Cooking

I'm a pretty good cook. I don't think I'll ever win any prizes or be a famous chef, but for a while I thought that if the law gig didn't work out, maybe I would be a kosher caterer. (Now my back-up career plan is editing.) I won't tell you about the time that I managed to burn spaghetti.

I don't cook as much, or as varied, as I should, because I'm lazy and hate washing dishes. (See: goals #3 and #4.) But last night I compromised and even though I made pasta for dinner, I tossed some brocolli into the sauce. (And then I set aside the second serving to bring for lunch today, instead of just eating it. If you ever were looking for an excuse to eat dessert first, that might be it.)

But my mom seems to think that I'm a brilliant cook and she even calls me for advice. She'll ask me for a recipe, I'll say "oh, a bit of this and a bit of that" and she'll say "but how much???" To which I always reply, "uh, mom? You're the one who taught me to cook. You should know that I don't cook with measuring cups."

I bake bread, I fry eggs, I poach fish, I'm attempting to infuse oil (we'll see how it goes), but there are a few things that I just am not capable of.

An aside to put this in context before I tell you what I absolutely cannot cook. I love Yondalla. And it occurred to me that I hadn't read her blog from the beginning. So I am doing so now. (Shh, don't tell the boss.) One of her house rules is that everyone has one night a week that they cook dinner. And one of her posts talks about her son making breakfast for dinner.

I am utterly incapable of making pancakes. (And omelets, and latkes.) What am I going to do if kiddo doesn't like french toast or waffles but insists that special breakfasts must include pancakes? Just another thing to add to my list of fears.*


*Please know that my list of fears includes many, many more serious things than my inability to make pancakes. I'm going into this with a whole boatload of naivete but am not completely unrealistic. I'll post more about my serious fears later.