Cooking Is Overrated

It was a typical Saturday afternoon and I was about to make the family lunch when my husband asked, “Will barf-bags be included with lunch?” 

Most women would be upset, and yes, I did grit my teeth a bit, but the truth is, I am not a good cook. OK, let’s qualify that: I don’t cook most things well. I burn food on a regular basis, so much so that when my family hears a smoke alarm, they automatically come to the table.   I have one or two specialties which, depending on the day and alignment of the stars, can be  good, but overall, cooking is not one of my talents.  I guess that’s why the family drink is Alka Seltzer.

Blame part, and only part of it on my mother.  She was from a poor family whose goal was to put food on the table – ANY food.  Taste didn’t matter.  The only spices Mom ever really mastered were salt and oregano, otherwise, food was pretty flavorless in our house.  For that reason I grew up thinking bland was the way food was supposed to taste. 

When I was single, I grew to like burned food, since I was, um, doing a lot of that anyway. Burned, bland food.  Maybe my tastes have been physically altered over the years and not in a gourmet way.

OK, there have been some really stupid mistakes.  My husband is lactose intolerant, so I’m not sure what I was thinking when, years ago, I tried to make him an 8-cheese quiche.  Perhaps I was looking for a new, easy recipe and figured the Lact-Aid pills he was taking would fix his stomach.  As luck would have it, our oven was failing at the time and the quiche never finished cooking.  Good thing, too. The quiche would have killed him. And the first time I cooked Passover dinner for my future mother-in-law, I made my world-famous lasagna, as in meat lasagna.  Apparently everyone on the planet but me knew what Kosher meant.

I do, however, blame the Thanksgiving turkey that exploded on the Pyrex dish I was using.  I mean, it wasn’t like I’d stuffed the bird with gunpowder. But the many, many times I’ve burned microwave popcorn have all been me.  My neighbors often see me carrying a bag of smoking popcorn to the garbage can before I go back into the house to open up all the windows, even on 8 degree days.  In fact, when my children smell burnt food, they’ve been known to say, “Wow.  It smells like home.”

What hurts is that I really do make an effort to cook well.  I’ve watched Alton Brown on the Cooking Channel a gazillion times, gaining inspiration from his explanations of why acids tenderize meats, or why nitrogen, helium, and sucrose result in … something delicious. 

I just get easily distracted by “unimportant” things like my kids.  Given a slab of undistracted time, I might do well.  Add the children into the mix and I find myself hopelessly trying to whip up a gourmet meal (husband must have his meals consist of a meat, a starch, and a vegetable – and the veggie has to be green) while helping Junior with his homework, Diva with an art project, and keeping the cat off the counter.  

Let me add that Husband wants his food, and that of the kids, made without preservatives.  No Rice-A-Roni, no frozen dinners.  Fresh, gourmet food.  Yeah.  Right.  Thank goodness the kids are easier and are more accepting of my inability to cook, although my daughter regularly turns her nose up at what I put on the table and opts for our default dinner of Cherrios.

As for my spouse, I feel that when someone walks in the door at 9 p.m., he’s lucky not to get a bowl of Purina Husband Chow.  I’ve known people who were just grateful their partner had a hot meal on the table, never mind what it tasted like. Closing the kitchen after the kids and I eat isn’t fair.  I mean, hubby DID work a full day.  But expecting gourmet-quality food after taking care of kids all day, with the prospect of single-handedly putting them to bed, is a bit much. 

Still, I take pride in a few things:

1. No one has ever wound up in the hospital as a result of eating one of my meals.  The bathroom, yes, but not Saint Barnabas.  In fact, my husband once said that the most enjoyable part of his meal was the time he spent afterward in the bathroom.  He loved the solitude.
2. The fire department has never been called because of one of my dinners.  Last year I almost called them after the chicken I was cooking on the outdoor grill caught fire, but I managed to close the grill.  Disaster avoided.
3. I finally got the microwave clean after cremating some microwaveable popcorn.  Cleaning tip:  if you scrub the appliance with baking soda and water 25 times, it gets the odor out and the brown becomes a lovely shade of tan.
4. I have never burned a salad.

These days, the goal of my cooking is survival:  keep the kids alive and healthy, help me lose weight so I can be healthy, and mollify my better half.  And in answer to his question,  no, I do not serve lunch accompanied by a barf-bag.  Now shut up, each your lunch, and I’ll get the Tums.