PB & Js for Dinner

I’ve come to a startling realization in the last week. I can’t cook. No really- I can’t cook for shit. I can make toast, providing the toaster isn’t having a greedy day. I can make a pb& j. I can also make a quesadilla. I had to add that last one because it sounds somewhat exotic, and therefore impressive. Oh, and I can cook and make a baby, but I’m pretty sure that one falls into a different discussion.

Long, long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and my knockoff Guess jeans were totally radical, I took a Home Ec. Class. (Read- I was REQUIRED to take this public humiliation.)  “Hmmm”, I thought. “This is strange. Why are we learning about a stove? Everyone knows the “beep beep’ noise of a microwave is FAR superior to the “click click” of the stove knob. Then I learned that Red Baron made a frozen pizza that you put in a stove. That changed my attention span…a little. That’s when I learned about pre-heating… and the temperature at which plastic melts. (YAY!!! Science AND Home Ec!) Well, I managed to make it to week 2 of Home Ec when they introduced ---You know I’m going to interrupt myself for a sec-  Shouldn’t this class be called Home Maintenance, not Home Economics? Where is the industry within someone’s own home? Where is the retail shop? But I digress-----  Anyway… I burnt my cake. I was the only one who burnt my cake. Complete humiliation. I could crack an egg better than Erin Madison, but Erin’s cake didn’t look like hammered dog shit. Embarrassment was causing my neck to burn, and my Hypercolor shirt to change to purple. I would have hidden under a desk but most of them had these strange sewing contraptions on them and I would have poked my eye out or something. I just stood there next to my non-rising burnt craptacular cake. Mrs. Lawson took pity on me, and made a comment about how my cake might have been “perfect” if not for my extended bathroom break. That didn’t stop her from trying to torture me, weeks later, with the sewing portion of the semester. The term “creative and imaginative” always seemed to follow me outside of Art class, but never garnered me anything more than a worried and confused smile from teachers.  

There is a point to my story- I had absolutely no talent to cook at this age or at my current one. I once heard a man say that “the woman who can truly feed your appetite for food, sex and laughter is the one”. That’s somehow stayed with me. I know that in order for my husband to forget what a goddamn tragedy I am in the kitchen, I need to be a sexual dynamo, and put him into hysterics. I've also learned that, unfortunately, these two can collide at the same moment. I won’t go into detail. 

So here I am with two skinny kids and a hungry husband. I find myself surrounded by women who seem to have this drive (and talent) to make food.-to literally go into a kitchen, pull stuff out of the cold box thing, and put stuff in pans. Magically this turns into food. Someday I will be driven to learn the magic. I will probably have to take a class… or classes. I will probably have to make a cake. I just hope that I don’t have to sit next to Erin Madison again.