I Quit

Home cooking. Where many a man thinks his wife is. ~ Jimmy Durante

I was watching a reality cooking competition, and found myself salivating. I thought how rewarding it would be to create a delectable concoction. Then I remembered how much I hate to cook, and switched channels.

I used to love cooking. I owned dozens of cook books. If a recipe looked appealing, I rarely followed it. Instead, I would make note of the main ingredients, then add or subtract ingredients to suit my own taste. When guests said, “You must give me that recipe,” I couldn’t. I’ve never been able to make the same thing twice.

Mighty Marc enjoys cooking, but his style is the antitheses of mine. He is a purist. If the recipe should happen to say, “With your hands go clap, clap, clap. With your feet go tap, tap, tap,” he would not stop to question it. Rather, he would put down his wooden mixing spoon and start clapping and tapping. Why? Because “that’s what the recipe calls for.”

I used to be an excellent cook, but my casual, unorthodox style qualifies me as the world’s worse baker. Baking requires precision measurements and patience. I hate precision, and I have no patience. I even failed at baking a Betty Crocker boxed cake mix because I applied frosting to the cake before it cooled, which resulted in a pile of crumbs. It tasted great, but looked like clumps of yellow Play Dough. Knowing my guests were entitled to dessert, I scooped piles of cake chunks onto each person’s dish and passed the cake mix box around. That way, they could see a picture of what they were eating.

Several years back I entered a Jersey Fresh state wide cooking contest. The only rules were that the recipe be something I created, and must include vegetables grown in New Jersey. My casual guess and toss cooking style wouldn’t work here. I needed accurate measurements. So, I dusted off my measuring utensils, and forced myself to record everything. My psyche operates better with spontaneity than precision, so this was extremely difficult for me. Fairly satisfied that I’d guessed correctly, I mailed the recipe in with my entry form.

I was stunned when Jersey Fresh phoned to say that out of hundreds of entries I’d been selected, with nine others, to come to Atlantic City and prepare my recipe in some big hotel. The judges would be a group of renown chefs and newspaper food critics.

I was accustomed to cooking on an electric stove. But, this hotel had huge gas burners that totally intimated me. As it happened, I came in third, won three hundred dollars and had some great newspaper, radio and television publicity.

In light of how cooking was once an important part of my life, it saddens me that I no longer derive any joy from it at all. Cooking for company has become difficult. It was more fun when my only concern was that I make enough.

I recently invited a group over for an afternoon barbeque. I was looking forward to it until the phone calls started coming in. One person didn’t eat meat. One had a peanut allergy. One only ate fish. One said garlic upset her stomach. Two were gluten free. One was a vegetarian. Two were lactose intolerant. One only ate white meat chicken.

They arrived with Benadryl, pro-biotics, Lactaid, epi-pens and, in one case, her own food. The world was more fun when everyone was ignorant, and I could serve anything from one of Paula Deen’s cookbooks without the need for apologies and a side of Lipitor.

I’ve had it with cooking. I’ve cooked over 60,000 meals in my lifetime and I now know I can be happy if I never set foot in my kitchen again.

I believe it was the late, great comedian, Todie Fields, who said that when she got married, she told her husband, “I can only be good in one room. You pick the room.” Consequently, she never had to cook. I’m going to dress in something seductive and make that same offer to Mighty Marc, but I’m a little nervous that at our age he might opt for the wrong room.