Dinnercraft helps bring your (and our) protracted adolescence to an end. Our authors cover topics ranging from cooking and eating, to home and garden, to crafting and DiY, and all the rest of the things you find yourself caring about these days.
A Life In Progress: Heartbreaker to Homemaker in Under Ten Years
Last night I was whipping up some splendid supper whilst decking the halls and looking good doing it, my husband casually remarked that when it first occurred to him to marry me he had no idea that I would grow up to be such a good cook.
As I have mentioned, Malcolm is not always a fan of what I privately prefer to eat. And I seem to recall that most of my early ventures in dinner crafting went that way. A mashup of veggies, kind of a mushier stir-fry, served with some type pf pasta or unpretty chicken breast, but presented with pride. Because he loved me he almost always ate what I made but proffered a few tips and recipes along the way.
Actually, he used to do a lot of the cooking now that I think of it, and introduced me to some of his childhood favorites, such as herbed chicken in a bread basket, Dijon chicken and tuna pasta salad, when we were young and unmarried, broke and living in old apartments in New Haven. We relied heavily on takeout then and became experts in cuisine and television pairings, but that’s a lesson for another day.
It has only been in the last year that I have read recipes thoroughly and all the way through, consulted experts and considered flavor profiles and improving my technique. Most of us have been influenced by the recent trend in respecting good food, celebrity chefs and the slower kitchen traditions our parents abandoned. In many ways it is easier to be a young wife, now that we have our husbands eager help as well as every level of inspiration from the cautionary tale to the sublime.
My grandfather once related that he ate food that was either raw or burnt for the first decade of his marriage to my grandmother. But over time and with practice she learned and perfected dishes that are now family classics. But she was only twenty-one when they married and soon had a baby, didn’t drive a car or own a television. Her own mother was a mean old Italian matron, whom I cannot imagine lovingly passing down insights about the art of making a home. How did anyone learn anything before the Internet?!
These days, such notions and methods are inescapable and husbands and wives are collaboraters in crafting a lovely life together. And while I am fortunate to have a partner with an interest in cooking food as well as eating it, I take a perhaps anachronistic pleasure in being the dinner-maker and keeper of the kitchen secrets. It was never a conscious effort to become more domestic, but I am happy that it delights us both to have known me as a slightly slutty undergraduate and in the present, as a woman, wife and scantily-clad and increasingly skilled cook.
