About Me

I am a grad student at Penn State, finishing up my master's degree in kinesiology.  I was planning on taking two years to get my master's degree (you know, like a normal person).  Somehow, I was able to take all the required credits, do the research, and write and defend a thesis in one year.  That's all well and good, but I now find myself with some unexpected downtime while I look for jobs.

I like cooking.  I have not taken any classes or had any formal cooking education.  I just have a wonderful cook for a mother.  When I moved out to go to grad school, I knew there was no way I was going to settle for eating out of cans and TV dinners.  So, with the help of the internet, I cooked.

Why "The Mechanical Cook?"  There are two reasons.  First, my undergraduate degree is in mechanical engineering.  Engineers aren't generally supposed to be the creative, culinary types, but I figure that a lot of cooking is just being able to follow directions.  If my engineering education taught me anything, it is that I can follow directions.  So that's sort of the second reason.  Yes, there is a lot of improvisation and creativity that goes into cooking (a lot of which I don't have...yet), but you can get pretty far by just mechanically following a recipe.  The more recipes you follow and the more cooking you do, the more experience you get.  And with that experience comes the more intuitive and spontaneous side of cooking.

So here I am to show you, in the immortal words of August Gusteau, "anyone can cook."