I know how to mince garlic. And stuff.

I frequently say that I can’t cook. I don’t like cooking. Nah, my sister cooks and I’m the baker. I’m a rotten cook. If you don’t get food poisoning from my cooking, you should call it a victory.

Only… I’ve been thinking.

And that’s not really true.

When I was younger, I cooked all the time. When I was a teenager, my specialty was pepper steak (ah, back when I loooooved red meat). Tender strips of beef marinated in a soy sauce, ginger and garlic (and other stuff I can’t remember because THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO), tossed with lots of beautiful red, green and yellow peppers and strips of onion and served over a bed of steamy rice, and you know what?

It was good.

And I imagine I lost my love for cooking when it became mandatory. Being a grownup is stupid sometimes. Isn’t it the way of the world – if I want to do something, it’s great – but if you tell me I have to? I’m going to drag my feet and whine and gripe about it.

And so goes my feelings about cooking.

When you start having to tailor your menu around the palates of others instead of simply your own, sometimes you end up cooking things you’re not wild about. Conventional parenting magazine “wisdom” says, cook what you want, serve what you want, don’t be a short order cook, if your kids don’t eat, they don’t eat and there’s always the next meal… THEY’LL BE FINE.

Okay, maybe so.

But in the meantime, after I’ve worked hard, prepared a meal that they hate, I get commentary like:

Ew.

That’s gross.

I don’t want that.

What is IN THAT ANYWAY?

And frankly, after you’ve spent twenty minutes (or, most likely, more) slaving over a hot stove to put a meal on the table that the whole family will enjoy – negative feedback is NOT FUN.

And I avoid it.

But I flip through food magazines and I pull recipes out and I file them in binders and I drool over pictures of these spice-laden main dish meals and think to myself, Wow. Now THAT would be good. I never make 75% of the recipes I save.

I’m not inept in the kitchen and I need to stop saying I am. While I am truly passionate about baking (who complains about brownies? Um, NOBODY, that’s who) and I’m pretty decent at it, I’m not a rotten cook. It’s time for me to stop saying that I can’t cook.

I can.

Just… I’m the only one who likes my cooking.

Hm.

Maybe I should just blame their palates: My cooking is great, it’s just that they don’t know any better.

Uh. Yeah.