You can't claim to love cooking unless you also have a love for the laborious effort of food preparation, the haphazard risk of things going wrong on the fly and the inevitable task of cleaning up. It would be like saying you love going to work, but only the part where the company pays you. That'll show those snooty home cooks a thing or two about the true cooking experience.
Based on all those confused looks and nervous responses I get at various restaurants when I say "What do you recommend" instead of picking something from the menu. I would think that if you're going to work in a restaurant, you'd have some opinion about which food items are good. Unless they're all equally sub-optimal, then I suppose you should just go to another (hopefully more impressive) restaurant.
Perhaps you might even go so far as to claim that oddly coloured food is an exotic variant, which can work to your advantage when explaining why it tastes like Play-Doh and smells like burnt rubber. Of course, this is defeated simply by having the other person push back with "OK, you eat some of it first". Man, convincing people to eat arbitrarily modified food is hard work...
Even after all these years, that unfinished $40 burger still haunts me. Now that I think about it, perhaps that's why I don't find myself eating many burgers these days. I'd like to think I'm not the only one haunted by my food-related failures from yesteryear, but perhaps this is one burden I'll have to take with me to the grave. Or to the nearest toilet...
