Cooking Dinner

Cooking Dinner

How hard could it be? Having that thought came back to me many times over the afternoon, but never so clearly as at that moment. Newly married, I had decided I needed to learn to cook. I don’t mean easy stuff, toast, fried eggs, I make a great salad. I needed to learn to cook a meal, like my mother did all my life.

She had tried to involve me many times. She actually was old fashioned enough to say I was going to need to know how once I got married. As if that was a given, you’re a girl, you’ll get married. In my mind it was always a maybe, so why learn to cook just in case.

I like food, but not enough to suffer over it. Fixing food was right up there with cleaning the bathroom for me. Matter of fact, if given the choice of making food or cleaning the bathroom, I always did the bathroom, which is why my sister Nancy ended up such a good cook. You’re welcome Nancy!

But now, married, I guessed I could try to learn. I found a recipe for something I knew he liked (he’d ordered it many times in restaurants.) I shopped, I planned, I prepared. I didn’t understand the directions, I forgot things, I burned the potatoes. I ended up scraping the potatoes enough to mash, and got the meal on the table just as he walked in from work. He was delighted!

As my new husband looked over my beautifully set table, he innocently asked if there were any vegetables. Remembering the green beans, still in the grocery bag, and I finally knew the answer. How hard could it be? Too hard.

Forty-two years later, he’s still the cook. And we’re still happily married.