I Can Almost Guarantee Take-Out on Thursday

I don’t know if anyone’s explained this to you yet – and I don’t mean to step on your parents’ toes – but there are things that men and women do – quite often in the privacy of their own homes – that lead to great satisfaction, potentially unsanitary situations, and differences in opinion on technique. It can look like fighting, but don’t be scared, kids. Mommy and Daddy still love each other.

And every Sunday, whether we like it or not, we do it, Willie and I.

That’s right. We cook.

It’s not exactly a well-oiled machine, our cooking and putting away three or four main dishes, but we manage. These meals will be both lunches and dinners for the work week until they either run out and/or we tire of them.

It’s both a domestic thing and an economical thing.

Of course, that much time in a small-ish kitchen and you’ll see we have different cooking styles.

Willie, for example, takes three hours to chop an onion. I may be exaggerating here, just a bit, but it’s enough to make me leave the room. As my brother, the king of hardwood floor installation and finishing would say, “Come on! We’re not painting the Mona Lisa here.”

But this is not how Willie rolls. Willie is precise. There is strong German and Dutch blood in his veins, and this leads him to measure everything, to line things up exactly, and to cause me to scream things like “for Pete’s sake, Willie, drop the knife already!”

Honestly, I just don’t have the time for the minutiae of a perfectly chopped onion. There’s laundry to fold, blogs to write, and forensic crime shows to watch.

I have a very busy life!

I am proud to point out that I’m no longer irritated by his perfectly measured, exquisitely cut and time-sucking onions. The instrument, however, required to measure my indifference regarding this “skill” of his has yet to be invented. I remain unimpressed with his chopping. The chopping is an inconsequential bit of the whole experience, in my opinion. I’d rather get on to the simmering part, shortly followed by the eating part.

I’m sure there are things about my cooking that Willie has complaints about; but Willie can’t type for shit, so we’ll never know what those things are.

HA!

I’m a big fan of food waiting for me in the fridge. Better yet, if I could get that food without having made it myself? That would be good, too. Because I don’t want just any food, not food in a can or bought frozen, but food made from scratch, in my own kitchen, filling the house with smells of home and then slowly mellowing in my fridge, waiting for me and my yoga-weary self at the end of a too-busy day.

Of course, for all my home-made-food snobbery, by Thursday or Friday we’re out of food and we're looking at take-out menus – and I don’t care.

This Thursday, I’m thinking gyros, maybe some hummus. I would not turn down crema or baklava.

Dagnab it, I can only be so domestic and thrifty.