Kitchen Nightmares.

I am supposed to be sleeping between 12 hour midnight shifts.  When our kids were small Bill used to dread my weekends to work, trying to keep a couple rowdy kids corralled so I could snag five hours of sleep before doing it again.  By the third day in a row I was cranky and it seemed like I woke up for anything and everything, the simple reason being that I was missing out on my family's weekend and wanted to be a part of it, tired or not.


Today it's a little different.  I woke up to four 18 year old's in my basement that were so quiet I had no clue they were there. In her room, Casey was singing with her headphones on at a volume I couldn't hear. Bill has done well.  After all these years, the kids respect when I sleep.  A fan in the bedroom and a shot of Sambuca before bed doesn't hurt, either.


Today I woke up in the middle of the day for a wonderful reason.  I woke up because my house smelled amazing. It smelled like spices and garlic and BACON and chicken stock.  It wasn't a dream, and it wasn't a lame Folger's commercial.  It meant Bill was cooking.


When we married, I don't recall a summit meeting about division of chores.  I can't remember laying claim to certain responsibilities. I simply remember that by default, cooking fell to Bill.  He was just plain better at it.  Unlike me, Bill knew his spices, the difference between a sauté pan and a pot, and the proper knife to use.  Bill would never make a spaghetti sauce containing not one but two bulbs of garlic in it. (Clove. Bulb. Apparently there is a difference. But he ate it like a trooper and together we learned that garlic has the ability to ooze from your pores and permeate pretty much everything around you for days and days).  Call it a rookie mistake. Call it a dating tragedy.  Call it one if Bill's favorite "Do you know what she did?" stories.


I clean the house, or at least 90% of it. When I paint rooms, Bill cuts in, which I hate doing.  I enjoy the outdoors, so I mow the lawn by choice.  I am fussy about how things look, and everyone suffers because of it. I maintain the pool, we both do laundry.  There are no "boy jobs" and "girl jobs" around here.  I have been cooking more often, thanks to my friend Laurie's blog and the magical tug of the of Food Network; where I can listen to southern accents all day and the Barefoot Contessa comforts me with her voice.  I do OK.  But the bottom line is Bill is the family cook.


Sometimes I get surly about the house being a mess, the laundry piling up, the grime on the kitchen floor.  Then I hear one of my friends complaining about making dinner and I check myself.  I believe the responsibility of putting a complete dinner on the table seven days a week would throw me into a massive panic attack.  The planning, the timing, the pressure? No thanks, I will tackle the toilet bowl ring every, single, time.


When I am supposed to make dinner, I look in the fridge and I see...nothing.  I shut the fridge. I ponder.  I open it again.  I look a little harder.  I see...nothing.  I proclaim to Bill:  "There's nothing to eat in there".


Bill moves me aside.  Bill opens the fridge.  Bill rummages.  Bill walks across the kitchen with an armload of the nothing I found and in 20 minutes, there is food.  Hot, delicious, healthy food made out of nothing.  It's a festivus miracle, and I cannot duplicate it, no matter how hard I try. He makes it look easy, chopping, dicing, flipping food around in the well oiled pan.  He's like a running back, cutting this way and that, moving fluidly between the fridge, the stove, the table.  It's like watching the ballet of sous chefs, if there was such a thing.


Conversely, my kitchen routine consists of the following:

• Look at recipe.
• Begin to assemble ingredients on counter.
• Walk back to computer to look at recipe.
• Get out pans that I am allowed to use (the shitty ones I ruined, not the ones Bill uses).
• Walk back to the computer, cursing my aging brain that can't hold a thought.
• Move mouth as I read to make words stick better.
• Start cooking.
• Drop shit.
• Stomp back to computer because I forgot.  Again.
• Splatter stuff on my shirt.
• Swear.
• Turn computer toward kitchen.  Realize I am blind.
• Swear.
• Swear.
• Look imploringly at my beloved.
• Step aside to let Bill salvage my mess.
• Apologize profusely for my incompetence.

  

Please don't judge.  I work hard to clean up after the Pig People I made.  I make sure the vacuum tracks all go the same way. My lawn rocks.  My countertops sparkle.  But at the end of the day, when I am eating  pea soup with chorizo, (yes, I had to ask him what chorizo was) I am grateful that in addition to a homemade, balanced meal, I also have helped create a balanced marriage.

The other day, I was watching The French Chef.  Even though I am a sub par cook, I like to watch the masters, and Julia Child is my favorite.  At one point, she looked directly into my eyes and spoke to me.  I just know it was me she wanted to get through to, because what she said was this:

      “The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken.  Bon appétit. ”  

I whooped as I headed to the wine rack to make dinner.

Bon appétit, indeed.