Now we're cooking

When Stacy (our paddling group’s “den mother”) couldn’t make the Hiwassee trip last spring, I stepped into the breach and prepared the Saturday night feast; a magnificent Boeff a la Capitan. I still have some in the fridge if you desire a sampling, and the container is only slightly bulged. It’s hard to destroy your own creation.

My fellow kayakers were surprised that I was skilled in the culinary arts (or maybe just that I had mastered fire). There’s a story behind it (or why have a blog?).

I enjoy learning diverse disciplines, but the derivation of this was when I got married. My bride was employed by a bank and had to work Saturdays. I worked for a Fortune 500 company and didn’t. In fact, the sum total of my responsibilities was shifting budget from other departments to ours, shifting blame from ours to other departments, and wearing wingtip shoes.

My Saturday routine had been hanging with the guys. My new wife felt that phase should conclude since their sole interests were playing ball, scouring the bars for promiscuous women and marinating their brains in beer, and I was better than that. Better is such a relative term.

We rented an apartment, so it’s not like I had yard work to consume my weekends. My first solitary Saturday, I got up and started on my to-do list. I got out of bed, walked to the couch, and took a nap.

I woke up, sat up and contemplated my next chore. That would be feeding me. I ambled into the kitchen and opened a cabinet. Nothing. Nothing except some cookbooks Carol had received as shower presents. An idea began to germinate.

I would pore through these tomes, bookmark some of the most succulent dishes and prepare them. My wife would return from a hard day at the office to an elegant multi-course meal. Oh what a good boy am I.

Not exactly. Carol’s preferences in food ran toward the bland, at least by my standards. Not a big problem when we had dined together a couple times a week at a restaurant. But now, she was in control of the menu. Maybe I could at least preserve Saturday nights.
I excitedly compiled my shopping list, hied it for the store and cooked up a storm.

Needless to say, she was pleasantly surprised. At least by the sumptuous meal. Less pleasantly by the havoc wreaked upon her kitchen. I had not deigned to master the art of pot scrubbing.

Ensuing Saturdays produced even grander efforts. And, all the cues weren’t coming from the books. When I was a child, my mother had made a decision to have her own source of income, her own car, etc., which meant her own job. Not par for the course back then. She’d deposit me with the next door neighbor when she went off to ply her trade.

Isabel DiFlavia was an elderly Italian immigrant who lived with her son and daughter-in-law. In the finest tradition, she awoke before dawn and began cooking and baking continuously until dusk, just in case the 101st Airborne dropped by. If not, she fed the neighborhood. She would sit me on a stool in the kitchen and provide a running narrative as she prepared all manner of exotic dishes.

I didn’t consciously internalize any of this. But now, in my mid-20s, in the heat of the kitchen, the lessons bubbled up from the depths of my mind.

My Saturday routine began to gel. A number of recipes required wine. But seldom more than a cup or so. I didn’t waste the rest. Creative cooking should be emotional. Music augmented the art and was synergistic with the wine. Four Tops for Italian. Chuck Berry for French. Santana for Mexican. I boogied around the kitchen. Carol asked how marinara sauce got on the ceiling. Did anyone ask Michelangelo how paint got on the floor of the chapel?

This tradition went about a year before Carol called a meeting. She said she appreciated the thought, but the cleanup of the debris from my creative process took longer than it would’ve taken her to make and straighten up after a dinner she made. I should skip the wine and post-creativity nap, and add a tidying mode.

I can’t work like this. I can’t. I won’t.

It would’ve appeared petty to curtail the tradition over that. So, I bought a house and used the chores as an excuse to abate the cooking. A little expensive, but perception is everything. I would’ve bought the Hearst Castle to avoid cleaning up after lasagna.

So that was that. But once in great while, the muse stirs me, I take spatula in hand, fire up a Stones CD and cook my brains out.