That's a Wrap

When you’ve been married as long as we have, (35 years last May) you are often asked questions by young newlyweds seeking your wise counsel about how to ensure a successful marriage.

Here’s a tidbit of advice: try not to surprise your partner with three new food items in one meal.

A new recipe once in a while, O.K. Three or four over the course of a month or even a week, fine. But three in one meal? No fair.

Normally, I think I am on fairly solid ground around here as far as my cooking goes. In 35 years, I can only think of a handful of occasions when my cooking hasn’t been edible. I think that’s remarkable considering that dinners to date exceed 12 thousand, or so. I feel quite lucky that I married a man who appreciates my skills in the kitchen, especially as it is my absolute joy at the end of the day to make a nice meal. So what went wrong last night? I have no idea. The chicken in the ad on TV looked so good.

Have you seen this ad? A cheerful young mom wins smiles and admiration from her beautiful kids and handsome hubby for slathering mayonnaise over chicken breasts and sprinkling them with parmesan cheese, whereupon she sends them to the oven where they get bubbly and brown and juicy. Slam dunk, right? Wrong. They were terrible! They were totally gross.

For a side dish, I tried a new recipe featuring Butternut squash and Shitake mushrooms. I had seen it in a magazine that I picked up at the chiropractor’s and asked the receptionist to photocopy it for me, it looked that good! It wasn’t! It was terrible! Heavy and dense. Those mushrooms and that squash had no business being together in a dish. Neither of us found this one tasty and we held our ritual tearing up of the recipe after dinner.

I had high hopes for the oven-fried potatoes. They nearly jumped out of the freezer case at the grocery and hopped right into my cart! The packaging was so pretty! They looked positively gourmet. The label said, “Tossed Lightly in Olive Oil, Rosemary and Garlic.” I thought, “Yum.” Yum, right? Wrong! They were terrible! They were the driest old potato wedges ever eaten in the whole entire history of potato wedges. It was like biting into the cardboard box they came in. But, clearly batting 3 for 3, I wasn’t going to admit I didn’t like them.

You didn’t like your dinner, dear?” I asked, innocently.

“You know I love your cooking, but to be honest, tonight has not been one of your good ones,” replied the hubster.

“Didn’t you like the potatoes?”

“They’re ghastly.”

“Oh, you’re exaggerating! No they’re not!”

“Those potatoes are as dry as dust. They’re as arid as Arizona. They’re as dehydrated as dryer lint.  They’re like eating sheet rock.”

“But they’re gourmet! The packaging was so attractive! Well, I liked them.”

I was lying.

We both took solace for the bad meal in apples for dessert. Riley, our Golden Retriever, followed us to the kitchen after dinner when we cleaned up. He sat beside the dishwasher, hoping for a morsel of whatever left over he might get. I looked at him and hesitated for a second. I held out a potato wedge in front of his nose. He sniffed it and turned his head away. That tells you a lot.

So, tips to newlyweds: After you’ve been married 35 years, you can take some risks. But for now try to limit your impulses for “surprise-in-a-dish” to only  every once in a while. Take warning from a couple we knew when we first got married; divorced over refrigerator crescent roll wiener wraps. And that’s not a euphemism.