SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK
While my
better half was recovering from surgery this spring, I did most of the cooking.
I learned something about myself during that time:
I hate
cooking.
That is to
say, I hate doing the cooking; I
still enjoy eating the cooking of others.
Ordinarily she cooks and I clean up
the kitchen, which has the benefit of us not coming down with food poisoning. I
pretend this is a huge sacrifice, but sometimes a little mindless work can be
nice and non-stressful.
But cooking? Pure stress, a panic
filled hour of spinning from place to place, measuring and timing and trying
not to burn the house down. I hate cooking with every bran fiber of my being.
Some people love cooking. They
revel in it, joyful in their creation of fancy dishes and delicious meals.
Can we not do something with these
people? Help them, somehow? How can we let them just wander around in the
streets, searching for ingredients and the newest kitchen device? Isn’t there
some medication that could help bring them back to reality, some procedure to
help them see the real world? What kind of society are we?
When I told all this to Emily –
okay, after a week and a half of cooking it was kind of a rant – she just
looked at me calmly and said, “You know, some people think the same thing about
writing.”
That hit home, because she and I
have been known to spend hours happily pecking away at our keyboards – and no,
that’s not code for something. Okay, maybe the love of cooking isn’t a mental
illness. Maybe it’s a … choice. My complaining might be like those football
fans who paint themselves in bright colors, sit in an outdoor stadium in
sub-freezing temperatures, scream at people running back and forth across a
field, then make fun of people with different hobbies. “You dress up as anime
characters and go to an air conditioned convention center to applaud your
favorite science fiction actors? What a fruitcake. Yay, Cheeseheads!”
So, it’s a choice. But when it
comes to cooking, I choose no.
I didn’t even cook all that much,
by most standards. The day of Emily’s surgery, my mother brought over a gallon
of spaghetti, a truck load of bread, and enough salad to clean out a whole
field. For at least two other days we had takeout, because contractors tore up
the kitchen. (I know what you’re thinking: suspicious timing. Let’s just say I
left a calendar, with a twenty pinned to a certain date, for the roofer.)
A few times I sneaked in something
really simple, along the lines of: “Remove cover. Heat at 400 degrees for
thirty minutes. Be careful, product will be hot”.
Emily couldn’t give me advice even
when she wasn’t heavily medicated, because as a cook she’s what they call a
pantser. For her a dash here, a bit there, 350 degrees or so until it looks
done … I need an amount, doggone it, and a time. Sometimes I think she just
faked being asleep whenever I’d run through the room with my hair smoking,
yelling “But what does parsley DO?”
So I avoided cooking for as long as
I could, but we’d bought ingredients and planned meals. Once she got to the
point where she could get up and shuffle around a little, it became too hard to
sneak Chinese food through the back door.
After that, from time to time I had
to throw together more than three items to make one item, which is when I start
to get Harried and Confused, which will also be the title of my autobiography.
The more items, the harder it is for me to keep my head straight. The more
different dishes – and apparently meals are supposed to have, say, veggies and
fruit along with the meat – the more confused and stressed I get. Cooking, for
me, is like doing brain surgery would be for you. Unless you’re a brain
surgeon, in which case you can probably afford a cook.
For awhile it was a tossup whether
I’d burn the house down, kill us with salmonella, throw a pot through the
window, or all three at the same time.
The joy of cooking was the very
opposite of joy.
This brings me to the big discovery
I really made about myself. I already knew I hated cooking, no shocker there,
but my epiphany was on a grander scale. Since my teens I knew I wanted to write
for a living, and be successful at it. I wanted to be so successful that I
could do what I want in my life.
Now I know that I picked the
absolute worst career path for financial success, but it seemed like a good
idea at the time.
And was my ultimate goal a
beachfront house in Hawaii? A yacht? Private plane?
Nope.
The older I get, the more I realize
all I really want is to hire a private cook, and if they can stick around to
clean up, so much the better. Emily might disagree, as she’s one of those poor,
sickly souls who like to cook. But I know the true secret of happiness.
And it wears a chef’s hat.
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