I'll have whatever he's cooking

My favorite dish is anything that can be prepared in a half hour or less and that my family will eat without complaining. Cereal tops the list, and then yogurt, pancakes, waffles, eggs, scrambled or boiled, tuna spaghetti, although slicing olives is the sort of fussy prep work that I loathe most of all, and pizza. I can get a pizza on the table in a half hour, just.

Cooking is destined to be a chore for me. I grew up in a household where experiments in the kitchen were generally met with disapproval. It's tough when your audience consists of up to a dozen individuals, all starving and none of whom will eat anything interesting like organ meats or foreign vegetables. In spite of heavy opposition, my mother did try to widen our culinary horizons from time to time. The only person who appreciated her efforts was my grandfather, with the result that she only tried out new recipes on his birthday. So once a year, we'd endure something "icky" like carrot cake, for his sake.

I can see why now, at the age of eighty something, she's no longer interested in putting a meal together. Also, she's more inclined to be picky about what's set in front of her. Maybe it's the backlash that comes from having to put three squares on the table for a mob every day for more than fifty years. It's like she decided it's her turn to say "I'm not really all that hungry," or "It needs salt," or "I think I'll just have a melted cheese sandwich."

Mom's idea of a good time was not to spend any of it in the kitchen. I grew up resenting cooking chores, too. I especially hated peeling potatoes. In our house you had to do endless amounts for a single meal. And my dad had definite ideas about the right way to do it. According to him, my method would've landed me hours of KP duty in the army on account of how much actual potato I wasted. I was in awe of his skill with a paring knife, but not enough to practice using one.

Nowadays, my favorite recipes are the ones that other people make. This doesn't mean I like going to restaurants, however. Even if I like what's on the menu, after a recent homeschooling tour of the state lab, I'm reluctant to put anything that I haven't scrubbed personally into my mouth. There was an especially disturbing story told to us about a high school science project involving bagged lettuce and cat poop, which I will not go into here. Suffice it to say that I'm never ordering salad again. I figure the only thing that's safe is soup ("Make sure it's boiling hot!") and water ("No ice, no lemon.").

My husband is a great cook. He measures and stirs and sifts and grinds and generally makes a royal mess in the kitchen. But the results are worth it: colorful combinations of meats and vegetables, cut into neat, bite-sized pieces and spiced so divinely that I end up moaning like a lovesick zombie after every morsel ("Mmmmm!"). I couldn't begin to reproduce any of it, and until recently, this was frustrating.

I am competitive by nature and it irked me that my cooking never measured up to Steve's efforts, no matter how many good reviews the recipes had garnered on the foodie forums. Of course, sometimes I wouldn't read the reviews until after the meal had been served and found wanting. I've since learned the hard way that this is always a mistake.

For a start, the dishes never look as good as the pictures. And then later, after I've already gone to the trouble of cooking it and having it pronounced inedible, I read the comments and realize that, while everyone loved this recipe and promised they'd serve it again, they weren't actually cooking this recipe, having added lime juice and capers and omitted the meat and the nuts and most of the breading. To me, a caper is something that you pull off and not something that you eat. I've seen jars of them in the store, and frankly, I can't see how something that looks like that can possibly improve anything that it's stirred into. This is likely another reason that I'm not a very good cook.

The final straw for experiments in the kitchen came a few months ago, after I had researched and cooked a dinner so bad that I couldn't even make my kids eat it. Later, when Steve came home, he pointed to the crockpot and asked, "What's this?" "Dinner," I said. "But it's terrible." "Really?" he said, and tasted it. I cringed, wating for his reaction. "Did you find this on the internet?" he asked. I nodded. "And you put the marinated artichokes in it because…?" "That's what it called for," I said. "Well," he said. "If you added a little basil, salt, pepper, sugar and marjoram to it, it wouldn't be half bad." So he did.

It was then that I gave up competitive cookery for good. I mean, I can follow a recipe just fine. It takes a real creative genius to resurrect a meal that was just one step away from the dog's dish. In fact, after Steve got done fixing it, I had seconds.