Cooking it up

Cooking is not my cup of tea.

Yet, I do it and I dare say I do it quite sincerely even though it does not exactly excite me. There are times when I do try out some new dishes for the sake of variety and when the cooking bug does bite me-yes it does happen. The first year of our marriage was most significant in this regard when I was enthused into trying out new and newer dishes, trying to impress dear hubby (wink wink, don’t all the new brides do it to an unsuspecting husband). After years of staying away from home and eating non-palatable stuff, hubby was most happy and grateful if I can say so. Appreciation being a great motivation I was not stressed to create a meal. Even if not up to the mark, which was the case many times, hubby would be gracious enough to cover it up. Ah! The innocent me took it seriously enough to assume that I could cook quite well. I would naively even ask him to rate me from a scale of 1 to 10 and he would say I average between 7 to 8 which was a great score for me-an amateur cook.

Now, to be fair to myself, I do not cook atrociously and over time I have learnt to cook quite decently and do dish out some delicious stuff every once a while (consistency here is a challenge though ;-)). However, with time, hubby’s expectations have also increased and the rating system has, as a result, also become stringent:-(. As a mother to a toddler now, I do not enjoy the leisure of time and hence this important chore has become a case of hit and misses.

Now, the real issue here is that I have not (yet) conditioned myself to be able to digest a bad review, however genuine, for the simple fact that I feel the connoisseur should take into account the effort, time and intention behind the whole process of dishing out a (decent) meal. Also, I find it really unfair on the part of life to pile upon so many tasks on the shoulders of women while men get away with very little. She is expected to multi-task with a smile on her face and is not spared any inefficiency on her part too! Any confrontation on this matter with hubby is met with a benign smile and “oh, you women do it so well. Blah bah”

So with the bar being raised by hubby compounded with my basic disposition towards cooking and the eternal paucity of time in the world of mothers, should I say, I have not come closer to embracing this abhor-able yet intrinsic activity/chore of life?

I score a shameful 5 or 6 now on hubby’s scale. Well, more years into this marriage and I only hope I do not slip into sub-zero.

2 comments:

  1. writing ur thoughts not only requires flair for writing, it involves courage. great going. and while cooking may not be ur cup of tea, writing definitely is.

    ReplyDelete
  2. thanks chitra..feels great to receive such words of encouragement

    ReplyDelete

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