The (Hapless) Brochure on Returning to the Kitchen: The Humor of Home Cooking

Trying to make it healthier and lower calorie. Really, my main motivation there was so that I could eat more. Eat more pasta! It's a good goal, right?

Today I’m going to talk about cooking. Uh, ME cooking.  Yes, I have recently decided to venture back into the kitchen longer than just visiting the refrigerator to get the dog’s food or getting a cold drink.  This is epic and somewhat frightening.  Really if you know me it’s more like horrifying.

But before we really get into today's topic, I want to continue reading another review from Apple podcasts. This one is entitled Enjoyable Stories from Real Life. “Tracy is warm and insightful with quiet humor that's like a twinkle in her eye. Her podcasts are a lovely chat with a friend. Relatable adventures and misadventures. Appreciation of life's ironic twists and there are heart tugging moments of human connection along the way. The best part is feeling better having listened.” 

Now this person is, uh, well, the screen name is RosaShoshana. I believe that's how you'd say it. And I don't know who this person is, but I can tell you that they characterized how I would like my podcast to be um, seen or, or heard completely accurately. This is how I would want people to describe my podcast. So thank you if you're listening and we have one more review on Apple podcasts for next week. If you haven't written a review, I hope that you will consider doing so. And we look forward to that. So thank you so much for your support.

Now, we've picked up a few more countries. Right now we're in 28 countries. We picked up a listener in Israel and Turkey. And also South Korea. I think that was the other new one. So that's really exciting. Thank you so much and I hope you'll continue to listen and I hope we'll get more in those countries as well. 

So, if you’re a regular listener you already have heard me talk about the fact that I come from a long line of bad cooks.  I’m not exaggerating.  My Thanksgiving stories alone should tell you that.  So cooking and cooking well isn’t in my blood.  It’s not in my genes.  It’s not the way I was built and it’s not what I’ve observed most of my life.  

Now I know how to eat!  I’ve been eating my whole life and I’ve been able to observe how things are put together and created.  You’d think that would help, wouldn’t you?  But I guess just because you watch a lot of baseball for example doesn’t mean you can play baseball, right?  

Just going to the supermarket brings me a lot of hope actually.  Seeing all the individual ingredients?  Seeing how these things go together to make an infinite number of wonderful combinations.  It seems so easy, right?  Well, it’s not.  It’s something like going to the fabric store and imagining all the beautiful garments or curtains or slipcovers you could make with the fabric.  It doesn’t work that way.  It takes time and a talent, and a flair to take the raw materials and then turn them into something more.  When I used to sew or try to sew, the bobbin in the sewing machine would just become a big knot of thread. I don’t know.  

Recipes?  Recipe books?  They are beautiful and offer hope as well, but seriously, sometimes a good recipe will have like 20 ingredients.  How can you efficiently make a dish that has 20 ingredients?  It would be more cost effective to order something from a restaurant.  ANY restaurant.  I know, I guess you should build up an inventory of spices and other things, but again, that just isn’t me.  I saw a recipe for a pie, it was a chilled pie, not a pie that you’d have to cook, that looked good the other day, and went to the market to get the ingredients.  Now this had about eight different things I needed to buy.  But by the time I was down to looking for the last one, I just decided to put everything back.  Each thing was costing at least $5 but some were close to $7 or $8 so the final product would be at least $40?  I thought what if I ruin it or it’s not that good?  It was too risky.  And we’re not even talking about a gourmet kind of pie.  

Recently I realized we were spending too much on meals, it just kind of blew my mind.  Food like everything else has become so expensive.  Let’s be clear.  When I had my knee replacement surgery, if we hadn’t relied on DoorDash and GrubHub, we would’ve died.  Sure I signed up for grocery delivery too so we didn’t have to pay the delivery fee every time, but yeah, Bill isn’t good at cooking either.  Well, he did make me some of the best toast once I’d ever had.  He worked in restaurants a lot before I met him.  Either as a waiter or a host.  But Bill cooking for us?  It would have been scary too.  His story of putting a frozen chicken in the oven once and seeing it literally bounce was enough for me.  He calls it his rubber chicken story.  But my knees are good, I’m what you would call able-bodied now.  So the expense plus we both have health issues that would benefit from home cooked meals helped to spur me on to try to cook things on my own. Even though grocery prices are shockingly high here, with careful planning and grocery store app deals, you can help cushion the blow, at least a little.  

Just in general we’ve been to see a lot of doctors over the course of our time together, especially for Bill.  They’ve often trotted out a dietician who I guess thought it was the first time we’d ever talked to one. Fresh faced dieticians have been sent in like relief pitchers at baseball games in the 9th inning, hoping to win the game.  Dieticians have been sent into the exam room or hospital room with no explanation but acted like we never got the Cliff notes on what they did.  Dieticians have been sent in to see my husband and I know they thought they were going to be our savior, but they ended up meeting the angered stare and cold shoulder of my husband.  It would always start out the same way.  They would sound so hopeful, so positive.  Then they would meet The Wall.  We would talk about portion sizes and reducing fat or reducing salt.  Now to be fair, remember that he’s been getting conversations like this his whole life.  Reduce salt.  Don’t they just tell everyone that?  Eat more fruit.  He hates fruit.  I think they call this a non-compliant patient.  It's not really the fault of the dietitians. And in deference, I would say that our good friend, Lauren, who is a newly certified dietitian, is probably one of the exceptions to the rule.  I'm sure that when she meets patients, she's not like this, but it's a tough thing. Fresh faced medical providers and my husband don't always mix well.  I’m just proud of the fact I finally got him to give up bacon.  It took years and finally a realization on his part that pigs are smart animals.  Neither of us eat pork anymore.  Believe me, this is a big win.  Nobody needs to eat bacon.  Talk about fat and salt!  

And then the dieticians and whoever was in the room would end up looking at ME aghast – not him – that I didn’t cook.  Actually some of the nurses would look at me like that too.  They would shake their heads in disgust.  I simultaneously felt indignant but also like a failure as a wife.  How could I not care enough about my husband to cook for him?  How could I not be the perfect homemaker and shop for healthy ingredients on a daily basis and whip these items up into delicious and healthy yet appetizing dishes?  How could I not give my over to this task?  THESE tasks?  Well, I’ll tell you.  Working full-time, driving through traffic on a daily basis to downtown LA, constantly picking up prescriptions or items for said husband as well as the pets, doing laundry – the bane of my existence – and during most of this time also worrying about my parents, and oh was there a minute or two in there for me?  Did I not have my own life to live?  I was supposed to have enough energy at the end of the day to cook for an hour or more, then clean up?  Seriously?  No.  It wasn’t happening.  I started to look back at them and think something like, “hell no I don’t cook! What do you think I am? Superwoman?”  My hobby became trying to find the healthiest to-go food I could find.  I wasn’t always buying him carbs and grease.  Still, it was a challenge and sure, sometimes convenience won out over other factors.  

It's an age old system isn’t it?  Women you know, or women in a film or on TV saying, “I have to go cook dinner now.”  Those words hold a lot more weight for me now.  I understand why restaurants were invented, and frankly, I’m grateful for them.  I understand why when I was growing up we ate out at least two to three times a week.  My mother, my poor mother couldn’t cook every night.  She didn’t want to cook every night and we didn’t want to eat what she did cook.  

I’m the kind of person who feels successful with meal prep if I snapped the bottoms off asparagus and microwaved them, and then put them in the fridge.  To me, that was meal prep at its finest.  And that, my friends, has been the extent of my meal prep.  The microwave?  That’s been my best friend. Dishwashers are one thing, but how did we ever live without a microwave?  

Not that I don’t enjoy cooking to a certain extent, but wow it’s a lot of work! When we had the apartment I would sometimes make lasagna.  I would even make my own tomato sauce.  Trying to make it healthier and lower calorie.  Really my main motivation there was so that I could eat more.  Eat more pasta.  It’s a good goal, right?  But making it took a lot of time, and I didn’t always have time.  I also make a mean chocolate chip cookie, but even that took a good amount of time.  I started off as a kid making Jell-O.  I made almost every kind of Jell-O you could imagine.  Jell-O molds, Jell-O with fruit, or marshmallows, or both.  All sorts of experimental Jell-O recipes.  It’s like I mastered in Jell-O.  Did a thesis in Jell-O.  I eventually transitioned to baked goods.  Overall even as I was growing up I was pretty good at baking things.  Desserts.  I could bake a cake or a pie, or cookies or brownies.  I could do that.  I think it made my mom happy because it was one thing that she didn’t have to take care of, dessert!  But think about a dinner entrée?  Oh dear.  And yeah, maybe I would try to make things but often ended up ruining food and thus wasting money at the same time.  Another reason I stopped trying.  And well, dinner entrées often include raw meat, which I admit, is a little disgusting in my mind and also unsafe.  You hear about all the germs and cross contamination.  Raw meat scares me, I admit it.  

Speaking of growing up, yes, I did take home economics in middle school.  We called it junior high.  Mrs. Nelson?  Was she the sewing teacher or the cooking teacher?  I can’t quite recall.  She was old though, I remember that.  Now instead of calling it home ec do they call it home arts?  Home arts, give me a break.  Mrs. Nelson teaching us to be good wives?  Anyway, we would be get an assignment in class to make a certain dish.  I remember mac and cheese or something equally innocuous.  We probably made snickerdoodle cookies.  What are those anyway?  What is a snickerdoodle?  Something that doesn’t fall into any other category?  I don’t remember much else, but I do remember making a pumpkin pie around Thanksgiving.  I remember coming home and serving my parents each a piece because you took home the things you made in class, and I remember vividly my mother spitting it out as soon as she took a bite.  It was bad.  Needless to say, something somewhere went wrong.  At least I didn’t fail Home Ec.  I just don’t think I got an A either.  I guess I was still in my Jell-O period.  

Now that we are living in the house, it’s a little easier to cook.  Our kitchen isn’t huge, but there’s enough space to make it comfortable.  I miss having a dishwasher though.  But I’ve come up with a system to keep myself sane.  Wash the dishes as they get dirty.  If you let them go too long, it only gets worse!  They start to look and smell weird.  You want to just throw them out the window!  

I would have to say that cooking for my husband is easy.  He likes simple things, not too fussy, and basically as long as it’s warm and fairly fresh, he’s good.  That takes a lot of stress off you when you aren’t a fancy or particularly experienced cook.  Way back when I tried making Hamburger Helper a few times, I started to get creative, if you can call it that, and I added in some oregano and other spices.  Bill said I was a good cook then.  I just laughed, mostly inside though.  I thought he was being sweet, he was being sweet.  He really is easy to please where food is concerned.  

One of the things that I think makes it harder for me to cook is that Bill can’t eat anything spicy.  Even bell peppers are too spicy for him and then there are a host of other things I need to stay away from.  Recently we watched the Emmy winning show, “The Bear” that chronicles the story of a chef and a small restaurant, and shows a lot of meal prep, meal creation and the final products.  So much work goes into some of the dishes!  Bill thinks that I’m aspiring to be like the chefs in the show but I have a long way to go to be anything like them.  Still, it shows you a little of what is possible.  I’m not necessarily a gourmet kind of eater, or the kind of person who would order a $100 cheeseburger.  But I do like a good hot meal, just like anyone else.  You can’t beat a hot meal.  

Well, that’s all I’ve got for today.  Now I have to go try to rustle up something for dinner.  It’s always an adventure!  Next week we’ll tackle another topic together.  I hope you’ll join me.