This is why I'm a bad wife.
I started the day out strong, dragging my lazy, so-called stay-at-home-wife ass out of bed at the crack of 8:30 to drive my bread-winning, bacon-bringing husband to work so he won’t have to wait in the rain for an L car that isn’t too crowded.
So far, so good.
Then Rob proposes that he come home for dinner at 7. He even mentions that he’s in the mood for my ravioli bake — one of the few things I make that he will eat without comment or complaint.
Score one for me. Only the husband of a Good Wife wants to come home for dinner. And, this is an easy dish — I already have the ravioli in the freezer and a jar of Newman’s Own Mushroom Marinara in the cupboard.
I am missing, however, the third of this dish’s three ingredients — parmesan cheese — which I don’t realize until 7:09 pm, at which point I have started neither dinner nor the oft-lengthy process of coaxing Rob home from his office.
So I offer to pick him up (the only reliable way of ensuring his timely departure from work) after swinging by Dominick’s for parmesan cheese. I get the non-pre-shredded variety, and even grab a bunch of asparagus — a side dish? Look at her go! — and I’m beginning to feel redeemed.
Back at home, ravioli bake assembled and about to go in the oven when lo, what is that on the discarded pasta packaging? An expiry? Dated what, now? March? Of last year?
After a moment’s hesitation, the casserole is upended into the sink. Above the whir of the garbage disposal, I argue halfheartedly, with no one in particular, that the pasta is most definitely still good. Can frozen pasta really expire?
This is what I mean when I say I cannot cook. To be certain, I can whip together a veritable smörgåsbord of hors d’oeuvre, the recipes for which call for little more than the most basic assembly of ingredients and the heating of the would-be-safe-to-eat-even-if-uncooked final product for 30 to 45 minutes in an oven preheated to 350 degrees.
And I can bake. But anyone who can read and measure can bake, and that only eliminates about half of my sister-in-law’s kindergarten class. Surely, with my strong reading comprehension skills and sharp attention to detail (you can stop laughing now, Husband Of Mine), I should be able to cook.
But the fact remains: I cannot.
Perhaps with some advance preparation — an itemized shopping list and a special trip to the grocery store, a pre-selected menu of recipes that complement each other, a detailed schedule with specific instructions about how far in advance to turn on the oven, and perhaps a sous chef to assist with the multi-tasking inherently required in preparing multiple dishes at once — perhaps then, I might be able to cook.
But that would be just one night, and the entire process would require daily repetition, preparation in advance of the week’s shopping trip, the hiring of a staff. I could not do it alone. Let alone with a job, or a house full of kids.
And so, I maintain: I cannot cook.
And now, at half past nine, I stand in the kitchen, boiling the handful of rigatoni left over from some other month’s attempt at dinner, hoping it will amount to enough to feed at least one of us. It likely will not, but no matter: in the interim, Rob has devoured a bag of tortilla chips and I a half pound of cherries and a healthy portion of chocolate hazelnut gelato, straight from the pint. We’re not really hungry anymore, but we’re not satisfied, either.
Bad wife.
I freaking love you! Don’t feel bad, I mean who really cooks these days anyway? (at least that’s what I tell myself every night when I decide between one of my 3 specialties: pasta, chicken breasts or tacos…oh and sometimes pb&j for variety
You entertain me!
I disagree that you’re a bad wife. A bad wife would have fed him the expired food.
See, you actually are a good wife. I would have cooked the expired pasta and hoped for the best. I do this on a fairly regular occasion. I mean really, it was in the freezer, that means it’s OK, right?
I’m with Abbie! Except I prob would have just bought it from the pre-made section of the grocery store, transfered it to a nice clean plate, meticulously hidden the packaging, and then taken credit. Boo and Ya.
I am having trouble processing the fact that ANYTHING frozen could EVER expire? I’m seriously not kidding, I had no clue. That’s the point of freezing stuff, right? And although I’m terrified to check, I may just have to check my own frozen ravioli tonight. After reading this story, I feel positive it expired sometime when W was president, and most likely, it was during his first term. You are hilarious and are not a bad wife. Tell Molly hey!
Don’t worry, most nights MIke feeds much of his dinner to Rosie under the table, and then tells me it was just “okay.”
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.