If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon

by Jenna McCarthy

  Because I didn’t exactly relish the hours I spent slaving over the proverbial hot stove, I tried to minimize them by cooking in bulk. I’d buy twenty-pound turkeys for our little family of four (only two of whom actually had full sets of teeth), stuff as many meatballs into the Crock-Pot as it would hold, bake a dozen potatoes at once. I wouldn’t just make enchilada pie, I’d make four enchilada pies! My theory was that if we could live off leftovers for a few days at a stretch, I could whittle my time in the kitchen down to a reasonable two or three evenings a week.

  What I failed to factor into my brilliant plan was the fact that Joe doesn’t like leftovers. Actually, that’s not technically true. He likes leftovers, he just prefers to eat them all on the first night you cook them.

  “Take this away from me,” he’ll say, pushing the serving bowl toward me.

  “Just stop eating,” I reply.

  “I can’t,” he says with a shrug, pulling the serving bowl back toward himself.

  “Are you still hungry?” I ask him, this time reaching for the bowl myself.

  “Actually, I’m stuffed.” He groans, leaning back and rubbing his annoyingly flat abdomen for effect.

  “Then stop eating,” I growl.

  “Wish I could,” he replies sadly, dumping the entirety of tomorrow night’s dinner on his plate.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  I have never heard someone chew a sandwich the way my husband

  does. I promise that you have heard it from your home and you were

  probably thinking to yourself, Gosh, what is that sound? It’s my husband

  eating a PB&J. Every time he does this, I instantly think of the look on

  Nick Lachey’s face in the first season of Newlyweds when Jessica Simpson

  asks if it’s chicken or tuna. I firmly believe his sandwich sounds are

  the reason I have lines on my forehead, because I make that face every

  single time.

  AMANDA

  Worst of all would be when he would walk in the door at the end of the day with a grocery bag, because invariably—and I am talking roughly 127 percent of the time here—it would contain nothing but beer.

  “Would it ever occur to you to call me and tell me you were stopping at the store and ask if we needed anything?” I’d rage. At any given time I have no fewer than four different shopping lists going, one each for the farmer’s market, the “regular” grocery store, Costco, and the super expensive mostly organic specialty market. And even when I go to each of these places, I forget stuff all the time, even stuff that was on my stupid list! I don’t care if you saw me unloading $600 worth of consumables just this very morning; the odds are that we still need something. And even if we don’t, I’m going to make you pick up something heavy—like the thirty-two-pound tub of kitty litter or a case of water bottles—just to make it worth your while.

  It was a long and exceptionally random string of events that finally led to my kitchen salvation. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it began when I was pregnant with my first daughter and we bought a new house that happened to have a pool. It was a balmy ninety-nine degrees the day of the open house, and that pool glistened like a cartoon hero’s oversized front tooth. I am fairly certain that if you look up “How to Hook a Sweaty, Hormonal Home Buyer in the Summertime” in any real estate manual, you’ll find a photo of that piece-of-shit, owner-built, godforsaken pool.

  The ballooning hose running nonstop into the corner of the thing should have been a tipoff, but it wasn’t until we got our first $500 water bill that we realized if pools were ships, we had the fucking Titanic docked right in our backyard. Well, we’d just have to get it fixed, that’s all there was to it. Immediately. In a big, fat, pregnant-lady panic I called every pool repair company in a hundred-mile radius and started scheduling estimates. To my horror, after a cursory inspection every single one of them systematically refused to touch the thing.

  “We don’t know when it was built or what it’s made out of or if it even has a proper foundation,” was the general consensus. (To their shared credit, for the price of a fleet of Range Rovers, several were willing to have the existing pool removed and replaced with a brand-new model.) In other words, Good luck with that colossal money-sucking hole in your yard, chubs.

  The bulldozers showed up the next week. I stood in the kitchen, sweat pooling in and around my newly massive cleavage, weeping openly for the floating SkyMall table tennis set I would never have, the legendary water polo parties I’d never host.

  “What about an outdoor kitchen?” Joe asked one night as we stood on the freshly tamped mound of dirt where my overpriced Pottery Barn double-wide lounge chair was supposed to go. You know how they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach? I’m thinking a knife to the chest would be a lot faster.

  “Ooh, just what I always wanted,” I said with an extra dose of sarcasm. “Two kitchens!”

  “Jenna, you know I love to barbecue,” he replied. “I’d totally cook all the time if we had a kitchen outside.”

  I didn’t believe him for a second, but he had some compelling arguments. First of all, our inside kitchen sort of sucked, so this would make life better for both of us. Second, if we built a kitchen instead of putting in another pool, I wouldn’t have to play neighborhood lifeguard, which—now that it was a little cooler outside—sounded like a relief. In the end I negotiated an al fresco fireplace in exchange for a beer tap, and the whole thing sounded way better than the current dirt pit I was tired of looking at, frankly. It’s all about resale value, I justified to myself. If I wound up getting an occasional cheeseburger or veggie kabob out of the deal, it would be one of those unexpected little delights of life, like finding that something you were already going to buy is on sale, or discovering one last Tic Tac stuck to the inside lid of the box when you thought it was empty and you were desperately craving one and a half calories of minty freshness.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  I call him the food economist. This has nothing to do with nutrition or

  finances or cooking. No, it is all about the way he eats his food. No

  matter what he eats, he plans it out in his mind so that each item on

  his plate is eaten in one of two ways, and which way depends on how

  much he is enjoying his meal. For instance, if he loves everything on

  the plate (say a nice rib eye, potatoes au gratin, and grilled asparagus),

  he will eat everything in unison, rotating bites of each but maintaining

  the exact proportionate quantities of each so that his last bite may

  include all elements of his dinner, or at least, so he can then decide

  which to eat last. It’s maddening. Sometimes I have to reach over and

  grab that last mushroom just to fuck with his organization.

  ELIZABETH

  Within a year’s time we had a new baby and a new kitchen.

  “What do you want me to cook tonight?” Joe would ask eagerly several nights a week, the picture of the helpful, enlightened superdad.

  “Something, anything, I don’t care,” I’d mutter resentfully. I know, he was offering to cook and I should have been grateful, but I wasn’t. I was a ravenous nursing cow, and here we were with two kitchens and I was still having to make the dreaded call on what we were going to eat for dinner. Only now I had to do it balancing a squirming newborn on my padded, postbaby hip while yellowish milk dripped from my nipples. (Forget the condom talk. This is the image they should show in high school sex ed classes.)

  For a while this was how it worked: I’d shop for all of the food and assemble the day’s menu. An hour or so before dinnertime, I would hand Joe a platter containing a hunk of the marinated animal flesh du jour, then proceed to sauté the veggies, toss the salad, boil the requisite starch, assemble the necessary condiments, fold the napkins, set the table, and dole out an assortment of beverages. Proudly manning a shiny variety of high-tech appl
iances with a frosty draft beer in hand, Joe would gingerly lay the meat onto the hot grill (five to thirty seconds, ranging from a single small pork loin to multiple chicken breasts or some nice carne asada). For the next ten to forty minutes, he would be free to talk on the phone, check his e-mail, watch a few snippets of the news, catch some ESPN highlights, or play with the kids until it was time to “check the meat” (fifteen seconds). He might have to repeat this burdensome inspection phase two or three more times (thirty to forty-five seconds) before it was officially time to remove the cooked flesh from the flame (ten seconds) and carry it to the table (twenty-five seconds).

  Make no mistake: If I sound like a bitter, miserable hag as I reminisce about this time period in our marriage, it’s because I was a bitter, miserable hag during this time period in our marriage . I may have tried to hide it—I genuinely can’t recall if I had any will at all at the time—but even on a good day, I am sure my miserable hagness was never far from the surface. Like many modern-day moms, I was working, shouldering approximately 98 percent of the new-baby burden, keeping up the house, sleeping an average of two hours a night, and still trying to fulfill what I felt were my wifely duties (provide sex and dinner, mainly). So while he was “helping” with dinner, Joe’s total time contribution to any meal averaged about two minutes and five seconds, and that’s being patently generous. If you factored in the time I spent doing related meal-preparation minutiae like circling the grocery store looking for a parking spot, comparing prices, reading ingredient lists, waiting for the ninety-eight-year-old lady in front of me to painstakingly write out her goddamned check and record it in the accompanying check register (Dear God, why? I mean, I know she has nowhere to go and nothing to do, but does she have to bring me down, too?), cruising the neighborhood for an hour because the kid had fallen asleep on the way home and she needed her nap so there was no other choice, loading and unloading the groceries, and searching online for recipe substitutions when I opened the lid on the sour cream container to find a mass of furry blue goop where creamy white deliciousness should have been, let’s just say it’s pretty clear who was doing the lion’s share of the work. (Ahem. Roar.) Compounding my agony was the fact that my friends, my mother, my stepmom, and one very envious sister constantly, woefully bemoaned how “lucky I was” all the flipping time because my husband “cooked.” I began to think they should congratulate me on how much “money I’d made” each time I traipsed down to the bank to deposit my beloved’s latest paycheck.

  “Most guys don’t cook at all,” Joe would argue if I dared to suggest he step up his efforts a notch or two.

  As much as I hated to admit it, he sort of had me there. Still, I wasn’t about to let him off the hook.

  “Big deal,” I’d huff. “Most women don’t work and take care of the kids and keep the house as immaculate as I do!” So there!

  “Yeah, but you’re the only one who cares about the house being immaculate,” he’d point out with an annoying combination of accuracy and matter-of-factness.

  It was usually right around this point that I would come to my senses and realize that things were never going to change, so I’d better learn to just suck it up and be grateful for whatever measly contribution I could get. The vocalization of this highly evolved sort of epiphany usually sounded something like this: “Oh my God I fucking hate you and I am totally not ever doing your stupid laundry or shopping for goddamned groceries again EVER so good luck with that, jackass!”

  Of course that was a total pack of lies, and I kept doing the stupid laundry and the goddamned grocery shopping and the hateful, mind-numbing meal planning because apparently I was the only one who cared about a clean house and also not getting scurvy. (True story: When I met Joe, the only food in his house was a twenty-pound bag of pierogies. If you’re like I was and have no idea what a pierogi is, picture a potato-filled ravioli dumpling, your basic nutrient-free, white flour gut-bomb. Purchased in bulk, the lowly pierogi may be the one convenience food that is even cheaper than and inferior to ramen noodles.)

  This is where my story of culinary deliverance takes on an ironic edge Alanis Morissette would appreciate. If you recall, we now had two kitchens merely because what I originally felt was my home’s most compelling feature turned out to be a mirage. To my great disdain I continued to serve as the primary kitchen wench—until the fortuitous day that Joe discovered the convergence of food and television in the form of the Food Network. I wasn’t there when it happened, but imagine how you’d feel if you discovered that two of your favorite things in the world—like petit fours and pedicures, or Dancing with the Stars and dirty martinis—had somehow been rolled into a delicious model of one-stop shopping. Talk about televangelism!

  I didn’t even notice it at first, because as I may have mentioned, I don’t watch much TV. But one day I was scrolling through the TiVo lineup looking for something to occupy the girls and I noticed a bunch of strange titles: Boy Meets Grill. Throwdown with Bobby Flay. 30-Minute Meals. Diners, Driveins and Dives.

  “I saw a bunch of cooking shows scheduled on the TiVo thingy,” I mentioned casually later that day. “Do you watch any of those?”

  “Sometimes, a little, I don’t know, yeah,” Joe stammered. He sounded guilty, like I was his mom and I was grilling him—so to speak—about the baggie full of funny-smelling parsley I found in his jacket pocket.

  Relieved that the only breasts he was ogling after I went to bed belonged to dead chickens, I let it go. Then my birthday rolled around.

  Joe likes to wrap presents in newspaper. To be extra ironic, he likes to wrap my presents in the sports pages. Anyhow, as I tore through a piece about our local high school football team, I very nearly went into early cardiac arrest when it became clear that I was now the proud owner of the latest Williams-Sonoma cookbook, simply titled Grilling. If the steak on the cover had been a man, it would have been Hugh Jackman, his bronzed body dewy with sweat and wearing nothing but a smile. My mouth immediately started to water. But really? A fucking cookbook?

  “I know what you’re probably thinking,” Joe said, rushing to preempt my disappointment. “But I am going to make everything in that book for you. Every week I want you to pick something new and I’ll make it. And shop for all of the ingredients. And clean it all up.”

  For once, I was speechless. I didn’t even screw it up by pointing out the still unfair six-to-one weekly division of labor. I gushed and fawned appropriately, and proceeded to dog-ear the pages of the most delectable-looking recipes. Something is always better than nothing, I reminded myself. And those scallop and mushroom brochettes better rock my little world.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  My husband makes these gross things I call “scrumples” where he

  crumples a napkin at the end of a meal and sometimes blows his nose

  in it and sometimes even kind of wipes his tongue with it if he has

  snotty mucus. I hate it. He leaves the crumpled napkin on his dirty

  plate. If he hadn’t cooked the meal (he’s a chef)—and he does cook

  every meal—it would be grounds for divorce or a Lorena Bobbitt move

  at the very least. I hate the scrumples but I love him.

  DIANA

  Before long I noticed that Joe was cooking—or at least, contributing to the cooking—more than once a week. A lot more than once, in fact. I started to get cocky, even grocery shopping without a list. As long as I bought some sort of meat, he could figure out what to do with it and make it taste good. The positive impact of this skill on our marriage truly cannot be overstated. The kids became so accustomed to our tag-team efforts in the kitchen that rarely did we enjoy a meal without having some version of this conversation:

  Kids: “Who made the steak?”

  Us: “Daddy did.”

  Kids: “Who made the asparagus?”

  Us: “Mommy did.”

  Kids: “Who made the rice?”

  Us: “We made it together.”


  And that’s pretty much how it worked. Until one night, something funny happened: I made a casserole. There was nothing inherently amusing about the casserole, but the conversation that followed was one for the books.

  Kids: “Who made the chicken?”

  Us: “Mommy did.”

  Kids: “And who made the noodles?”

  Us: “Mommy did.”

  Kids: “But . . . then who made the broccoli?”

  Us: “Actually, Mommy made that, too.”

  They looked at each other, then back at us, not for one moment buying this preposterous story.

  “Mom, you can’t make a whole dinner all by yourself,” my six-year-old finally blurted.

  “Yeah!” her four-year-old sister agreed, as if that settled it and we were just a pair of liars in cahoots.

  Was this really happening? Did those years and years and years and years of doing all of the miserable grunt work by myself mean nothing to the little ingrates I had birthed? Did they really think that I was incapable of pulling off a simple supper without their father’s help?

  “Actually, it’s not that I can’t make an entire dinner by myself,” I finally replied. “I just don’t usually want to.” As understatements go, that may have been the mack daddy. But at least I’d gotten across the message that I was relinquishing some of the cooking by choice and not out of incompetence.