Cooking

I cook. Which is to say that I take one bunch of things and, through the magic of chemistry, make them into one big mass of something else and expect other people to destroy the evidence of said alchemy by eating it.

When I was a kid, even though it was the seventies and women were all busy smoking Virginia Slims and wearing "Little Prunes" (betcha forgot about them, didn't you?) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, I was still expected to take home economics where I would learn how to cook and sew and do laundry and care for children. Even the ugly girls like me were expected to know those things, even though it was also a foregone conclusion that we would be living with our parents for the rest of our lives and never need them.

Cooking at my house was a survival thing. There were four children and only one parent in our household - an unfavorable ratio at best, and a formula for "Lord of the Flies" at worst. We children were expected to cook the meals at dinner once we were old enough to reach the stove, and you could only make so much macaroni and cheese before mom blew her stack.

Something happened, though, over the years. I got good at cooking. It was passable at first, but I was encouraged by my successes. The first was my late high school/early college boyfriend who tasted my tempura and then went home to tell his mother about it, only to have her try to duplicate my rice flour/iced club soda recipe with buckwheat flour and lukewarm beer.

My second success was my first husband. This "success" was made easy by the fact that his mother was arguably the worst cook on the planet. Apparently his father had told her "one day, all food will come in pill form and it will taste exactly like this." How he could taste it is anyone's guess, as everyone in the entire household, including the the aged corgi, chain smoked unfiltered cigarettes. The furniture was covered in plastic that was amber and sticky with years of accumulated tar. In those days, all of my cooking skills were directed at just making something the poor man could taste.

My second husband was also impressed by my culinary abilities. Again, I have his mother to thank. The poor woman was allergic to wheat, and so he had to endure things like the cake she made out of rice flour that was so dry that he couldn't unpucker for days. He drank endless glasses of water, only to have them turn to glue in his mouth. I don't think he used the bathroom for more than a month. This is the same woman who found out that cucumbers are hard to pull off as a vegetable side dish when shredded and boiled. I don't think she had a recipe. This was entirely a brainwave on her part.

What really spurred my culinary creativity, though, was my third husband. This was a man who absolutely scorned vegetables of any sort, and who also inspired the sort of contempt that made the marriage the blessedly short-lived thing that it was. I created vegetarian masterpieces, purely out of spite. Every night at our house was a vegan dream, lived out by a carnivore in purgatory.

So, all those years of training have paid off. The ugly chick has made good, the years of cooking to overcome the handicaps of others are behind me, and I'm currently married to a vegan who eats like there's no tomorrow and who never met a vegetable he didn't like. No, I don't make spite chops or hot roast vengeance. I'd like to think that, as my cooking skills have evolved, so have my interpersonal skills.

Then again, I have so many bodies in my wake that argue against both of those things.