This book is NOT a how-to-cook book, but a how to think-about-cooking-book. That is why I think this book will be interesting and useful to cooks -from experienced professional cooks to people who can hardly cook. Speaking of which: the reasons why many people do not cook to fullest of their abilities (or not at all) are purely psychological reasons. Just think about it: anyone can acquire the physical skills to become a decent cook in a relatively short time. Compared to becoming a half-decent drummer of guitar player, becoming a half-decent cook is a walk in the park. You only think you do not have the time, you think are not interested, you think it is all far too complicated, you think you have lost interest in cooking, you think are too important to cook, you think you know it all already, you think you are wasting your talents in the kitchen: you think, you think, you think. So we are going to pay some attention to that thinking of yours. How are we going to do this? Most cookbooks seem to think you do not. At best, you are a package of some skills and knowledge, but more often you are just regarded as a soulless, emotionless manipulator of tools following instructions. The kitchen is a place completely disconnected from you and your world, and the tools you use have nothing to do with you. "Dice the onion," "whisk until creamy." I think it is high time to get "you" back in the kitchen. In the chapter "Can you cook?' we look at the strange finding that good cooks usually have a reasonable idea of how good they are in the kitchen, but that many bad cooks have no idea how bad they are, and actually are convinced they are quite good (let's hope you are not one of those!). How do you know which one you are? Read on. Then I will take you back even before the stone-age, and make a point that we are the cooking ape: we could have never become us with our large brains without cooking our food. We big brained apes, Homo sapiens and just before us Home Erectus have been cooking for two million years! That is astonishing, because we, Homo sapiens, have been around for just two hundred thousand years. Then I will show you how cooking our food shaped our societies, made a thing like marriage necessary, and put women around the fire and in the kitchen, for better or for worse. Next, we turn to a bit of pure psychology: how do we process information? How do we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch?. You will see that we perceive the world much more with our brain than with our senses, that we in fact construct the world, we don't just "get it." We will use these insights later to explain strange effects in the kitchen: why the name of a dish changes how it tastes, how the shape of the serving plate, the music, how your brain uses almost anything to construct "taste." Memory is next. I will show you how your memory works, and how you can make it work for you in the kitchen by applying memory tricks. If you realize your memory is nothing like a hard disk, but more a story-producing database of ever-changing knowledge with a preference for pictures, all sort of cool tricks become possible. Now we are ready to look at multi-sensory experiences and cooking. We look at how you can manipulate all information around food to change experiences of the diners. Here we will also have a look at the psychology of wine tasting. Then we will turn to recipes and techniques, and how they influence the way you think about cooking and the way you cook, and how to use your kitchen, your knife, and dealing with mistakes. Next up are the cooks and diners themselves. We will look at individual differences and you will get some handy questionnaires to check what kind of cook and diner you and the ones around you are. Then comes the menu: how should the menu look, how do you name dishes and, not unimportantly, how do you price them? Last up is psychological aspects of cooking and eating healthy.