Housewife Responsibility #1: Cooking

Note: This title is not meant to imply that my most important responsibility is Cooking, it's to indicate that this is the first in a series of posts about Housewife Responsibilities.

I dislike cooking.

I dislike doing the dishes, and cleaning, and changing diapers, but if I were ever to hire household help, the person I would hire first would be a chef. Because I really do not like to cook.

I love eating. I love eating multi-course meals. I love eating desserts. I love eating all kinds of meats and veggies and pastas. I love trying new foods!

I just wish someone else would cook them up for me. I find no joy in peeling potatoes or chopping onions, or browning meat.

That someone else doesn't exist, though, so I go on cooking.

About a year and a half ago, I got really sick of cooking the same 10 meals. I'd been cooking the same 10 meals since getting married 9 years earlier, and it was just too much, like when you hear a song you like on the radio four times a day for six months and start to hate it.

I'm not a good cook.

I'd tried to cook new, exciting meals before. Someone gave me a Rachel Ray cookbook, and I attempted to use it. The problem was, I never had the right ingredients, so I had to improvise, and her ingredient lists are literally a page long and consist of things like "chopped arugula" which implies that you just keep chopped arugula sitting around. Except that you don't, which meant that when I got to that part of the recipe, I'd wind up finding something I had close to arugula (lettuce?) and then madly chopping it while overcooking whatever meat was in the pan.

No, I don't keep lemon zest around. Can I use orange juice instead?

"You should get the ingredients together ahead of time," you say, wise reader. And I agree. But she still uses way too many ingredients in most of her recipes, and all of them have been prepared in some way ahead of time, and while she claims her recipes take 20 minutes, that's after an hour of chopping and slicing and zesting and goodness knows what else.

So I very quickly gave up on Rachel Ray, and went back to my same 10 meals.

But I really wanted to eat new foods.

Last year, I discovered these 30-minute meals that promised to be easy in Good Housekeeping. "Easy Weeknights!" they promised. And instead of a page-long ingredient list, they had like, six to ten ingredients. One of which is usually salt - an easy to use, always-available ingredient! And to make it even easier for fools like me, they write the recipe out with the ingredients inside it, in bold, so you don't have to go looking back and forth between the list and the instructions. What a genius idea!

I tried one recipe. I tried another. They were actually easy! They actually took... well, not always half an hour, but never more than 45 minutes, even with preparing ingredients! And now I have a whole binder full of the good ones, and closer to 50 recipes in rotation, so that when I decide to make steak-marinated-in-Italian-dressing, it's for the first time in two months instead of the first time that week, and it tastes delicious once again.

I say this five times before it sinks in and people sit at the table.

I do need to plan ahead.

I need to pick about a week's worth of recipes and make my grocery list off of that, because sometimes the recipe wants arugula (no, I lie, they never want arugula, but sometimes they do require spinach). It's not much more work - it takes me about twenty minutes a week, which is not too steep a price to pay for having the right ingredients for five or six recipes.

And Things 1 and 2 aren't always on board.

Thing 1 and Thing 2 would much rather make macaroni and cheese with broccoli three nights a week and eat hot dogs another two, and maybe McDonald's all weekend. I try not to let it get me down - the good thing about having Husband, two Things, and Baby all eating meals now is that at least one of them is bound to like whatever it is, and that makes it all worth it.

But I still dislike cooking.

Taking Action!

The Husband got me a book for mother's day to show that he listens to me. It's Writing Fiction for Dummies. This is because a few weeks ago, I confronted him with the statement that he's not supportive of me in my endeavors. Since then, he's actually asked me about whether or not I had time to work on my writing during our Family Dinner Debriefings, and offered on the weekends to watch The Baby so I can work on writing.

In short, he's become supportive.

This does put pressure on me to up my game. So I actually read the section in the book on submitting your work to agents, and started the process. In tandem, I'm going to work on editing my second book, which I think has more potential than the first.

I'm not sure that I'm ready to elevate writing to the level of a job, though. Because then I'd have three jobs: Housewife, Paper Deliveryperson, Writer. And there are still only 24 hours in a day.

But I'm taking action!

Actually, I've tackled a lot of things lately. And I do mean tackled - something needs doing and I'm all over it like white on rice, without thinking too much about it.

First, the car's headlight

I noticed it was kind of dark during my paper route one morning. "That's weird," I thought, "The moon is even out. Why's it so dark?" And then I saw that one of my headlights was dead.

This is the sort of repair that old me would normally advise the Husband of, remind him of six times, and maybe one of us would get around to fixing it a month or so later. (Don't tell anyone, but I have been known to put off my annual car inspections for up to 9 months.) But this Housewife is now Taking Action!

We live within spitting distance of two auto parts stores. I dragged Thing 1, Thing 2 and Baby to one of them that very day. I marched in with my vehicle owner's manual in one hand, Baby in the other, and was immediately accosted by an employee.

"Can I help you?"

"Oh, I'm just looking for a headlight bulb."

"I can help you with that," said the employee. "It will be easier for me to look it up in the computer!" He was overeager and a little pushy, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to have him pull the right bulb for me, so I agreed. He entered my vehicle into the computer, and a long list of parts came up.

"Is it the high beam or the low beam?" He asked. I advised him it was the low beam.

"There are a lot of options," the man said, "How much do you want to spend?"

I stared at the computer screen. He chose one of them, and I pointed out that it was clearly labeled "High Beam."

"Oh, you're right," he said, and went back to the list. I began to feel uneasy about his abilities to assist me. But he chose a bulb that did not contain "High Beam" in the description, and we located it on the wall. I summoned Thing 1 and Thing 2 and we took the bulb home.

Following the instructions in the owner's manual, I removed the dead light bulb, opened the package for the new light bulb, pulled it out and stared at it.

The bulb I had purchased looked completely different. It was labeled with a different wattage. It had a different tip. And, most fatally, it had a different pin connector, so there was no way it was going to fit.

Grousing all the while, I rounded up Thing 1 and Thing 2, shoved the sleeping Baby back into the car, and we went to the OTHER auto parts store. (I refuse to patronize establishments that staff themselves with inept employees.) Thing 1 and Thing 2 ran into auto parts store #2 like hellions, and I hauled in the sleeping Baby and the owner's manual. Once again, an employee accosted me immediately.

"Can I help you?"

I warned him that I had already been not-helped once today. Again, relying on his magical computer, this employee looked up the part I would need. Once again, we walked to a wall of bulbs. This time, I was armed with the knowledge of what the bulb should look like. When he handed it to me, I was sure it was the right one.

So I replaced that bulb. But I do have some extra high-beam bulbs for a Mazda 3 if you're interested.

Second, the flagpole.

The flagpole holder we have was screwed into the siding, but not the house, and it was ripping the siding off the house when the wind was strong. So after asking the Husband to fix this for a year, I Took Action! On the advice of my father, I purchased longer screws and I found the power drill and I screwed those puppies into the house. Now the flag is up.

Perhaps the screws could have been shorter.

Third, the dresser

We purchased a dresser (Our first dresser purchase ever!) We had to wait several weeks for it to arrive - which worked out well, because during the wait, we procured the spaceship to pick it up. I arranged to bring it home on a weekday by myself, having grown overly confident in my ability to handle things since accomplishing the aforementioned tasks.

I called to advise the furniture warehouse I was on my way for pickup and began to have misgivings.

"How heavy is it?" I asked.

It is 179 pounds.

This should have frightened me more than it did. I just said, "okay," and stuck Baby in the spaceship. I maneuvered all the "magically" stowing seats and removed one of the second row seats, and off we went to fetch the dresser. 

Dressers are very, very big. Two men put it in my car, but it was even too large for the spaceship (at least with the Baby occupying a seat). One of the men was super helpful and tied the trunk down, which I think the vehicle manufacturer frowns upon. But I wasn't going to give in to reason and come back on the weekend without Baby. So Baby, dresser and I then took backroads very slowly all the way home. It was a harrowing half-hour during which I kept staring in the rearview mirror trying to decide if the rope holding down the trunk was getting looser or not, and wincing at every bump in the road. If the dresser fell out, the Husband would surely be furious with me for overreaching on this one.

Fortunately, we made it home. I untied the trunk and attempted to remove the dresser from the trunk. It was not a success, because I am not eight feet tall and can barely lift 55 pounds. I had to take my little old car (with its new light bulb) to pick up the children from school, because I was not driving another inch with that monstrosity dangling out the rear end of the spaceship.

The dresser is so huge and heavy that even with the Husband, we could not move that box inside. We had to strip it of its the packaging, remove all the drawers, and then we were able to maneuver it slowly inside.

Housewife Tip: Don't Attempt to Move a Dresser Alone.

The dresser in its new home. I made the bed just for this picture.

Up next: I ruin a bathroom

Inspired by the fact that everything has survived through my earlier actions, I am about to embark on the task of fixing the plaster walls in the bathroom, and possibly put in an exhaust fan. The stakes are high here, and the likelihood that the Husband winds up sending me back to work in an office is great. This may be my last post as

-A Real Housewife of the North Shore