cooking is my new bag, baby.

I've suddenly learned that cooking is not only not all that terrifying, but it's also totally healing my relationship with my husband in ways that I never before thought possible.  I can't believe it. 

Wait.  Let me stop myself before I turn into a verbal avalanche, which is inevitable, but let's see if I can pause it; we're also getting better sleep.  I dug out all my favorite books a few weeks ago, because Caleb brought them into the house finally, since we'd finished the basement and then the kitchen, and the holidays and the dizzying ride of illnesses had kind of abated for the moment (which is back, but that's another rant altogether).  The books were still cramped and pissy, all smashed together uncomfortably in their boxes, but I remedied that for a lot of them, trekking upstairs into my room while cradling them lovingly in my arms, stacked too high so that I dropped several on the way - just like old times!  And after sorting them out and spreading them through the upstairs, randomly, so wonderful, that random spread of books, so comforting and cozy and sumptuous, I noticed the Ferber book, and I grabbed it along with my complete short stories by Fitzgerald, and toted it to the living room with some tea and cookies and snuggled down into the sofa cushions.  And after re-familiarizing myself with its contents, I grabbed my husband and forced him into the chair across from me, and explained how we'd be revisiting the Ferber process.  To my amazement, he agreed; we've both reached our maximum quotient on sleep deprivation, it seems.  When I consider the rounds we've gone on that whole business, it blows my mind.  But that's all past.  Now is what matters!  Now is in our clutches!  So we set off to reinstate sleep in our home, and it was accomplished within a night.  All we did was ignore the tiny bits of weeping, just plain ignore it, and sleep was had.  It got us into a better sleep place, which sort of stimulated me to get better organized in general (I see that now, looking back), and I started having stuff done enough in the evenings that I just sort of *wanted* to get to bed earlier than usual, and then I was in a better mood, and then the organization process lent itself to my having the headspace to work out meals in advance, and get the requisite ingredients, and begin making dinner during the week. 

Which leads me to this post.  The marriage-salvage, the succor that is my making dinner Monday through Friday. 

I've dreaded this becoming a truth since I was a kid.  My mom made dinner every night of our lives, and at one point she tried to induce me to start making it, and from my current vantage point I cannot blame her one wit, but at the time, I remember thinking, ew.  I hate *eating* dinner; why would I want to make it?  I like dessert, so I'll make that.  I started baking all the time, in fact, and would make a batch of cookies or a cake from scratch at least once a week.  She managed to coerce me into housekeeping and ironing, too, which I am grateful for; but I simply wouldn't budge on the dinner-making.  The reason?  My big resistance to dinner?  At the time, I couldn't have given you an answer, not much more than a shrug and an I-dunno.  Now?  I know it's because my mom, bless her honest, awesome, hard-working heart and soul and every other bit of her, is really not much of a cook.  That's being nice.  She tried.  She came home exhausted from her tiring role as executive assistant to the president of the division of the company where she was employed, every single day, and cooked dinner.  I remember how, after clean-up was complete, she'd collapse into bed, and nothing I could do to keep her out of it worked.  She was plumb wiped.

In my twenties, I insisted I'd never become domestically skilled.  (Even though I would've killed in any housekeeping challenge that didn't involve cheffery.  I can clean like you would not believe.  I love it.  It thrills me.  I wish there a clean-cathalon.  I need that ribbon, just for validation.)  So I'm not sure why I was trying to bother convincing anyone about my lack of domesticity.  I guess it was the link between my mother's lack of desire to live beyond her work and her dinner-making.  It didn't seem like much of a life.  Not one I'd want, anyway.

Caleb's been making dinner, along with all the other meals, since we've been together.  His whole family cooks like crazy.  All the kids, on both sides, are mind-bogglingly skilled.  They can all do that whole throw-it-together thing, the dash-of-this, pinch-of-that, cooked-to-perfection bit, without breaking much of a sweat.  It's beautiful.  I'm a foodie, in the eating sense, and it is AWEsome to eat the food that any of them make.  His little brother is a sushi chef; has been one for about eight years, and throws the most incredible fusion meals together on a whim.  It's frigging fantastic.

It's been an issue, all these years, my staunch refusal to share in the cooking duties.  I do everything else housekeeping-related - in the beginning, he shared laundry duties with me, but I eventually took over, and he's fine with that.  I am, too.  I'm so damn particular about folding and put-away and whatnot, although not as much lately, because of time constraints, which bums me out, but mehhh.  I'm learning to live with it.  But I've cleaned the toilets since we first began living together, and at my stubborn insistence, with his willingness, it's been my purview ever since.  I. Clean. House.  He Fixes Dinner.  The End.

Then we had our son, and that just shook everything up like, you know, just as you would expect, only in ways that you wouldn't expect if you didn't know what to expect and didn't read the what-to-expect book because you'd heard it was a crock.  And then read that crap-ass Sears bullshit and it made you insane for months, until you somehow managed to shake it all loose, and then you were *still* lost because of the sleep deprivation and the stubbornness about refusing to cook, although you were actually cooking a good portion of the time for that kid in your life, because you had to, but who counts heating up frozen peas and mashing them in that little food mill as cooking?  Not me.  But then, one day, you're making lasagna, without your husband's help, even though it's this ridiculously simple recipe from your kitchen GENIUS step-mother-in-law (seriously, she's the best cook I've ever encountered in the flesh), this sinfully delicious recipe that makes people ask for third helpings of, but also easy in a way that makes someone who lacks all the cooking skills in the world, like yourself, astonished that you made it.

And then you don't cook for a long time, because that lasagna, plus some lentil soup (also sinfully good, but in a way that makes you have some very painful interludes of gastronomic distress, plus it gives your breastfed baby similarly horrid bouts of bad gas that make him convulse with pain and make you break up with that recipe altogether, albeit totally sadly, and with sidelong glances, because it was *such* a good recipe, dammit, esp. with a side of fresh sourdough, oh my GOD it was good) was all you knew how to make, and the lasagna -- well, you can only eat lasagna so many times in a row, we're talking months on end, before you kind of want to never eat lasagna again, ever, ever, ever.

Ever.

So.  We started to get some sleep.  And I started getting organized.  And to meal-plan.  Simple stuff.  You know.  Spaghetti (a dish I've hated from time immemorial, because of the weekly church-spaghetti-dinners on Sunday evenings, with all that slimy pasta and that oily, runny sauce, sweet and cloying and yet somehow still flavorless, and the slippery-with-margarine french bread, mysteriously dry and simultaneously squishy, and the grey-green iceberg salad chunks, with the reddish, spoiling center pieces, and that white-pink chunk of tomato, hard as rock, off to the side, and the green cans of parmesan spread in bunches around the auditorium tables in the dank basement of the church quarters).  But this time, I made my step-MIL's recipe, with all that good red wine, and garlic, and wine, and liberal amounts of salt and pepper that just FLY in the face of church spaghetti makers everywhere, the flavor in it is quasi-obscene.  It's GOOD.  Amazing.  Good and spaghetti *can* live together in the same sentence.  My mind slid sideways out of my ear when I found it out, that it can happen, that *I* can make it happen.

Hamburgers.  Breakfast for dinner.  Taco night. 

I roasted a chicken and made garlic mashed potatoes, with the potato skins on for added texture and nutrients (the potato skin's so good for you, which just sounds exactly like something a mother would say, doesn't it) on Friday night last week.  Lots of butter and cream and salt in the potatoes, too, and fresh-ground pepper, and all I used on the chicken was butter, salt, pepper and some dried rosemary, and it actually turned out juicy and flavorful.  I made gravy, too, and blanched some fresh spinach.

My marriage has never been better.

I know.  It's kind of silly.  Part of the reason I've stopped being afraid of the kitchen is because my mom stood nearby and coached me while I cut up a whole raw chicken a few weeks ago.  There's something about doing that - it really makes you feel like you can do anything in the kitchen.  (It's also not a little gross.  Yeah.  I said it.  I've handled raw chicken before, in its various forms, and I even helped my mom cut a whole chicken up when I was a pre-teen, but I'd never done it myself.  With my own two hands to rely on.  It's a -- thing.  And given my lack of desire to cook partially because my mom was not so good at it - that's funny, isn't it?  But I think we all can see that it's a little deeper than that.  And we can also see that my cutting up a chicken actually managed to heal my relationship with my mom, which is a nice touch of irony, isn't it.)

Let's end it there, for now.

Comments

[slouching mom]

damn, girl, this was so good. all of it. the church suppers -- LOL!

and so accurate. i felt such kinship with you as you were in the beginning of this post, because i don't cook. could, but don't. won't.

i wonder if this will inspire me? probably not, but i'm a tough nut to crack.

[Melanie]

FFSSST! Check your e-mail, ma'am!

[qt]

Oh, the church spaghetti feeds. How scarily accurate that description was...

I love to cook, and I love that you are giving it a go and enjoying yourself, ms debbie, because cooking SHOULD be fun.

[jaelithe]

So, are you saying that the way to a man's heart really is through his stomach? ;)

I had to learn to cook basic meals when I was a teenager, because my mom didn't cook dinner. It's a good skill to have, and I learned to really enjoy it, but, lately I have been feeling really burned out about cooking. I'm hoping I'll get my cooking mojo back soon.

Maybe I just need a new cookbook!

To go with my 38 other cookbooks.

(Or maybe I need a lovely new kitchen, like yours?)

[Emily R]

You really need to read Julie and Julia!

[Mary]

See? I told people cooking was therapeutic, but did they listen? NOOOOO! They all stood there with their takeout menus and called me Martha and assumed my IQ was lower, and then wondered why it was that my husband does laundry and irons and never says bad things about me to my friends.

IT'S CALLED HOME COOKING! Seriously, watch FoodTV for a while, read Heat by Bill Buford, make a batch of homemade bread, or Chicken with 40 Cloves (on my blog, check it out)....it's like therapy, like sex, like a clean house, ALMOST like new shoes. It's unreal.

[Mignon]

I don't/won't/dislike to cook. But we get take-out, so I do an excellent job of ordering and setting the table, and this seems to make Jim happy. And bjs. Take out and bjs. Can I say that here?

[Gwen]

But, see, if you cook, then you can get by with fewer bj's. ;)

(I opened this comment box last night and still found it empty this morning .... just in case the discussion has moved on in my long absence).

[Major Bedhead]

I love to cook. And it's not the little dictators who live with me who don't like the fancy-schmancy stuff, it's the Canuck husband and wretched teen-aged daughter.