My dad still cooks better than me and he's 71

I don’t think professional chefs ever lose their touch. My DS trained as a chef for three years and then joined the RAF to do something entirely different. He’s never lost his skills or his love for food and does most of the cooking at home. He’s far more imaginative than I am, but he can’t outdo me on his favourite - a good old fashion meat and potato pie!

Oh this made me smile joining the RAF and still cooking. Some things just don't leave you do they.
And I completely get you on the meat and potato pie. My dad is the same, there are certain things that are just his, full stop. No competition.
And you're right that the real ones never lose it. It just becomes part of who they are.

My dad baked the lightest cakes and most delicious scones.
He could cook anything better than most, sweet or savoury.

I, however, made better bread - probably because he wasn't
interested!

To be honest, I would say that at 71, I wouldn't really expect your dad to have lost his touch yet, assuming that he is still in good health.
71 really isn't old these days.

My mum was always a great baker, as was her mum, and she was well into her 80s before there was any noticable decline in the standard of her cakes.
Mind you, I wish I could say the same about myself. At 65, I'm blaming my newest oven and / or changes in the ingredients available for the unpredictability of my own baking efforts over the last couple of years, but do sometimes worry that I might be the problem !!!

My Mum, at 86 and with incipient dementia, still made better pastry than I ever have.
Generally I think my cooking's tastier, but in her day they made a limited amount of things & light, buttery pastry was something that was strived for & talked about - no ready-roll back then.

My 13 year old GC is a better cook than I am.

At 77 I am no worse than I always have been, just lazier and less adventurous.

My 79 year old dh took over all the cooking about 10 years ago and though untrained, is a much better cook than me. He enjoys it a lot more than I do too, so am happy to leave him to it.

Living on my own I get lazy but every Friday I invite friends for supper so I cook and enjoy it.
I stick to fish and get compliments so it can't be too bad.
Last night sea bass with jersey royals, broccoli and salad. strawberries and cream, pinot grigio
Can't go wrong.

My father lived to be 92 and was still more than capapble of running tings. After my mother died he started watching Delia Smith tv prgrammes and be came an excellet cook. His top dishes were a cld pork loaf to serve with salad, a Victoria sponge and a trifle.

Any social event where everyone brought a dish, he would take one or two of his culinary stars. At his funeral several people said how they would miss his contributions to get togethers.

Anyway 71 isn't 'old' in the sense of loosing mind or having a crumbling body. My DH is 82 and a Chartered Engineer and he is still working on smaller projects although he can no longer cope with site visits.

You need to up your ideas about what people are capable of at 71. They run marathons, lead big companies, undertake big engineering projects.

My stepdad had to learn to cook a couple of years ago, 81 this year, when mum’s (86) dementia reduced her to boiling everything (and regularly pans dry).
He takes real pleasure in it now and enjoys telling me what he’s cooked (though mum sadly will only eat one meal and still boils it to death).

When DH retired, he decided he wanted to do more cooking. It wasn’t something he’d ever turned his hand to, so we started off with a simple bolognese sauce. He insisted on finding a recipe online, even though I had been cooking it for donkeys years. I would go into the kitchen to find him painstakingly cutting every vegetable into tiny neat even sized pieces. Yes, when it eventually came to the table, it was delicious, we could have been reduced to skin and bone in the meantime! GS loves to cook, and wouldn’t you know he’s just as painstaking (nit picking) about preparation. He not only looks like his grandad, he cooks like him too!

amzn.eu/d/02IoCnBH

Greyduster treat your husband and grandson to a Fullstar vegetable chopper. You'd all be happy!

Thank you for the link V3ra. I have an electric vegetable chopper, but DH is now chopping vegetables in the hereafter and I have offered it to GS for his student digs but he is too bloody minded to use it!

Ohhh I'm sorry to hear that about your husband 😕

Typical about your grandson though, my husband never uses the chopper either. Our daughter bought it for him for Christmas. I love it though!

To be fair, NoraHayes your father is still a young whippersnapper.

A good friend of ours was a professional cook and he is still a Wizard in the kitchen in his seventies. I agree they don't ever lose their skills.

I'm rather shocked that you are surprised that someone in his 70s is still capable of doing something he has done all his life.
There are a lot of 71 year olds still working!
.

The OP is clearly decades younger than most of us, hence her surprise about her dad’s cooking ability. When I was 30 or 40 I too thought people in t heir 70 s and 80 s were very old.
I am late 70 s, and realise how wrong I was

My lovely husband (69) made his first ever cake yesterday, a Guinness cake.
We have a Thermomix so it is like painting by numbers but with food!
He has recently made hollandaise sauce, aioli and few other bits.
He has never cooked in the past but since we moved home a year ago has promised he will try.
I would love him to become better than me but for now at least I know if I die before him he will cope.

My dh has yet to make a cake, probably because we don’t often eat cake, though that one looks tempting Sago.