his or her subjects. The king also gets to delegate some of the work involved (but only some, as we'll see below), and figures out who should do what task and when.

We’ve found that allocating nearly complete powers to the King works well for us, but of course you can delineate the powers of your version of the king in a way that works best for you. The key point is that you should always choose your king together before starting up a recipe. You'll be stunned at how much smoother things go once that decision is out of the way.

And certainly it goes without saying that you need to take turns being king. We've settled into roughly a 60/40 split favoring me with kingly powers, but that’s only because I tend to do more of the cooking in our home.

Another king-related rule we have is this: if you come up with the meal idea, YOU get to be king. This makes being king a reward for dinner idea generation, as well as a reward for initiative. Of course, the king still typically ends up doing much of the work too, and that's deliberate: you want the pleasures of royalty to only slightly outweigh the burdens of command. You don't want the king to live off the backs of the serfs in some kind of kitchen feudalism. Thus, being king is a good thing, but not so good that you won't share the title next time around.

Another compelling idea would be to let your kids be king once in a while (after they’ve developed the basic skills of cooking of course). Imagine being a teenager and getting to order your parents to do prep work! Who knows, not only will this give your kids an extra opportunity to appreciate cooking, it could help them develop skills in management and leadership.

I'll be back in a couple of days with Part 2: How to Divide and Conquer Your Cooking Labors. Stay tuned!