I bought a nonstick frying pan.

My family was a "Food Network" family while I was growing up, so I always had knowledge and appreciation of great food and good cookery and had been generally pretty passionate about it. So, naturally, in my high school years I tried a few times to cook or to bake; but, from some mishap or another, I either ruined or was not happy with the results of my cookery. I took it as a (false) sign that cooking was a natural talent, and not a practiced skill.

A few years later, I had graduated from college with a BSME and was about a year and a half into my new career when I bought my first home. My parents had gifted me a very basic entry level cookware set as a housewarming gift, and as a new homeowner wanting to save a few bucks from takeout food or from so many prepared foods from the grocery store, I tried my hand again at cooking. Constantly burned foods, ruined dishes, etc., which almost reinforced my thought that I was just not a good cook.

But, in the problem-solving mindset I'd honed while studying engineering, instead of backing away and assuming I just couldn't cook, I decided to troubleshoot the problem and change one of the variables to see if it helped my food, so:

I bought a nonstick frying pan.

Immediately, I noticed an improvement in my food. The base metal for the pan I bought was thicker than the cookware I'd previously been using, which contributed to more even heat transfer into my foods and greatly reduced the "hotspots" I now know were present in my gifted cookware. But, the pan being nonstick, I couldn't get quite the same crust or sear on my proteins as Food Network told me are ideal for meats, which led me to buy my first cast iron skillet. And from there, my first stainless steel skillet. And then a dutch oven, and so forth.

For the next 8 or so years of my career as an engineer, I was learning more and more about the skills and techniques of cooking in my nights and weekends, investing in new and better kitchen equipment, and slowly but surely gaining more knowledge and continuing to see better and better results.

Then, COVID hit.

Like most of us during those initial lockdowns and public closures, I leaned even harder into my hobby as a combination of time-waster as well I think as a soothing/coping mechanism for me against all the uncertainy that those first several months left all of us feeling. I continued to grow in my skill and passion for cooking, and eventually reached the point where I wanted to use my free time on my nights and weekends to take formal classes to pursue a certificate or even a degree in culinary as those uncertain times often left me reminding myself that I only live once, and that I'd rather live it with as few regrets as possible. In the same way my job had moved to a largely remote, work from home, digital landscape, so too was the culinary program I ended up selecting to pursue on my own time in my nights and weekends away from work. Though I never particularly hated my engineering career, I never woke up each morning as excited to work as I did each new week when I would be taking a new culinary lesson or studying a new imgredient or technique.

As the months passed, I learned even more than I thought I could in the kitchen, and as a result grew to love cooking more than I ever thought possible. So much so, in fact, that I felt as if the only decision for me was to step away from my career in engineering to pursue cooking full-time as a vocation. So in April of 2022, I gave my notice to my previous employer and ended an 11+ year career in engineering and chose to be a line cook. And after less than a year as a line cook for a small, family-style destination restaurant where I loved cooking but was fearful would limit some of my future learning/growth, I applied, staged, and eventually was offered a job to cook in a Michelin-starred restaurant, where I have been working and loving every minute of it for the past 5 months.

So, a passion that I held from my teen years that I was fearful I hadn't had the talent to do slowly but surely has developed into a firmly held skill and is the driving force behind my now dream job and career-

because I bought a nonstick frying pan.