Hi folks, I'm Evan. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia but am now in Cambridge, Massachusetts working on my phd (in operations research / applied math / transportation).
I've been interested in food about as long as I can remember, very much due to my parents. They cook fairly simple food, at least by the standards of this crew. But probably 300 nights a year we ate dinner as a family together, cleaned up together, cooked together once my brother and I were older. Every dinner included "is this recipe good?" and "does it need more salt?" So I guess I learned from them that food is a process, a communal activity, the essence of home.
About 10 years ago I started baking (huge sweet tooth) which got serious in college - my clothes lived in a pile under my dorm bed and my standard dorm-issue dresser instead had a stand mixer, flours, etc.
Since I started grad school I've been cooking more seriously. For me it's very much about having fun or pushing myself; I have almost no interest in "healthy fast 5 ingredient weeknight meals!" If I'm cooking it's either pancakes/eggs/dutch baby/etc or plated meals that take me 2 hours.
In the last year and a half I've started small dinner parties for friends and family. Nothing gets my excited (or terrified) like "oh gee, guests show up in 3 hours and I still have 4 more courses to prep I'm not going to make it!" See
https://www.chefsteps.com/forum/posts/starting-to-cook-for-others for a few pictures from a year ago. Though I like to think I've improved a bunch since then!
Still, overwhelmingly in the kitchen I feel I have no idea what I'm doing. Every dinner party at some point I realize I'm doing something I've never done before, that I saw once on ChefSteps or Youtube and now I'm making it for people I want to impress am I crazy? There are so many basic techniques I've never tried that it feels ridiculous to say I'm even an enthusiastic amateur. And so while I love modern cooking (my 21st birthday gift was Modernist Cuisine...) and sous vide and all that jazz, mostly what I'm trying to get from ChefSteps and all this practice is rock solid competency, a strong base of various skills, good judgment, etc.
I've been around these parts since December 2012 and I want to say thanks to all the CS employees and forum members who've made it so welcoming and so much fun!
