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.

baker, baker baking a cake
make me a day, make me whole again
-Tori Amos

When I was a teenager, I once upset my grandmother by refusing a slice of cake. I can’t remember the reason – was I simply not hungry, was I in one of my “I don’t think I’ll eat today” phases, was it a calorie counting thing, was it a “you want me to eat this and I don’t want to do what you want me to do” thing. Odds are, it was far nothing more calculated than not being hungry – I have and have always had an insane sweet tooth.

But to her, it was an unbearable slight – to her, I hadn’t just rejected her cake but her love, love that she put together with her own two hands. Ingredients that she pulled off the shelf, out of the refrigerator, butter and sugar creamed together for the sole purpose of sharing cake with her grandchildren.

In the speech that I wrote for her funeral I said that food was her love language. I didn’t realize it when I was younger – had I known, perhaps I’d have accepted that slice of cake. I’d have eaten bite after bite, until finally, pressing the tines of my fork to the plate I would have captured every final crumb to savor in my mouth.

I remember when I was young thinking how trivial it was – who gets upset over cake?

And then as I get older, I realize more and more than often it is how I show my care and my concern and my heart is through food.

Not through my cooking – because lord knows, that might put you in the hospital with food poisoning or a terminally bored palate – but I bake.

Like my grandmother, I don’t like to arrive somewhere empty handed.

And when a birthday rolls around, yes, you better believe there will be cake.

Or three.

Unfortunately, in my quests to show my care and my love and heart in the form of a birthday cake – I always have these grand visions. It started on The Princess’s first birthday. I envisioned this tiered cake – smoothed with buttercream frosting, a different color frosting on each layer. Each layer would have a different design – one stripes, one polka dot, and so on.

Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans.

Actually, what DO they say about the best laid plans? I don’t know.

Anyway, which the cake was delectable and every bite was devoured – it was ugly as hell. And even today, years later as I had grand visions of the cupcakes I would make for The Princess’s gymnastics team tomorrow, I muttered and swore and wrapped myself in frustration that my vision wasn’t coming together on that damn cupcake.

As if somehow, perfectly piping those sunflower petals in yellow-orange frosting would show her just how much I love her – would show her how my life has changed since she has been in it. As if this pastry, surely to be gobbled down in three bites could even come close to saying what she means to me and how happy I am to be her mom, and what my world is like with her around.

Not even close.

I scraped off the marred frosting. Smeared a new layer on and doused it with sprinkles. I could never make a cake that tells her how much I love my daughter, but hopefully my words say it often enough that my cake doesn’t have to.

Note: I developed a habit in college of writing with my screen turned off — not really paying attention to the words, just figuring if I could get the words out first, I’d edit them into something coherent later.  So… That’s what I’m doing now. While I can’t turn the screen off (that I know of, I probably can but I’m too lazy to look it up), you’ll basically get a few minutes of brain spew. You’ll see how it is up in that brain of mine – like little hamsters running around all around up in there. It’s scary. Really. Are you ready? Here goes.

***

Sometimes a craving for cake will strike me out of the blue. I don’t even really like cake – but tonight, I was craving cake. Not just something sweet – I’d had a granola bar and was still thinking I needed something a little bit more…cakier… but CAKE. My friend had passed on that Nutella in a coffee mug cake recipe to me the other day. That cake, THAT is going to be the death of me… or the death of being able to fit into my pants.

But yum.

The weather is gray here. I spell gray with an a, gray. Some people don’t. Grey. How do you decide which way you’ll spell it? I prefer it with the a – is it a regional thing? Something that varies by country?

That Nutella cake requires a big glass of milk. Preferably really cold.

I saw a bit of Extreme Couponing tonight. Those people kind of scare me – makes me wonder how much time they spend on the whole coupon thing. All that research and planning? Bleh. And so help me if I ever end up behind one of them in the grocery store. I mean – I wonder, do you just watch the whole process impatient and annoyed or do you feed off their excitement, I wonder. Every clip I saw required the store management to intervene somehow, and I just picture standing in line, twenty minutes later wondering why in the hell anyone needs 58 packages of string cheese at once.

I have a stack of pictures in frames that need to be hung up. It’s been months and I keep framing my favorite shots and I keep stacking the pile higher and yet my photo wall isn’t even started. I can’t pick a wall – isn’t that crazy? In my head, I can visualize what picture I want placed where. I can even tell which pictures I haven’t yet framed but need to – but I have no idea what wall I’m visualizing. Seems like there’s not the space I need in a place where anyone else will see them.

***

Time’s up.

How’s that for random-slash-pointless?