I hate cooking. There, I said it. The unfortunate thing about this hatred of anything culinary is the fact that is figures prominently in my job responsibilities. Sure, I’ll bake a dessert every now and then, but I get no pleasure out of adding a dash of this and sprinkle of that to create the perfect dish. I am extraordinarily lucky in that I am married to a man who loves to cook so much, he considers it a relaxing hobby and will prepare elaborate meals on the weekends for me while I sit at the kitchen table reading magazines and drinking wine, but the regular, everyday cooking falls squarely in my wheel house as a stay at home mom. I sort of don’t have a leg to stand on, being home all day and then asking H to prepare dinner when he walks in the door at seven thirty.
Back in the day, H and I shared cooking responsibilities equally. If you can call what we did “cooking”. Most nights it was takeout or random, over-priced salad components picked up at the Korean deli on the way home. Once the kids came though, running out to pick up hummus, tabbouleh and a rotisserie chicken every night at six o'clock stopped being an option and I started having to plan a menu each week. Poor H, my early menus were pretty much composed of the same five dishes every single week and three out of five featured ground turkey, which is pretty much the world’s most flavorless food unless you really doll it up, and as I stated above, I have no interest in doing. My preferred method of cooking is following a recipe that requires dumping a whole lot of crap in a pot and letting it cook, hence our repeated consumption of turkey chili.
Looking at my childhood, it’s no wonder I didn’t turn out to be Julia Child, considering my mother’s spice cabinet contained, salt, pepper, garlic salt and beef bouillon cubes. I had never seen fresh garlic in use until H and I met and my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce recipe called for ketchup – seriously. The Irish have never been known for their cooking and my family held strongly to the belief that unless all color and flavor have been boiled out of the dish, it isn’t done yet.
The roots of my five meal rotation were firmly planted in my formative years with our family menu having the culinary regularity of a elementary school cafeteria. Two of our favorites were Shake ‘N Bake pork chops with Rice-A-Roni, and spaghetti with Ragu and heaping pile of Kraft Parmesan cheese (oh, yes, the kind that came out of the green can) and fish sticks. I have no idea why fish sticks were thought an appropriate pairing with marinara sauce, but then again, since Ragu really isn’t marinara sauce, I guess anything goes. There were regular meals my sister and I didn’t exactly look forward to, such as hamburgers and hot dogs. Strange, no? Well not if you consider the hamburgers were cooked to the consistency of hockey pucks in a skillet and rather than buying real hamburger buns, we used slices of Wonder Bread that absorbed the hamburger grease and formed a pasty carbohydrate sludge that had to be scraped of the roof of one’s mouth. And one could never be sure hot dogs would indeed be “hot dogs”. My father, thinking himself quite the culinary explorer, would try to sneak in some bratwurst which he tried to sell as “really big hot dogs”. The week’s menu was also usually rounded out by a wild card entrée – overcooked roast beef that used to have a sprinkling of garlic salt on it until my father declared himself “allergic”, or in later, my mother's more adventurous years, tacos. Of course, she used the Old El Paso kit since all of our ethnic foods must come a large American, processed food plant.
Thankfully, I have changed my ways and actually have a recipe folder and I even rotate which recipes I pick from according to the season, since I figured out H didn’t really love eating a big, steaming bowl of turkey chili in August. But even though the food has improved (and I do a little dashing and sprinkling now), I still can’t say I enjoy it. It’s part of my job and I do it because I have to. When my kids complain about what’s being served , I like to trot out that favorite phrase, heard by children world wide, “Back when I was a kid…” Even H knows to keep his trap shut if the grb's not great, since he’s really enjoying not having pot roast made with a mixture of Lipton’s dry onion soup and Campbell’s cream of mushroom, creating a gravy of processed goodness. And if he gets to lippy, I just threaten him with that sauce recipe of my grandmother’s.
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