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.