But soon, he was frustrated: "We were getting in a rut. We were having the same thing every week," he lamented. "By the time you'd get home and try to go through the cookbooks and see something and then realize, 'Oh I don't have that ingredient, or that ingredient.' It wasn't working."
Meanwhile, in the Murphys' house, as in the homes of most avid cooks, recipes from newspapers and magazines were piling up - and so were the cookbooks, hardly used.
So one day last summer, Scott culled the cookbooks and clippings and made a long list of everything he'd like to try.
Falling back on the organization from a career in the military, he entered all the recipes and ingredients onto a computerized spreadsheet. That allowed him to create a carefully organized shopping list, so that he can do a mammoth monthly shopping trip and then fill in with supplemental trips for fresh ingredients.
"This was a way to get a little more variety and to not be sitting in work wondering what I was going to need to make dinner," he said.
Said his wife: "He doesn't know any other way to do it except organized, so he doesn't think it's weird. He thinks it's normal."
(Maureen is not necessarily a reliable judge of normal. She irons her sheets, pillowcases and underwear.)
The couple met in 1996 when they both worked at the American Society for Testing Materials, a professional organization that creates quality-control standards. They were drawn together because they both like to watch the Food Network. It is a second marriage for both; he has three grown children who have made her a grandmother of three by marriage.
He, 60, was an Air Force pilot who served in Vietnam for a year and then finished out a military career mostly at McGuire Air Force Base. Now he runs a continuing education program at the American Society for Testing Materials.
She, 47, has a master's degree in nonprofit management and now works as a fund-raiser for the World Affairs Council.
