Mom is Just a Nickname

In our first year of marriage, Toph definitely had the edge over me when it came to cooking skills. In fact, I brought a reputation for horribly bad cooking with me to our relationship. Where he was creating luscious lasagna for me, I shrank from the thought of cooking for him. He definitely did NOT marry me for my abilities to feed him well!

There was a story in my family about pancakes I made one Sunday morning. My brother and his friend, who had spent the night, ate them along with my mom, sister and I. Both boys got horribly sick later that day and blamed my pancakes. (I’ve always believed that if my pancakes made them sick, it’s because they were really good and the guys ate too many of them! The rest of us were fine.) Neither of the boys would eat my cooking again for years!

There was the time I was determined to make a stir fry for Toph in a style similar to what my dad always used to make: ground beef, broccoli, soy sauce….it always seemed like he just tossed stuff into the pan and it came out great! So, I tried. That was a NASTY experiment. There is no other way to describe it, except for the name Toph and I have taken to calling it: Beth’s Soy Fry. It was so salty from too much soy sauce, it was inedible.

I also managed to burn water our first year together. I still get teased about that. Often I get incredulous looks that say, “HOW the HELL do you burn water?!” Well, folks, it’s called short attention span: Put on the pan of water to boil. Stare at it a few minutes. Get bored. Wander off to putz on the computer. Forget about water on the stove. Sniff the air a while later and wonder what could possibly be burning. Go looking for it. Find the pan on the stove, black on the bottom. Yep, I burned water. I can’t remember if the pan survived or not.

I distinctly remember trying to cook a venison roast in my crockpot one time. That was nasty.

Still, I did manage to produce some winners in that first year. I could make a beef stew that had people begging for third and fourth servings. I often took a crockpot of that into Toph’s office with a loaf of fresh bread and fed the entire office (which consisted of three or four people at the time).

By the time I was pregnant with Sullivan in our third year of marriage, I like to think I was gaining a better reputation for my cooking. We moved back in with Toph’s parents then, and (after I got over the horrible first trimester) I was often found in the kitchen cooking (yes, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen!). I discovered meals like chicken and barley bake, meat and black bean burritos, fajitas, and crockpot cheesy chicken. I began to enjoy cooking a lot more than I ever had before.

Early on, I made it a habit to try a new recipe each week. I don’t make it to each week all the time, but I do it often enough that the reportoire of meals we eat is always changing slightly. Some of the things we’ve tried have been hits. Some have been decidedly ‘two thumbs down.’ Those nasty experiments are a good excuse to order a pizza though!

Now, as Toph and I enter our tenth year together (our wedding anniversary is in March!) the balance has swung more in my direction. I can’t claim to be a better cook than Toph, but I’d say we’re at least even. We certainly have to order less pizza nowadays due to failed cooking experiments than we used to!

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