Cooking with a Loved One

So, as many of you know, I’ve been doing much more cooking ever since I’ve had a girlfriend to clean up after me. We make a good team as I love to cook and hate to clean, and she hates to cook and hates to clean.

It’s not all roses and butterflies, or whatever stupid metaphor people use to describe paradise. For example, she’s always in the way while I’m cooking. When I need to deglaze a pan with water, I’m not one to have a cup of water at my side ready to pour into the searing hot pan. I bring the pan to the water, the way God intended pans to be deglazed. There’s a good six feet between the stove and the water, and if you’re standing within those six feet, well, I hope you’re wearing shoes. And a face mask.

Now, I’m a strong believer of the “you live, you learn,” tenet people so graciously spout. I, though, am not so heartless. I’ll give her fair warning before turning for the water. I figure a quick “careful” through my teeth will suffice, and usually she gets out of the way fast enough. Sometimes, though, she stands there doing I don’t know what, getting water probably, and ends up with a face full of hot pan. Don’t ask me how the pan ends up on her face.

Other times, she’ll pick something off the cutting board . . . while I’m chopping. “Can I have some of that bell pepper,” she’ll ask. “I love raw bell pepper.”

“Yes, of course,” I say happily and she ends up with a cut across the back of her hand and legs.

The worst is when I’m making cheesecake and I’m transporting it to the oven. “Make yourself useful, honey bunches of oats,” I tell her. “Can you open the oven?”

“Sure!” she says and, somehow, ends up entirely within the 400 degree oven.

What a pain in the ass.

I hope that one day we’re as two ballet dancers moving to a beautifully choreographed dance in the kitchen, she the yin to my yang, complimenting each other like a pair of symbiotic beings. Until then, we’ll have to laugh off the third degree burns and lacerations.