"You know I can't cook." I replied.
"I couldn't cook before I married you. I learnt to cook for you." I had to agree with that statement. It was a miracle, how it happened, so much so, I felt conned. Here we were, going out to dinner one day and the next day she whipped up a surprise in the kitchen. It was like she called up someone and got a cooking program uploaded like those nice folks in the Matrix did. True, I had not witnessed ineptitude from her in the kitchen before that astonishing dinner, but I take her word for it and home cooked food does beat fast food joints hollow.
"You could learn to cook and make something nice for me. It's all available on the internet. If you took out just 5% of the time you spend on Cricinfo-CNN-Wikipedia, you'd get some awesome recipes."
I omit to mention to her that if I reduced 5% of that time and spent it in pursuing my day job, I'd probably get a raise. Or at least get promoted.
This left me with a knotty problem. How to feed the woman I married and who is excellent at feeding me, without the use of a credit card and from within the confines of a kitchen. I know there are a host of technical loopholes in the statement I made, but you get the picture. She wanted me to create a meal; to cook something for her to eat.
The only silver lining I could see in that was that maybe, I would not have to eat what I cooked myself.
My wife saw it as an expression of love. I saw it as a recipe for disaster. I could see my marriage foundering in the soup I cooked. My previous culinary exploits have been considerable, but more on the demand side. There are people who remember me solely on the basis of my demonstrations of eating chocolate and milk-fat based products.
Even on the eating side though, there is enough evidence to corroborate my prescient visions of the boat called PJS Marriage capsizing. Once I ate a plateful of scrambled eggs without realizing sugar had been substituted for salt. To add insult to injury I lost ten dollars when I bet my roommate we had salt at home. It turned out to be fine white crystal sugar, that was without doubt, sweet. It sure did look like salt, so much so I had passed it off as salt to the person kind enough to cook the scrambled eggs in question.
In a nutshell, I am hopeless.
But then, the keen brain kicked in. I got the domed forehead to churn out some plans, devious or otherwise.
I offered to take her to one of those Japanese/Chinese restaurants that have a pot of soup cooking on your table and you can dip pieces of food into the boiling soup to cook and eat. I thought it would be rather nice - she could order, I could hold the stuff in the soup and then we could eat. 'Win-win' as someone put it so nicely.
She would have none of it.
"In the confines of our kitchen." she said by way of explanation.
The brain was flustered that this plan was so easily sidestepped. I pointed out that since I was going to such lengths as to cook for her, the least she could do was to waive a measly condition.
She said nothing.
This was serious.
The rule of marriage is that the seriousness of the matter is generally in direct proportion to the amount of nothing a wife has said. Even though this was a small burst of nothing, it meant that we were already in the serious zone of post marriage discussions.
I asked for an extension of a timeline. This weekend was too close. She did not say more nothing. She said, "Whenever. Just sometime, whenever you feel comfortable."
I got more time, but it looked like I would need to cook.
I started at the base of the problem, the verb 'Cook'. I looked up the dictionary. There was a bit of hope. The online dictionary described 'Cook' as follows:
cook
1 [kook]–verb (used with object)
1.
to prepare (food) by the use of heat, as by boiling, baking, or roasting.
2.
to subject (anything) to the application of heat.
3.
Slang . to ruin; spoil.
4.
Informal . to falsify, as accounts: to cook the expense figures.
Based on what I could see, my cooking would lie largely in point 3 above. I really would have cooked the food once I was done with it. The other thing I could do was to try point 4. To cook my cooking.
Picasso said that it took him a lifetime of practice to paint like a child. Would I be able to find in this city someone who could cook believably, like me? It had to be just right. Not too good, look amateurish, taste passable, should show lots of effort and have no potential for development, so as to preclude other such demands in the future.
I took advice from a friend of mine, who can cook. He saw merit in the idea, but did not know of any such place. He also pointed out certain pitfalls in the plan. The food would need to be delivered. Which would mean my wife would need to be away from home. The payment for the food would need to be untraceable. Which meant cash, a commodity only infrequently in my possession owing to delinquent ATM visiting habits.
It meant a dirty kitchen. My initial enthusiasm was curbed when he said that a kitchen dirtied by cooking requires training. Any amateur dabbler in culinary forensics would be able to make out if the dirty stuff had been used to cook other stuff or no.
I put forward the idea that I could pretend that I cleaned up after cooking. He gave me a baleful look. He was right. She would smell a definite rat there. Better to curb all investigation.
Then he mentioned she might ask me how I did it. Not that she might suspect anything, but maybe even conversationally or because she was astonished and surprised or to really appreciate the effort I put it.
I was stumped.
He tried to coach me with answers. It was a disaster. I stammered and I stuttered pathetically.
Plus we could not find a place that could cook 'just like that'.
For all the investigation into the potential of point 4 as a plan, we had to shelve it. The risks were just too great.
I then went to point 2. Apparently the application of heat to an object is to cook it.
That weekend, I got up before my wife did and decided to do some cooking. I settled for toast and eggs. I cooked the bread in the toaster till it became a toast. I thought to start off with, I should not be very ambitious and decided to settle for boiled eggs. That was simple. I took two eggs, filled a bowl with water and put them in the microwave for five minutes on high. That would cook them for sure.
For sure, there was something akin to a muffled gunshot a couple of minutes later. The eggs had exploded. There was egg everywhere inside the microwave. And it smelled rather strongly of boiled egg as well, progressively getting worse. For a fleeting moment I thought maybe I could pass it off as a new poached egg recipe, but then a preliminary examination told me that getting the shell out of the egg would involve a lot of painstaking work.
The toasts popped. I buttered them. I am good at buttering toast. There is just one rule: The thickness of the butter on the slice of bread should be a significant percentage of the thickness of the toast.
I told my wife I had cooked breakfast for her. She blanched at the quantity of butter on the bread and made a great show of having to use both hands to lift it, but did not eat it.
Her first comment that it was not humanly possible to consume this quantity of butter on a single slice of bread was easily disproved. I ate a slice.
Her second comment took more. She said toasting bread was hardly cooking. I showed her point 2 from the dictionary:
2.
to subject (anything) to the application of heat.
It cut no ice with her. Cooking apparently is not only the application of heat (and laying on the butter does not count as processing), it should include utensils, involve an appliance (toasters don't count) and should have a significant change in appearance for the food in question. Maybe I should have used white bread instead of brown, but that too I figured was a technicality.
Back to square one.
The answer came later, by chance.
Barbecue.
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