MARIO RITTER: “Man With a Pan” also includes an essay by the author Stephen King.

JOHN DONOHUE: “Steven King started cooking for his family in Maine after his wife lost her sense of taste and lost interest in doing any cooking. He wanted better food for his family, so he went into the kitchen. He talks about using the microwave and other basic things about keeping things simple. That’s his motto. He has great advice: ‘don’t set the kitchen on fire.’”

FRITZI BODENHEIMER: Author Mohammed Naseehu Ali shared childhood memories of his mother’s kitchen in Ghana.

MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI: “I grew up in a Hausa Muslim community. And, in our community, it's highly frowned upon for men to be around a kitchen. But my mother, she allowed me to hang around while she cooked.”

And that experience in the kitchen may have also helped prepare Mr. Ali to become a writer.

MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI:: “I’ve actually kind of compared cooking to writing. It’s pretty much the same thing. In writing, you have a blank page for you to start with. In cooking, you have an empty pot to creatively start thinking of what you going to put in the pot, to mix it together to create some food.”

MARIO RITTER: Travel writer Jack Hitt also wrote an essay for “Man With a Pan.”

JACK HITT: “In the essay, one of the things you discover when you start to cook is that following a recipe wasn’t simply just a matter a measuring out cups and tablespoons, but something much bigger and more metaphysical that that. It’s a very minimalist sort of form that implies so much more than what is actually written. And it’s like gardening, in some sense, or driving that becomes second nature and becomes instinctive.”