Why I Weigh My Ingredients

I've loved Science my whole life. I was one of those kids who always wanted to know why and how something worked. I was blessed with a biologist turned Purchasing Director for a father and a teacher for a mother so most of my why's and how's were promptly and correctly answered. National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines sat on my bookshelf along with high school and college textbooks gleaned from book sales. Because of my love for Science and my dream to become a veterinarian, I was put on the advanced science track at my college-prep high school. Even more worlds of wonder were opened to me when I took Biology as a freshman. BUT "they" forgot to put me in advanced math. This error caught up with me first quarter of Sophomore Chemistry. I was only in Geometry I with no Trig or Calculus experience. "Fortunately" there was about a half dozen of us in the same boat and we had a kind and dear Chemistry teacher. Mr. Britten spent many a lunch period giving us crash courses in math. He did the same thing for us the next year in Physics. By then, I was barely treading H2O and decided being a teacher or librarian was a better idea than a vet.
But the why and how questions were still there, especially when I started cooking on my own. (Keep in mind this was in the pre-Food Network/Internet era.) I drove my mother crazy and made AT&T very happy with questions like "Should I bake the meat loaf for a different period of time because I have a glass loaf pan?"  I really, really drove her crazy with the "How do you correctly measure flour?" question. I tried to explain that different scoping methods could drastically alter the amount of flour because the measuring cup only measured volume, not weight. I even gave her a demonstration when I came home for a visit, showing that our scoops contained different amounts of flour. She gave me a perplexed look  and said, "Susan, all I know is every cookie and every pie I've ever baked for you was with that size scoop of flour and you ate them all!"
A few months after the "flour scooping experiment" I was visiting the big city of Indianapolis. In a bookstore in that town, I happened upon an issue of the magazine Cook's Illustrated.  I opened it up and my world was turned upside down. It seemed that there was a test kitchen in Boston filled with chefs/scientists who "experimented" on the same recipe over and over until it was just right. They did things like vary the pan type - glass or metal. Then they wrote detailed articles explaining the science behind what made the final recipe work. I couldn't get enough! Had these folks been inside my brain? The answer was "Yes!"