When the dinner bell rings
She set the plate on the dinner table: fried green vegetables simmered in a healthy dose of garlic.
After another long day at the computer, my Beijing-born wife had whipped up a tasty fare that included yams and a couple of hunks of last night’s leftover steak.
To my eyes, the veggies were a bit foreign-looking, like a plateful of dandelion stems. Hardly appetizing. More stalk than leaf.
But I dug in.
After a few chews I realized that these bad boys were not going down easily. I kept fighting back the gag reflex, feeling like I suddenly had four stomachs and had been put out to pasture, a major contributor to the planet’s methane problem (an accusation often thrown my way).
I finally washed them down with a major gulp of red wine.
I didn’t want to complain, since I had not lifted a finger in the kitchen to prepare this meal.
And yet I knew I had to be, delicate.
“Um,” I began, “what exactly are these vegetables?”
My wife assessed me coolly.
They were yam leaves and stems, she explained.
“In China, we used to feed them to the pigs,” she continued. “But they’re very nutritious. These days, they’re on everybody’s menu as healthy food.”
She paused.
“I thought you were going to complain, but you didn’t.”
And then she smiled, ever so slightly.
“Attaboy”
Complain?
Moi?
You’re talking to a guy with a major aversion to the frying pan, a kitchen cretin who would rather watch a snuff film or a videotape of a college Calculus class than be subjected to any windy celebrity cooking show.
For me, kitchens are like ex-wives: The thrill is gone, baby, if there ever was one.
I grew up spoiled, the first son after four sisters.
As a boy, I was never tasked with kitchen chores and merely had to push away my plate when done gorging.
The girls will take care of it, I knew, slouching back toward the couch.
I was raised in a middle-class family of seven children and my mother would throw a stew on the stove with hurried cooking instructions before heading off to her waitress job.
So I quickly learned to view the kitchen as a place to forage, where one was on one’s own, rather than a place of formal, sit-down family meals.
And forage I did.
As a preteen, I was always hungry.
I scoured the fridge for whatever was easiest, a lone jackal on the hunt for roadkill.
I wasn’t choosy.
When we ran out of peanut butter and jelly, I settled on ketchup sandwiches, with a few taps of ground pepper to spice things up. I could not have happier to sit down to an after-school plate of cut-up raw potatoes slathered in salt.
In college and then living on my own, I made do. In my Las Vegas house where I live alone, I keep the cleanest stove and oven on God’s green earth. Both are used about as much as my wife’s curling iron in the bottom bathroom drawer.
And this suburban homeowner does not own a backyard grill.
Nope, never have. Never will.
Too much bloody work, if you ask me.
Let me whip up some leftovers, or a quick salad.
No greens in the refrigerator, you say?
Then I’ll settle (happily) for that old standby, the stalwart PJ sandwich.
And fat Vlassic dill pickles. Love ‘em. Can’t get enough of ‘em.
And yet I am not a total slobola. I never order out for pizza. And I’d rather get caught in a gay swinger’s party or weekend traffic school than in any fast food restaurant.
No, there’s another word for me, maybe more than one, as my wife is quick to remind me.
Like lazy.
Or shiftless. Snoozy. A laggard. Remiss.
But I was a happy kitchen slug, perfectly content with my unimaginative meal choices. Homer Simpson with a knife and fork.
Then came COVID-19.
And I made the fateful decision to drive to the San Francisco Bay Area and live with my wife for a few months.
I actually suspect that my wife even likes the kitchen.
At least she doesn’t have any Clockwork Orange fear-and-loathing of the room, as I do.
She’ll be hard at work at the dining room table, engrossed in her finance industry labors, when she’ll suddenly stop and say, “Huh! Maybe I should start cooking dinner!”
I have had that impulse, like, never.
OK, my stomach growls and I sate an urge, but those animal needs are never graced by two adult-and-civilized words such as “cooking” and “dinner.”
Perhaps this strange behavior comes to my wife through culture and instinct.
She knows she has a mouth to feed (mine) and her own mother set a fine example when my wife was growing up.
Mama cooked under pressure. Her husband and son were fussy eaters. To this day, she can taste a dish at some specialty restaurant and announce, “I can make this.”
Every one of her meals is made from scratch in her galley kitchen and involves at least five dishes.
You never leave Mama’s table hungry.
They say such talents usually skip a generation and this is partially true in our family. My wife’s younger sister is also an accomplished cook.
As for my wife, she’s like a student who gets straight Bs in her classes while never studying for the test. She could get As as an imaginative chef (and often does), it’s just not that important to her.
She’s not driven to cook, but performs in a pinch.
As the Chinese saying goes, when it comes to the kitchen, my wife is the third beauty in the village.
The other night, I heard her on the telephone with her mother.
Mama always wants to know how her eldest daughter is feeding me, whether she’s continuing to make my favorite dishes.
And my wife does work wonders.
Her kitchen rules are simple: Let’s get this over with quickly. And when she brings the food to the table — with me there, waiting, panting like Pavlov’s dog — she always performs the same ritual.
She pauses to take pictures.
It’s not for my benefit — oh no, far from it.
She posts these snapshots among her friends like she’s trading baseball cards.
She calls it her ongoing cooking blog, insists that she’s documenting her life.
Whatever.
As long as the food doesn’t get cold.
Which it does, sometimes.
My role has so far been to set the table.
I have offered to do the dishes, but she refuses. She doesn’t like the way I sloppily store them in the dishwasher to dry. Or she’s later found soap stains or (Yikes!) hardened flecks of dried food on the put-away dishes.
Who, me? (I call it the bachelor wash).
Quick, but not necessarily efficient.
So my job come dinner-time is to just stay out of her way.
And that I can do.
But lately she has begun to challenge me.
She’ll poke me on the couch, stirring me from some creative slumber, and assign me to go online and find a good recipe for cooking, say, flank steaks or lobster rolls.
Then we walk through the preparation and cooking process together.
And you know what, it’s not too bad.
Heck, it’s even fun.
And there’s also a certain reward to eating a meal you spent time cooking yourself.
It’s like riding your road bike up the hill to view a tourist attraction instead going the easy route and taking the bus to the top with all the other lard asses.
Will I start to get imaginative in the kitchen when I resume my solitary life in Vegas?
Lord, no.
But I’m on my best behavior here.
I eat what is put on my plate.
And I give my wife the usual heartfelt compliment.
“Five-Star,” I’ll say, reaching for my toothpick.
Right out of Wolfgang’s kitchen.
And we’re both happy.
My wife will smile, satisfied that she’s delivered another appetizing home-cooked meal.
And I get to skip doing the dishes.
Burp.
