The husband doesn’t cook much, but when he does, he gets into the kitchen in quite a lively way.
By this, I mean that every couple of months or so, he’ll approach me breathlessly, waving a piece of paper. It will be a recipe. It will be something he will have found online, often by accident, and which he will have printed off.
The recipe will have an exotic name. The recipe will call for exotic ingredients. The recipe will occasionally require us to invest in some exotic new kitchen appliance.
“We’re going to need a food processor for my Sweet Honey-glazed Korean-style Short Ribs,” he informed me not long ago.
“We have a food processor,” I reminded him.
“I know,” he said. “But we need one with special attachments that we don’t have. So we’ll need to get another one.”
The husband’s recipes, it must be noted, are rarely budget friendly.
The husband, it must also be noted, is usually drawn to a recipe because of the picture that accompanies it, and not because it can be whipped up in a snap.
“I’m going to need some vanilla paste,” he told me a couple of months back. And some Saigon cinnamon. Do we have those things?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Vanilla ice cream, yes. Vanilla paste, no.”
“OK,” he said.
“And can’t you just use regular cinnamon?” I wondered.
“Listen,” he said. “The recipe calls for Saigon cinnamon. I’m not going to start messing around with my recipes!”
I glanced over his shoulder at the instructions for the recipe of the moment. I reckoned there were about four dozen ingredients. I noticed that the instructions for the recipe of the moment ran to about three pages.
“Have you read the recipe?” I asked.
“Of course not!” he said. “I’m going to have to read it when I’m cooking! Why on earth would I read it twice?”
I was tempted to tell him that in my kitchen experience, best practices involved reading a recipe ahead of time. I refrained, given that I did not want to dampen his enthusiasm.
“For this one,” he said the other day. “I will be making sambal oelek. To make sambal oelek, you have to grind up red chilies with a mortar and pestle. What are a mortar and pestle?”
“They’re something you use to grind up things like red chilies,” I said. “We don’t have them.”
“OK,” he said. “I’ll have to add that to my shopping list.”
I sighed and pictured the hit on the bank account.
Ah well, I thought, it could be worse. He cooks the exotic some six times a year. Beyond that, it’s pot roast and tacos.
