We, or more honestly my boyfriend, started to cook more meals at home. His ability to make something taste amazing always astounds me. He works in fine dining so his skills are already unbelievable, but now he commands our kitchen in a way I’ve never seen before. It’s great for our stomachs as well as our wallets. But I also find it very intimidating.
On the rare occasions when I do make food for him, dinner usually comes in the form of Dave’s Fresh Pasta because it’s hard to screw up boiling water. Tonight he made that for me too, because he’s patient and forgiving of my lame qualities.
The problem is that I can’t do anything close to what he does. I’m safe if I have a recipe to follow, but cooking has never been able to hold my interest for very long. In fact, I almost dread having to do it. My mother used to cook all the meals in our house, except breakfast because she had morning coffee at the bakery with her friends. However, as good as those meals were, and even though she was constantly making bulk potato or macaroni salad for the bakery to sell, I never got the impression she enjoyed doing any of it.
Looking back, I think the problem was that she probably didn’t appreciate having to work long hours at the restaurant only to have to come home and make dinner for a husband who wouldn’t come out of the bedroom until dinner was on the table and a daughter that hid at the sound of pots and pans rattling. When she enlisted me to help in the kitchen, I considered anything she asked to be the most tedious and painful chore. I hating peeling potatoes and hard boiled eggs, my arms ached after a few minutes of stirring something on the stove, and I had no patience for canning, pickling or making jam (heh, jamming). The only thing I liked was watching her use the electric knife to remove corn from the cob before she froze bags of it for the winter.
My father was no help. When I was young and she was working late, he was in charge of dinner. That meant Hot Stuff Pizza from the gas station, Hardee’s combos, or foraging for leftovers, which we had plenty of in that house. I’d like to think I knew that what we were doing was wrong and self-destructive. He knew how unhealthy it was to eat fast food and diner chow, but he did it anyway. I certainly knew that the food I was gorging on when my mother was away was not part of a “well balanced diet,” but it was fun to be naughty. She always scolded us when she saw the wrappers or boxes in the trash.
My bad habit didn’t get any better when I reached high school because I was hanging out with friends, and all we ate was trash. Living in an apartment during college was only slightly better, because as I at least tried to once in a while fry a chicken breast and steam some veggies or make pot of spaghetti and Ragu. Still, it wasn’t until my boyfriend and I started talking about how much money we wasted on prepackaged food or frozen and deep-fried objects, which could barely be called food, that we actually started to realize the impact of our poor decisions. Not only was it a huge waste of money, but I was lethargic and uninspired, and he wasn’t enjoying the taste of food anymore, except at work. This decision to do something about it happened roughly a month before we quit smoking (January 2011).
Although we gave up cigarettes together, what should have been a team effort to improve our diets was instead my boyfriend carrying us both using his considerable skills behind the stove. My contribution to this whole self-betterment endeavor was that I took to walking last year as if it was a brand new craze I’d just discovered, and I dragged him willingly along on my journey.
Somewhere along the way, I also discovered I didn’t mind stopping at the grocery store to pick up salmon and a lemon so he can squeeze us out another Bees Knees (or limes for margaritas). Our afternoon text messages are often limited to who’s making a stop on the way home for supplies, or whether one of us has a craving for a certain dish. As boring as it is, that dialog I think keeps us both going. Neither of us can flip a switch and become healthy all of a sudden. It takes work, but it helps to know we both want the same result and we have a partner to lean on if the road starts to get a little rough.
Bought the Ticket and Taking the Ride 