Friday, September 16, 2011

98119

Recently the gossip mongers at work have decided the statute on keeping secrets among themselves has run. Last week a co-worker in town on business from Minnesota said to me, "I heard a rumor about you." Hmmm...this is curious. A rumor about moi? When I inquired what said rumor was, she told me she'd heard that Mr. Wonderful and I had been dating. I confirmed that was no rumor and, yes, we've been dating for a year now. She seemed surprised that it'd been that long and she had just heard this fact from some third source. We're nothing if not discreet. Okay, as anyone who's been around us can attest, we are not exactly discreet.

Yesterday another co-worker in Golden, Colorado sent me an Instant Message saying "I heard you have a boyfriend. Anyone I know..." She could skip being coy. I knew she already knew because our co-worker, Fun Bobby, had told her months ago.

My boss asked me last week if we were still dating. I told her we were and she confided that she had told her boss. At this point, I'm nearly expecting to be standing in the checkout line at Safeway and catch a glimpse of the front cover of "Insurance Weekly" showing Mr. Wonderful and I together outside Insurance World. The headline "It's true. They've been seen holding hands!" I'll be wearing those large sunglasses that cover my entire head and Mr. W. will be turning away from the camera. The lens will most definitely capture some extremely unflattering angle that accentuates my all too curvaceous figure in a negative light. Mr. Wonderful will, undoubtedly, look hot and all the girls reading the rag will ask "what is he doing with her?"

Young couples often have to suffer through the marriage question from friends and family at every event and holiday function. They want to know where this relationship is going. They are getting attached to the partner and need to know how invested they should be. It's always a drag when a good friend breaks up with a girlfriend or boyfriend everyone liked. "What happened?" they ask. "Will you remain friends?" their eyebrows furrow in disbelief.

For the slightly older set who may have been married once or twice before, the question of matrimony isn't as pressing as the question of moving in together. Although a few friends and co-workers have asked about marriage (one being the Golden co-worker who said she wanted to "be there" when it happened), the move in is on the forefront of their minds.

After a business meeting with Mr. Wonderful one morning, a co-worker was suddenly standing in front of my desk. "Mr. W. mentioned he was moving to Seattle and I just had to come down and find out if you two were moving in together," she said trying to appear nonchalant.

"Why didn't you just ask him?" I said.

"I didn't want to pry." This she said with a straight face.

Last Sunday I was helping Mr. W. move a few things into his new pad, a condo about a mile from my apartment. He is renting from the cutest elderly Norwegian couple who have been married 57 years! While moving some boxes into his place, we met one of the owners of another unit. Introductions were made, niceties exchanged as we clarified which one of us was moving in and which one of us was not.

"Oh, not yet anyway," the neighbor said smiling at me. "That's an awfully big two bedroom unit!"

"Not big enough," I countered.

At this point, I'm just happy my guy will soon be living in the same zip code.

Baby steps.










Monday, September 5, 2011

Bring on the Chef

Since my divorce nine years ago, I've been on a cooking sabbatical. First it was a trip to Europe that lasted nearly three and a half years. While I had access to kitchens or at least kitchenettes, I really couldn't say what I did was considered "cooking". I simply prepared food or ate out. Living abroad it was fun to find the local haunts and introduce my pallet to new flavors. That was part of the adventure of living in Europe and I wanted to experience as much as possible. I had no idea how long I'd be living there and wanted to take full advantage of every aspect of the new and different cultures I was embracing. Okay, the reality was I was newly single and preferred to eat out or fix simple foods in my tiny apartment to cooking for myself.

In Prague I met some great young friends who had larger apartments and found cooking and entertaining fun, exciting and rewarding. They would often invite me over for dinner and I'd sport a bottle of wine and do the clean up as my contribution to the event. Before they got to know me, it was suggested that I should cook for them. I think they assumed since I was older and had been married before, I would be good at it. I explained that I was on sabbatical. My wine and clean up services seemed to suffice.

The longer I stayed living abroad, The Czech Republic, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, the more used to not cooking I became. My first year in Lisbon, I shared an apartment with a Japanese girl who was studying to be a sushi chef. She love trying out new recipes on me and I loved being the guinea pig. One of my friends from Prague lived next door and she continued her routine of culinary exploration and had me over for meals regularly. She would tell me she bought too much of something and we absolutely "had" to eat it up so it wouldn't spoil. Who was I to argue?

The second winter there, I rented a room from a local woman who was a caterer. She would often leave leftovers on my night table or in the frig with a note for me. Wow. I could have really gotten used to that!

Upon returning to the States and securing my little one bedroom apartment with the intention of nesting for awhile, I planned on taking up cooking once again. However, my apartment is conveniently located near loads of cafes, restaurants and pubs which all have affordable and tasty cuisine. Happy Hours in Seattle proved to be economical and a great way to catch up with friends or meet new people. My tiny kitchenette was difficult to really make anything too involved and most of the fancier kitchen gadgets got lost in the divorce. There would be no Thanksgiving diners hosted at my place. Furthermore, I discovered that after taking so many years off from cooking, I was no longer any good at it. My ex-husband was really the executive chef in our house and I was more of a prep cook. I could hold my own back then, but somewhere between signing the divorce papers and traipsing off to far off lands, I'd lost my culinary abilities. Recently, a 92 year old woman I was chatting with at a friend's birthday party stated she was no longer a good cook because she got out of practice. I could relate. Maybe I'll get a second wind and start cooking again before I'm 92.

There are many good reasons to cook at home.

1. It's healthier than eating out. At least one would hope. You can select the ingredients, the healthy options and recipes vs. a chef who uses whole milk or creams, full fat everything, and loads of sugar and salt.

2. You save money. Unless you only shop at the gourmet grocer and buy locally grown organic foods farmed in soil irrigated and conditioned by home grown, hand fed earth worms, groceries are typically cheaper than eating out. Also, you must actually eat the groceries you buy. If you let them sit unattended for days on end while you continue to eat out, the fruit flies devouring your fruit and the veggies in your frig turning to mush, you won't actually save money.

3. You eat smaller portions. Provided you eat your one serving and put the remainder in a Tupperware for lunch or dinner the next day, rather than pick at it while cleaning up the kitchen until there isn't enough left over for a second meal, you will eat less overall.

4. It's a great date. Cooking together can be an aphrodisiac. What is more romantic than sharing the kitchen, each having a task, sauteing, stirring and tasting and then finally sitting down at a beautifully set table for a delicious meal, wine, music and candles and enjoying food prepared together? It really is a great way to be together, talk, laugh, and smooch throughout the process.

5. Like a great date, it's also a great social activity. Having friends over to share in preparing food is affordable and fun. You can chat and catch up while cooking, never getting interrupted by the waitress who always seems to turn up right at the punch line of your story. Cleanup is a group effort and you have the entire evening to linger over wine without being rushed out the door because someone is waiting for your table.

6. No bread basket. Except for certain occasions or specific meals, I do not buy bread regularly. I absolutely love bread, however, but I'd eat far too much of it if it were in the house. The bread basket at the restaurant is my weak spot. I can decline dessert, but I cannot pull away from the bread basket.

While there are many cases for cooking at home, there are cases for not cooking.

1. It is often cheaper to eat out solo. For example, a recipe calls for 1/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes. I buy an entire jar of red pepper flakes for $3.99. I'd have to cook a lot of recipes using red pepper flakes to get my money's worth. Since I don't even have them on hand, that means I haven't cooked anything calling for red pepper flakes in five years. Chances are those flakes will expire before I ever get through the jar. I can go to the Thai place around the corner and buy one dish that will turn into three meals for just a bit over twice that amount with a lot less hassle.

2. Unplanned schedules. While I can try to plan meals for the week and purchase groceries in advance, it never fails that something comes up to throw me off my schedule. Suddenly, I'm not home for a few nights to eat the food I've purchased and it starts to spoil. I hate tossing out moldy or over ripe food.

3. Not what I want to do on every date. While cooking together can be a great date, if we do it every night we're together it becomes mundane and tedious. To be honest I'd rather be on the sofa cuddling than in the kitchen chopping carrots.

4. Too many leftovers. While it's great to cook a full recipe and have leftovers, by the third or fourth meal, I'm sick of it. No matter how great it tasted on days one and two, it's just awful by day three. Freezing doesn't work for me. It becomes freezer burnt. Cutting the recipe in half doesn't seem like it's worth the bother.

5. Cooking from scratch is time consuming. If it takes longer than 30 minutes to prepare, cook, eat and clean up, it's too much time. After all day in the office, I do not find spending a couple hours in the kitchen the least bit relaxing. By the time I walk home, unpack my tote, change my clothes, go through my mail, prepare the food, cook the food, eat the food, fish out those little Tupperware containers for leftovers, and clean up the kitchen, it's nine or ten o'clock at night. Where did the evening go?

6. I really do not enjoy cooking. If I could choose a maid service, a chauffeur, a personal chef or a personal trainer, I'd choose the chef every time.


So whatever happened to my culinary friend from Prague? She returned to her home in San Diego, went back to school, got married and started her own business. She also hired a personal chef. She loves it.