What it’s like to live with a food nerd

My husband often jokes that the only way to get me to make something twice is to tell me that the dish I made isn’t very good. He is not altogether wrong in that opinion. As someone who is more than mildly obsessed with cooking and baking, I am so eager to try the next new thing that it can be a long time before I make a dish again, even if I really like it. That’s only one of the problems of living with a “food nerd” – a term from the team over at Serious Eats. They recently asked their loved ones to come clean on what it is really like to live with someone who works at Serious Eats.

One common theme is that eating out can be more of a challenge than cooking together. Because the Serious Eats staff is so into food, they can face decision paralysis when choosing where to eat or which foods to choose once they get to the restaurant. Says Bex Shubert, Daniel Dyssegaard Kallick’s partner, “This dilemma tends to manifest as indecision and slight panic on his part, and we generally end up ordering several times more food than we can eat in one sitting! There are worse problems to have—our fridge is perpetually full of tasty leftovers.”

As you might expect, partners of Serious Eats staffers are afraid their own culinary contributions will be judged. There is some truth to that rumor, as the humorous examples show. Cate Megley, Sasha Marx’s partner, says that Sasha “gets ‘the look’ when watching other people cook—something I’m sure he picked up running the pass and watching over cooks in restaurant kitchens. It’s an anxiety-inducing gaze of silent judgment.” I know that in our household this also happens, and it can be the catalyst for a huge argument. My husband will tell anyone who asks that I am difficult to work with in the kitchen. Although it has taken some time, I’ve learned which tasks I can delegate to hubby and which I should leave for myself.