Cooking is a Waste of My Thyme
It started out fun, but then things got fuzzy. I wanted to make a meal I often order at one of my favorite restaurants (yes, Mexican) called tortilla soup.
Well, to cut right to the cheese, I mean chase – you know it’s been a long time since you’ve cooked when you can’t even find the cheese grater. Worse yet, when you can’t remember what the cheese grater looks like.
This has nothing to do with memory loss and everything to do with cooking blues, because I know what a grater looks like, I just couldn’t remember what mine looked like.
In my case, it takes up way too much of my time, cooking that is.
For me, it’s off to work by 8:30 a.m., Yabba-Dabba-Doo time is 5 p.m. (sometimes midnight), then home to feed the horses (two overgrown dogs really, with big appetites and even bigger … never mind) then phone interviews for impending articles and more writing until 10 p.m., well let’s just say hello fast food via my ATM card. Sleep fits in there somewhere between today and tomorrow, I’m just not sure where exactly. Now who hid the ladle?
I always tell everyone when I do cook, my stove thinks a new tenant moved in. At this point, I can’t make out if it’s the onions making me cry or just the cooking.
I pour myself a glass of Chardonnay – this always helps. Truth be told, I cook just fine, and I receive my fair share of compliments when I host a dinner (key word: when).
I love to watch the Food Network cooking shows on Saturdays (how does Giada De Laurentiis stay so thin anyway?), and my obsession with Tupperware is off-the-charts. The wine is taking effect and I begin to search high and low (mostly low) for that new mini white Tupperware strainer with a practically noir look on my face.
What throws me off is my inexplicable love for buying and collecting kitchen-related relics, such as vintage half aprons with tie backs, vintage hand-held eggbeaters, salt and pepper shakers (I have more than 200 sets, seriously) and all-things Tupperware. Can we say “burp?”
Tortilla soup is almost done. So is the bottle of wine. But how could tortilla soup possibly take five hours to make? With no time left to read Bill Clinton’s book “Giving,” I plop on the couch and contemplate how it feels to be “receiving” no soup (because I’m full of wine) and wonder if I fed the horses yet. Can we say nay?
Kitchen is a mess and take-out would’ve only cost no more than two Abe Lincolns (hello Taco Bell), so why all the culinary fuss?
I’m thinking cooking is just not my thing.
I’m much better at putting words together than food, where the only things left on the floor and counters to clean-up are extra words, sentences and Oxford commas I didn’t need.
By the way, I finally found the cheese grater. It was tucked neatly away in my sock drawer.
