It’s not really the cooking I mind so much as the figuring out what to have.
There was a time when I was (much) younger and childless that I would pour over cookbooks and recipes in the newspaper looking for something exotic to serve for dinner. Honestly, I have tried to recapture that feeling of thinking that was actually fun, but just can’t.
You see, having children changes everything. There was a cartoon in the newspaper recently where the mom had fixed something “different” for dinner. The little girl was gagging over her plate saying to herself, “Only four more bites of this stuff and I get dessert.”
The mom glares at the dad and says, “And you wonder why we have macaroni and cheese three times a week.”
Exotic nowadays means serving macaroni and cheese on real plates instead of on paper ones. If I want to really go all out, I open up a can of pears to go with it.
When it’s time to think about what to have for dinner, I get depressed.
If I fix one of the same five things that I always fix, there’s a good chance I will hear at least one, “What?! That, AGAIN?”
If I go out on a limb and try something new I get, “I hope we’re not having THAT again any time soon.” I have threatened that if they complain about the food I cook, they’ll be the ones cooking dinner every night.
Which, unfortunately, doesn’t frighten them. Because, of course, that means macaroni and cheese seven nights a week. Maybe one night of ordering pizza for variety.
Some friends of our retired recently and moved to Lake Travis. He was out playing golf and fishing nearly every day.
One day she walked in and announced to him, “You know, ‘we’ are not retired. ‘You’ are retired. You play all day, and I still do the laundry, the grocery shopping, decide on what we’re having for our meals, and then do all the cooking. Well, as of today, ‘I’ am retiring, too. If you want me to cook dinner, you decide what it’s going to be, and you go buy the groceries I need. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a golf lesson …”
They go out to eat a lot.
