I was Pretty Hungry When I Wrote This

Last week, while I was standing at the counter of BJ's gas station, waiting for you to get your drink, I thought about how far we’ve come. And yet there we were…

Our first fight started with you putting butter in the boiling spaghetti, escalated to me squealing about the added fat (we knew nothing of carbs back in those days), you groaning about sticky noodles and it ended with us racing Matchbox cars across an ugly linoleum kitchen floor (a Mustang and a Thunderbird). I don’t remember what happened to the food in the pot.

Tonight I was driving and heard a lady on the radio (I did not take note of her name, I was not expecting to later need to quote her) reading her autobiography of meals. She described the tiny urban apartment of her youth, which had three rooms IF you counted the bathroom and considered the kitchen and living room/bedroom to be two rooms even though there was not a door or wall to separate them.

As she read about her “dinner parties” for which she prepared dishes on a single burner stove and had to use the bathtub as a sink in lieu of an actual kitchen sink, I visualized this shabby chic little apartments single girls get as they move through the bohemian circles (a combination of those seen on the TV show Friends and the play RENT), the type I had meant to move in myself before I chose to instead spend (that’s right, I split an infinitive and I am not ashamed) my youth married to you.

Radio lady read about the strange dishes she made when she was alone (while sitting in her chair and watching the news) and she said that “making dinner for only one’s self brings out the weirdest in mankind” and I laughed, because …uh hu.

And our meal biography?

After the spaghetti incident we continued to cook for one another. We were brand new to marriage and to all those grown up bills. Some weeks we had to forgo groceries and make do with what we had. Our little apartment had five rooms (if you count the line that divided our kitchen and living room as a room divide) and was built before either of us was born. I came home to it frequently to find you “experimenting” as you called it.

You made us needle in potato soup, rice with tomato sauce, mushy things with some kind of meat and I always enjoyed it. We porked up together those first few years and we never had to open that can of “Love Soup” your aunt gave me at my bridal shower (I think it is still in our pantry, how long does that keep?).

I always ate your experiments. You always ate my spaghetti.

Some where along the line you met a chef who put up a sheet between the living room and kitchen of another (our very last) shabby apartment and he served us our first artichoke by candlelight in a room cramped by a decorated card table (I think this was our fourth anniversary) and we still eat them just like he made them that night.

And between the chef’s pointers and your discovery of the food channel, and maybe the purchase of our own little kitchen, your experiments have evolved to works of art.

Over the years you have seduced me in to your world of onions, red peppers an hollandaise sauce over fried eggs and sausage. Your stint working for the butcher taught you how to select (and even the best times of day to select) a good cut of meat. I have learned to respect the marinade time you set, to know I had better have the guests ready to eat before your sauce separates. I had never tasted a real steak till I tasted yours! (Admittedly I was a vegetarian but those stakes were a big part of the conversion.)

Our kitchen has gotten prettier, over the years our floors have gotten better and the appliances get shinier and more functional (who knew a new faucet would change our lives so?) And the dishes you make have become more sophisticated. I can still make spaghetti. I use olive oil now.

I love our new tradition. You kicked it off with your finest work-the cuts were well chosen and the sauce made me moan. I took my turn the following week-tacos are not bad when you consider that 10 years ago I could rarely make soup without burning it. It’s week 5 now and I believe it’s your serve. I told you to make it light (because we bought that silly Halloween costume I wanted to squeeze in to the next day) but I have changed my mind. I don’t have the gumption to wear that thing after all. So tomorrow…bring it baby.


So getting back to BJ's...
But for all the culinary advances we’ve made, for all of the food snootiness we’ve gained, how is it we found ourselves at a gas station at 8:15am (we were due at work at 8) desperately looking for the right combination of things to throw in a bag to take to day care to replace the lunch we forgot to bring our little kid?

After school that day I asked little E how she had enjoyed the boiled egg in her lunch; I had found some at the gas station and was rather proud that this meal included protein.

“What egg?” she asked.

I ran it through in my head. If she missed the egg, for lunch that day our little girl had had a cereal bar, pumpkin seeds, yogurt and string cheese.

C’est la vie.

So dinner tomorrow? Will there be a dessert?