When Robert Pincus was a professor of cloud physics at the University of Wisconsin, he reacted to the stress of his day job in a perfectly normal way: by adding on a night job cooking for Odessa Piper at L’Etoile, where he received advanced training in cooking from the farmers market. He now lives in New York with his wife Tara Q. Thomas and their baby daughter (code name “Squishy”). He spends just a little too much time at the Union Square Greenmarket.