The Inconvenienced Chef

There is an invisible line of competency when it comes to cooking.  Once you can saute onions, boil pasta, make a decent grilled cheese, brown taco meat, bake a Betty Crocker cake, scramble eggs, etc., you are pretty much across the line.  Then you move on to a few more complicated techniques and fancy ingredients, and BAM! you're a cook.  I've been a cook for a while.  I'm pretty competent.  I can't make all of my mom's ethnic dishes, largely because like GirlWednesday's experience, it's all "a little of this, a little of that", and impossible to pin down. But I can follow a well-written recipe like nobody's business, and I have experience with most usual dishes.

With this ability, it can be fun and indeed healthful to look up new recipes online, pour through cookbooks, and garner tips from friends to fix your very own breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. And yet, I hardly ever do.  And it's not just because I hate doing dishes.  It's a lot of work in general.  It doesn't always go as planned.  I hate hate hate the feeling of working hard on a meal and then not getting an exuberant reaction from my husband.  Often, the leftovers sit in the fridge while we elect to eat some form of prepared food or go out to eat.

Or, the food that I have in the fridge with which to cook has gone bad (or at the least, looks questionable).  And if I can muster the energy to cook, the added stress of going to the grocery store puts me over.  I guess the reality is I'm a bad planner when it comes to providing my family with meals.  It doesn't help that my family consists of two finicky adults.

It would probably help if I thought of cooking as more of a chore that needs to get done regardless of outside moods and activities.  Because if you wait until you are hungry to think about what you are going to eat, you are screwed- take it from me.  The irony is, I was much more eager to get into the kitchen when I had no clue what I was doing.  It seems like now that I am able to cook, I can't be bothered.  I keep thinking a nicer kitchen with cooler gadgets will get me there, or a child I'm more motivated to provide healthy nourishment for.  I don't know what it will be.  But as always, I am going to keep trying.  I don't think my quest to become a better housewife will ever end.  At least not until the divorce.  :-)