Mr. Moon claims that I will not teach him to cook my recipes because I think that if I do, he will not need me around and will leave me.
We were discussing this with Lily the other night when she was here for dinner. She made the point, and rightfully so, that if Mr. Moon died, I would have no idea about the financial end of life and if I died, he would have no idea about the domestic end.
"Daddy, you'd have to move in with one of us," she said.
I said that he'd be fine and then he'd find someone to marry who would cook for him in about two months. "But not like you do," Lily said. "I see what people buy. Most people buy frozen meals and boxes of things like Hamburger Helper."
Well, quite frankly I think that Hamburger Helper is pretty darn tasty and I'm here to tell you that if my replacement fulfilled certain other criteria Mr. Moon would not turn up his nose at any of the forty (forty?) delicious varieties of Hamburger Helper but would tuck in to a nice big plate of it quite happily, especially if the woman made it with ground venison rather than hamburger.
That is neither here nor there but the point of my story is that Mr. Moon has signed-up to bring chili to a chili-contest thing on Monday at the bank where he works. White-bean-venison chili, to be exact, and he insists that HE WANTS TO COOK THE CHILI HIMSELF!
Mr. Moon has made chili exactly 0.0 times in his life whereas I have made it Gozillion point Gozillion times in my life.
Now I am not saying that Mr. Moon cannot make white bean chili. I am sure he can. The problem is is that although there is a recipe, I do not follow it exactly (are we surprised?) and that I add this and I add that and I do this and I do that and I'm pretty sure he wants to make the chili taste the way I make it and dammit, I just can't tell him how to do that. Unless I sit there and supervise the entire process and I sort of want to cry at the prospect. I have never had much patience in the kitchen and when people come over and ask if they can "help" I generally say no and not because I don't trust them or because I don't want to give up control of my kitchen but because it's just far easier to do it myself, except for with Taylor or May or Lis because they can do things better than I can and that's just the truth of it.
Well, I have a feeling that this is going to be a saga which takes up a good part of the weekend. And I already started the white beans because you know, they come in a bag and you have to boil them and I always add some stuff to them while they're boiling and he's already a bit perturbed with me because he wants to do this himself and really- he's right. I should just let him at it and let him follow the recipe because it's a good recipe and that's that.
We both slept horribly late for us today and it's already a strange day and not just because of that. The temperature is dropping like a rock and there's going to be about a forty-degree difference between what we woke up to this morning and what we'll be going to sleep to tonight. It is windy and I've already had to put on a sweater.
This is just fucking disconcerting. If I liked cold weather I would live in Alaska which I hear is about the most beautiful place in the world.
But I don't and so I don't.
Well, it IS getting chilly on this Saturday morning and already eleven o'clock and Mr. Moon is not out in the woods or on the water but right here and so he read me things out of the paper during my usual "quiet" time and I'm all discombobulated but I made him a nice breakfast because if I don't he will forget to eat and besides, I was about to die to crack that big brown egg and so I did. It looked like this:
I mean...WOW!And I cooked him a little sausage and some toast and those eggs and they were almost orange in the yolks when they cooked and so I restored the balance of a few things, I guess, by making him some food to eat, even if I did fuck things up by putting the beans on to boil.
And the wind is whippy and my feet are cold and I might even go see The Rum Diaries this afternoon and I need to figure out where in hell I put my Goodwill cashmere because I am gonna need it.
And one more thing- if not for Mr. Moon I would be living in a cardboard box under a bridge or in a van down by the river and so perhaps he is right- I don't want him to know how to cook because he might leave me if he did. I am not saying I am the most mentally stable of all people here on earth by any means but mostly I think that I just want to cook for him because I love him and making him good food to eat which is good for him is one loving thing I can do which is tangible and positive and it makes him happy.
If there's one thing I know, it is that nothing in this life is as simple as it appears on the surface except for a very few things and even they have more shades of meaning than we may like to think.
And some of us think too damn much but we may be good cooks which makes up for a lot of stuff in the long run and that's just the way it is.
