I can cook. I can feed myself regularly, and I can whip up a reasonably schmancy holiday meal when the need arises. I just don’t enjoy it. It’s a lot of fuss and bother and you get to enjoy the end product for about fifteen minutes. The destination is rarely worth the journey.
And then you have to do the dishes.
I do, however, try to eat reasonably healthily. I understand the components of a balanced diet. I am vegetably literate. I know that a woman cannot exist on Nutella alone, much though she would prefer that to be the case.
::sigh::
I have made it my mission in life to find as many ways to chuck vegetables into dishes one might normally have served with a salad so that I don’t, in fact, have to create a whole extra component to accompany my meal just to round it out. I am the Queen of the Casserole, and my Royal Motto is Veni, Vidi, Broccolini. “I came, I saw, I chucked a cruciferous vegetable in it.” For my dinner this week, I made a pot of chili: ground turkey, low sodium kidney beans, low sodium chili seasoning packet, onion, green bell pepper, canned tomatoes, a can of corn, and an entire bag of kale. The whole thing. I mean, I picked out the really huge stems, but other than that...a biiig pile o’ kale. My tuna noodle casserole and chicken alfredo casserole are always heavy on the peas and celery, and broccoli (or, if I’m feeling really adventurous, brussels sprouts), respectively. Pasta sauce? Start with whole tomatoes! Add squash! And mushrooms! And eggplant! And, oh, what the hell, a bag of spinach!
Don’t get me wrong, I love salad, and vegetables in forms besides ‘jumbled in with everything else’--I just love them more when someone else deals with the preparation part. And, if you couldn’t already tell, I’m a massive fan of the casserole, and its cousin, the one-pot meal. Fewer dishes makes a happy Elizabeth, and a happy Elizabeth is less likely to transform into Godzilla and go smash Tokyo. Just sayin’.
I truly don’t know where my cooking aversion--which isn’t so much an aversion to the cooking itself as it is to the post-cooking clean-up--came from. My mother isn’t any sort of a Grand Kitchen Adventurer, sure, but she always fed us more than adequately. The woman bakes like a wizard, though, holy waistline, Batman… My father can manage to use every pot, pan, measuring cup, and teaspoon in the house to make a bowl of cereal, so I suppose there’s really no mystery insofar as my dish-doing allergy. Apart from my parents, however, the rest of my family is full of clever cooks. They all love trying new recipes and their everyday meals somehow manage to be everything but. How did this gene manage to bypass me?!
I’m not really that bothered about it, though. Fewer dishes, remember?
My very bestest friend since we were three is my foil in this arena. The bish can cook--she always could. Her idea of a birthday dinner is that she makes it for everyone else. Not that I’m complaining--I’ve had sooo many good meals as a result of this--but it’s the exact opposite of how I want to deal with celebratory food.
I want to celebrate by not having to deal with it.
Mind you, in the grand tradition of my baker mother, I make a damn decent cake. You know, when I can be bothered to deal with baking at all. (Read: not often.) And you know what you can do with cake?
No, apart from all the crazy nonsense they used to get up to on Ace of Cakes.
YOU CAN HIDE FRUITS AND EVEN SOMETIMES VEGGIES IN THEM!
That makes them healthy, right?
RIGHT?!
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