On Cooking

I am not good at cooking.  I don’t particularly like doing it.  It’s not really my thing.

Turns out, cooking should sort of be everybody’s thing, because everybody eats.  If cooking isn’t your thing, you end up eating a lot of EZ-mac and Chipotle.  I didn’t eat great when I lived alone – things certainly got repetitive and sometimes there was some emergency EZ-mac.  Ok, there was a lot of canned soup.

Choosing, preparing, and eating food has always been sort of stressful, actually.  In high school, my mom had what I would now call an undiagnosed eating disorder and there wasn’t a lot of edible food in the house.  (Though there was always a lot of spoiled, slimy, or mold-covered food that she felt too guilty to throw away).  So perhaps I did not have the sturdiest food-behavior foundation.

Then, when I lived alone, food choices always represented this three-way balancing act between cost, health, and time.  If it was healthy, it took forever or cost too much.  If it was cheap, it was full of processed sugars and simple carbohydrates and had never seen a vegetable.  If it was quick, it cost too much and had never seen a vegetable.  As a medical student, I was short on both time and money and felt like a hypocrite if I ignored my health. 

One of the best things Benjamin did when he moved in was start cooking me dinner.  I was trying to drag myself to the finish line of my semester fueled only on coffee and desperation, and he swooped in and steamed some broccoli.  I thought he was a god. 

And he still often does this.  Last night, a girl friend came over and we hung out and Benjamin made turkey burgers and oven fried potatoes and mixed vegetables.  It was amazing.

But I’m not really pressed for time so much these days.  I have my internship and my thesis, but it is nothing like the end of the semester crunch.  Or, you know, residency.  So I feel like I should still contribute to the household eating by occasionally preparing a meal.

And it is still stressful.  I still feel that juggling act between health, time, and cost (though I have both more time and money than I did before). But the new layer I have to deal with now is performance anxiety.  I want Benjamin to actually want to eat what I cook, and I feel self-conscious about my lack of culinary talent.  Perhaps it’s some internalized sexism that makes me feel that as the woman, I should be better at cooking than he is.  Or maybe I’m just a competitive person.  But in any case, I just want to be better at it than he is.  And I am just not.  The man has talent.  And I have...a semi-edible track record.  There was some artichoke pasta I made recently that he soldiered through but I just could not even stomach.

Tonight, I made this recipe: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Mashed-Potatoes-with-Carrots-and-Leeks-109125.  It’s really just mashed potatoes with leeks and carrots thrown in.  It tastes like mashed potatoes with leeks and carrots thrown in (nothing magical happens with them really) but it was pretty tasty once I got enough salt in there.

I was feeling very flustered and hypoglycemic the whole time I was cooking.  And I thought seriously about just asking Benjamin if we could divide up the food chores from here on out – I would shop and do dishes if he would cook all the dinners.

But I didn’t.  Because I don’t think partnership is necessarily about specializing and not developing diverse skills.  It’s about specializing in the moment – dividing and conquering everything that needs to get done that night and still being flexible enough to switch jobs the next night.  Deconstructing rigid gender roles should mean something more and better than “I always mow the lawn and my husband always cooks dinner,” it should make men and women more competent and flexible. 

So in the name of self-improvement and a flexible partnership, I will continue to struggle through preparing dinner once in a while.  And Benjamin will continue to struggle through eating those dinners.

At least until July, when I fully anticipate everything to go to hell.  

Sixteen Breaths

Today at the grocery store, my husband barked at me for picking up a bag of candy off of the belt in the self-check line and making the automated voice lady all cranky-pants (“if you wish to purchase the item, please place the item on the belt.”)  I spun on my heel to face him and said, “don’t talk to me that way.”  I thought I was going to actually shoot lasers out of my eyes, but it turns out I just shot spittle out of my mouth.  He put the candy down and said, “you’re right, I’m sorry.”  It caught me so off guard.  I had all this anger all stockpiled by the entrance of my mouth and all of the sudden he’s just saying “I’m sorry.”  Like, that’s great, but what am I going to do with all this venom?  I looked around for someone else to yell at, but I didn’t see any republicans.  I felt like I had a mouth full of gristle at a fancy party and had to wait till no one was looking so I could spit it discretely into my cloth napkin.  I’m not good at changing gears this fast.  Last time we had a fight and I was wrong, I had to sit with my eyes closed and take sixteen deep breaths without saying anything before I could apologize.  It took sixteen deep breaths for me to rearrange my whole idea of myself into someone who could sometimes be wrong.  My pride was limping around giving me pitiful looks for days.

We did our taxes tonight and it was actually sort of fun.  Married life is weird.  We had stockpiled all these medical receipts and I read them out to Benjamin while he entered them into a spreadsheet on the computer.  It feels so nice and ordered to know that basket of scraps of paper is now a nice organized spreadsheet.  I’m not type A enough to do that sort of thing on my own, but I am type A enough to appreciate it when it is done.  My brain feels like it has good feng shui now. 

I went to the coffee shop today to work on my thesis and this nice young woman asked if she could sit down with me.  We talked for almost two hours.  I didn’t get much of my thesis done, but this is why I don’t work at home; it’s harder for the universe to tell you about something more important you should be doing.

The baby is either practicing her Olympic tumbling routine or I am about to have explosive diarrhea.  I really cannot tell which.  This is the weirdest thing my body has ever done.  Way weirder than the time I was twelve and realized I was growing little dark hairs in my armpits.  Puberty was rough; I feel like I just got used to that body and now here it goes changing on me again.  I have stretch marks on my breasts.  When I complained about this to Rosemary she arched one eyebrow so high it threatened to give up and join forces with her hair, “didn’t you have those already?”  I guess I am not going to get a lot of sympathy for the boob stretch mark thing. 

Yesterday was a terrible day.  Halfway through my third bout of sobbing I thought, “Oh yeah, depression, I remember you.”  Remembering that this was called depression did not really help me feel any better, but at least I had a name for it.  If I hadn’t remembered that it was called depression, I was going to christen it “Frederick.”  Today was much better.  Hopefully tomorrow will be bearable.