Salt in the Wound

The other night I cooked a romantic meal for my wife, and along the way taught myself what not to do when cooking a romantic meal for your wife.

First, hide the picture of how the meal is supposed to turn out. Recipes in magazines usually show the final product. Your final product will never meet this standard, so protect this image like it’s your PIN number, and everyone around you is a criminal.

Next, read the recipe well before you start the actual cooking. Don’t just read along as you go, because you might come across things such as “allow to cool to room temperature,” and even later, “permit to cool completely” which suddenly means there’s like three hour of downtime in the middle of your recipe, and dinner’s not going to be ready in the thirty minutes you imagined.

A quick aside: homemade pasta’s a lot more complicated and difficult than it sounds, and your wife’s not criticizing you by pointing this out, she’s only trying to help.

And finally, make sure you actually bought all the ingredients you’ll need. See, sometime you’ll write an ingredient at the very bottom of your shopping list, sort of off to the side, you know, in tiny little lettering because you ran out of space, and then for some unknown, probably completely rational reason, you overlook that ingredient while you're shopping. All hypothetical, of course. Suddenly it's no longer a recipe for pasta, you have a recipe for disaster. This only escalates when in a panic, with the memory of your wife’s comments ringing in your ears, you start contemplating how to get around not having things like basil, or butter, or maybe flour. See, there aren’t a lot of things that can take the place of butter and basil, no matter how much you wish there were. I’ve learned that flour falls into this category as well.