On Sharing a Kitchen

Girlfriend is a real lose cannon in the kitchen. We can have a tub of cottage cheese in our refrigerator for two years, and it doesn’t bother her—nor me for that matter. But when we run out of room, and she decides to throw a few things away, she doesn’t look at dates on the cartons. She doesn’t open the carton and look at what’s inside. She just guesses. This is why I ate my lunch today without the French Onion dip that I bought a couple of days ago and had looked forward to all morning. That cottage cheese is still there, by the way.

Of the two of us, the kitchen is usually my job. She does an occasional load of dishes or cooks a frozen pizza, but I do the real cooking—with good reason. Girlfriend never had the joy of working in a restaurant, which was my first job after high school. She’s never been married. My first husband taught me to cook the things he liked. He was a Kentuckian and liked fried potatoes, split peas, cornbread, organ meat, and gravy. I had two children in my second marriage, and for more years than I like to count, I cooked and cleaned for a family of four. I’m kind of a George Patton of the kitchen. I’ve actually been in the trenches. And I think I know everything.

For example: I know better than to cut a head of lettuce with a knife. I think I’ve always known this. I have this fuzzy image of the day of my birth. I come out of the darkness to a room full of people in white, and I am laid across my mother’s belly, and she strokes my brow and says, "Welcome to the world, baby girl. Always remember, if you cut a head of lettuce with a knife you’ll end up throwing most of it away. Tear it with your hands. It will last forever"—or something like that. I’ve told Girlfriend how to clean a head of lettuce. All you have to do is tap the core of the lettuce on the counter smartly. Then turn it over and the core lifts right out. I like to let water run in the hole and then drain it. I think it makes the leftovers crisper. Anyway, then you put both thumbs in the hole and tear the lettuce apart. If you cut it, the cut place turns brown. This is not rocket science. It has something to do with the laws of nature, I think. Okay, I admit I have my flaws in other areas. I leave my curling iron on for days (this drives girlfriend nuts because electricity costs money—but so does lettuce).

Anyway, getting back to the refrigerator, eating leftovers is not on Girlfriend’s radar screen. I don’t care much for them either, but I’ve raised kids—I’ve been poor . . . . So usually the things that take up a lot of room in our refrigerator are leftovers. Don’t ask me why we can’t cut out the middle-man and dump them right after our meal. I usually leave them in the frig until I have room for an extra casserole dish in the dishwasher, then down the garbage disposal the stuff goes. The next big space taker is vegetables. I am always telling myself I would lose weight if I ate raw vegetables. So I buy vegetables with the best intentions. But when it’s time to eat them, I don’t want them. I’ve actually had some celery sit in the vegetable crisper so long that it turned into brown liquid (looked a little like coffee, if you want the details). I don’t use those drawers anymore for that reason. But Girlfriend doesn’t worry. She’ll fill them up and forget what’s in there. You know how there are some things you just don’t want to know? I NEVER open those drawers.

There are only certain pan’s I’ll let her use. I know this sounds cliché, but she even burns water. She turns the electric burner so high the coil turns bright orange, and then sets a pan of water on it and leaves the room. In fact, I can always tell if she’s been cooking when I come home, because the house smells like it’s been on fire. The other night I was in the family room watching a basketball game and girlfriend was puttering around in the laundry room. At half time I went up to the kitchen to get a soda and I discovered a pan of tea that had been boiling for so long that there was only about an inch of water left. I didn’t tell her she was going to kill us all because when I say things like that she claims I open a door for them. But the woman shouldn’t be left alone in a house with a functioning stove.

Don’t get me wrong. She’s a good woman and I love her and I want to keep her. We’ve actually worked a lot of things out. We know we have to have the kind of coffee maker that shuts itself off. I don’t talk about her stack of stuff in the dining room, including 20 pound bags of birdseed that nets us 40 pounds of bird excrement on our deck every winter, and she doesn’t say anything about the stacks of books, mail and hot curlers on the dining room table. These are the kinds of things old couples work out over the years. It may not come out exactly even, but for all the meals I’ve cooked, she’s treated me to countless meals in restaurants over the last several years. And I suppose if I don’t get French onion dip for my lunch it won’t kill me. Like my mother used to tell me—after the stuff about the lettuce—there are people in Africa that go to bed every night without French Onion dip.