« Books read in February | Main | Stupid Thing Number Five Gazillion »
Monday, February 28, 2005
Breaking out of a rut
Lately I have been in a serious cooking rut. I began to dread the inevitable "What's for dinner?" when T would call me from work. The family would gather around me like baby birds with their mouths wide open, and I would throw in some hot dogs or a take-and-bake pizza or the occasional batch of spaghetti and run screaming from the room. I WAS TIRED OF IT, the neediness and yet the pickiness.
But when it comes right down to it, it's not really pickiness. Someone in our household (and I'm not naming names but I may happen to be married to him) just has really weirdo tastes in food. Here is a short sampling of the list of foods he doesn't like me to cook (note: if you happen to have ever cooked any of these things for my husband, don't feel bad. He doesn't HATE them. He just prefers when he's home and has some control, not to have to eat them.):
- Roast beef, and any of its trimmings (including really awesome potatoes roasted along with the meat. Right there, that shows you that something is wrong with him)
- Chicken pot pies, even yummy homemade ones
- Meatloaf, even really GOOD meatloaf, not the bricks of hamburger and oatmeal with ketchup slathered on top that defined meatloaf in the house where he grew up
- Baked potatoes
- Scalloped potatoes
- Any kind of potatoes except for a) mashed or b)Lipton onion roasted
- Soup, except clam chowder, which, hello, costs as much to make as a dinner out, so why cook?
- Stew
So I figured that I would stop teasing him and haranguing him about all his weird issues about food (we've been married eleven years and for nearly all that time I've worked very hard to try to convince him that just because his mother didn't know how to cook something doesn't mean that it isn't a worthwhile dish), and I had him make a list of foods he does like. Said list follows.
- Pancakes.
- Spaghetti.
- Pancakes.
- French toast which he can't eat because it has eggs in a recognizable eggy format, which for some reason cause his hiatal hernia to flare up to "hospitalization" levels
- Lipton Onion Roasted Potatoes
- Tacos
- Pancakes.
- Biscuits and gravy
- Chicken Marsala with Italian red sauce
- and let's not forget pancakes.
(if I could make a little cartoon drawing of myself with smoke above my head, I would put it here.)
So last night I pulled out this box of recipe cards that T bought before we got together. It was one of those things where they send you a sample set and explain that for X number of dollars a month you keep getting more and more cards until you have *fanfare* THE ULTIMATE RECIPE COLLECTION. He thought, hey, women like men who cook, and since he was in the market for a wife, he signed up and paid the X dollars for a couple of years until he figured out that he would be receiving recipes until he died, and that he had never used a single one of these (rather expensive) cards, at which time he canceled. A few years later I inherited this collection when I married him (and all he had in the refrigerator was a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a jar of jam. He did have some really cool T-Fal pans, though). I never used them much -- I had first my trusty Betty Crocker cookbook and then the Internet to tell me how to make pancakes, spaghetti, chicken marsala, and French toast. ANYWAY. Last night I pulled out these cards and sat on the couch while he sat next to me, fiddling on the computer, and we played flash cards. Anything I thought he MIGHT not dislike, I would hold it up and he would say "OK" or "No way". When we were done I had a stack of about sixty recipes to try. Not bad, and it's way better than giving up and making spaghetti. Again.
Tonight I made "Southwestern Chicken Wraps" which were actually really good. Or maybe I was just really hungry, I dunno.
