By the end of our Thanksgiving meal, life as a mother, as someone who is (can it only be?) eight-and-a-half months postpartum, and as a still relative newcomer to my new home — it was all beginning to seem manageable, pleasurable even.
And then Ellen turned to Mike. “You and I should have monthly Iron Chef-like competitions,” she said.
Ca-thunk. That was the sound of my perennially left-out, insecure thirteen-year-old self dropping like an air conditioner out of a New York apartment window into my stomach.
It’s true that Mike’s turkey was a piece of edible art. And Ellen is the only person I imagine has the culinary talent to turn green bean casserole into something approaching gourmet and without a hint of canned soup in sight.
But there was a time, not so long ago, when I considered myself a pretty awesome cook as well. In fact, it was Thanksgiving just fifteen years ago (eegads, fifteen years — can I still say “just”?) when I tested the waters of my fantasy escape-the-law-firm job of opening a catering business by cooking a kick-ass meal in a tiny apartment with a kitchen that measured approximately one foot by three feet.
Granted, I’m not much of a foodie these days and pretend that it’s just that I really like the taste of unadorned food, not that I’m too lazy to cook a proper meal with seasoning and sauces and stuff. Nonetheless, I’m more than a little bit sensitive about the cooking thing, for reasons I can’t begin to articulate.
All I know is that when Ellen summarily eliminated me from the Iron Chef competition it made me really sad to think that no one knows I can cook — and that maybe I no longer can.
Continue reading ‘I Can Cook! And Lots of Other Things You’d Never Know I Can Do’
