Cooking tends to be serial per-dish, with substantial amounts of mandatory waiting. A lot of cooking speed comes from experience and being able to intuitively schedule work for maximum throughput. After years of cooking, I can now interleave execution on 2-3 dishes of moderate complexity at a time, but that's only after years of practice.

Same for me. Scheduling is crucial and takes practice to get to the "intuitive" level. But, once you've got scheduling, right there are almost no wait time (except for long cooking dishes, says 3 hours or so).

What bothers me a lot down in this whole thread, is that many people seem to forget that spending time feeding oneself is actually spending time taking care of oneself (and one's family if any). And that seems to me a very important part of life.

> Amdahl's law applies, what fraction of cooking these recipes is purely serial?

The prep is usually highly parallelize; the cooking is usually pretty serial if you follow the instructions, but often parallelize with only mild invention (they often specify reusing the same pan, without any real need other than reducing cleanup and equipment requirements.)

Good point, I hadn't thought about that. But my point is that obviously cooking will happen faster you throw double the manpower at it, even if it not in a linear fashion. :P