I am having a very bad cooking week.

This is not unusual.

I don’t like to cook.

I am not very domesticated and have zero talent in the kitchen. This, despite the fact that my late mother, an English teacher, used to bake bread from scratch and make home made plum jelly that would make you think you were eating heaven.

Still, Costco and their ready made meals and I are very good friends. Perhaps a little TOO close.  I do manage to get dinner on the table and none of my children, so far, have starved, though they do whine and complain that there is “nothing to eat” despite a packed pantry.

As a fiction writer, I will now say something bad about women who are cook book writers. Here it is:

I hardly know what to do with them or what to think. There they smile on the covers of their cook books, their hair tamed and brushed, in pretty outfits, not a blackened pan in sight. They wield a wooden cooking spoon, matching red mixing bowls nearby, with a full counter full of delicious meals or desserts in front of them. There is no mention that they just swallowed horse sized tranquilizers to get everything so perfect, so I’m going to assume they didn’t.

The cook book authors say their recipes are “easy” with only 125 ingredients, some of which I don’t even recognize. Perhaps the ingredients are in Latin?

If that were me on the cover of a cook book, my hair would be singed, there would be flour on my boobs, I would have a super pissed off expression on my face, and half the stuff on the counter would be burned.

They don’t have two foot tall fires on the stove like I did a few days ago when I was de – thawing some Chinese meal. They don’t have to get out the fire extinguisher like Tall Son had to. After the fire went out Oldest Daughter said to me, in all seriousness, with a pathetic, begging expression on her sweet face, “Mom, please don’t cook anymore. Please.”

They don’t make toasted cheese sandwiches that are burned on one side and hardly done on the other. They don’t break their blue and white dishes.

My husband says that I cook by fire alarm. As in, when the smoke billows around the room and the fire alarm goes off, that’s when I know to pull the meal out of the oven.

I try not get real personal about my twenty year marriage, so I’ll just say that if my glare could have felled a man, well, my man would have been on the floor, clutching his heart and his crotch and begging for testicular mercy.

Tonight I made a crock pot chicken recipe my sister from Montana gave me for tomorrow night. The whole thing is so simple, but I managed to forget it was cooking and let the whole thing melt in there for six hours, not four.

This was a dumb thing to do as I could smell the chicken and spices. It did not occur to me  to check the timing on it, probably because I was in the midst of writing a hot love scene and forgot about it. (This guy, Josh, is sexy beyond sexy, ladies. I have created him for you.)

In fact, I often forget what’s on the stove because I get lost in my work.  Or in my daydreaming.  This is a problem I acknowledge.

 

 

 

Sometimes my lack of cooking abilities, I will admit, makes me feel like less of a woman. It does. I try to cook, but I just don’t like it, have no patience, and I’m not good at it.

What to do?

Well, that is obvious. I will simply go back to looking at overly done – up women on the covers of cook books and cursing them and their impossible creations. They’re probably on horse sized tranquilizers anyhow.

That should solve the problem nicely. And, if it doesn’t, I will employ a Cathy Rule I learned long ago, in the kitchen: When problems can’t be solved, they should be eaten.

Pass the frozen chocolate chip cookie dough.