Meet the Chef

My husband and I moved into our first apartment together in August 2004. At the time, I made one thing clear to him: I DO NOT COOK.

I bake. I will treat you to a restaurant date. I am excellent at ordering pizza, sandwiches, Thai takeout. I will walk downtown to pick up food with you. But I do not cook.

So Bryan took over as the main chef of our household. "What are we having for dinner?" I would ask when I came home from a 10-hour day of student teaching. "I don't know," he answered from the smoky side kitchen in our little two-bedroom apartment, "but it has chicken in it." It turns out it was a sautee of chicken, garlic, red pepper flakes, light beer, and broccoli served over brown rice, and it was surprisingly tasty. I envied him his kitchen confidence and his willingness to experiment. On the rare occasion that I did cook for him--or for anyone, for that matter--it was an all-day affair. I would painstakingly seek out a recipe, list the ingredients, then organize my list by what order I would find them in the grocery store (produce first, then meats, followed by the center-store boxed items, and finishing with dairy and bakery), head to the grocery store for at least an hour to gather the items on my list, spend extra time re-reading, verifying, and consulting my recipe, and always ending up feeling defeated by my efforts and not the least bit interested in eating what I had made.

When family came into town, I would plan our meals out by applying the same research and organization I used in my graduate school studies. There was a restaurant for every occasion in Bloomington, IN, and I was an expert on where we should go at what time depending on our hunger level, attire, attitude, time available and sense of adventure. It turned out that being this knowledgeable about restaurants had a serious side effect: weight gain. By the summer of 2005, I had slogged my way through an accelerated graduate-level teacher preparation program, had worked 30 hours a week at a bagel shop in town, and put on 20 pounds. In July, I decided that enough was enough. I was done with the restaurants, done with relying on someone else to make my meals, done with being overweight.

I was going to learn how to cook.

And learn I did. I joined Weight Watchers and tried recipes from the community boards. I read cookbooks. I watched the Food Network incessantly. When recipes didn't taste quite right, I added a little something that I knew I would like. I mimicked the chefs on my favorite T.V. shows by tasting and adjusting. I learned to relax.

I learned to love to cook.

Now, over five years later, I am the chief chef of our three-person household. After an exciting year in which I scrambled to update my Minnesota teaching license, had a son, almost lost my job, and ran two half-marathons, I started the summer with my weight higher than I'd like and my confidence low. It's time to rev up my cooking engines once again.