Cooking Lessons

When I met Alan the first time 23 years ago, he was 17 years old and I was 19. One of the things that impressed me the most was his independence and ability to take care of himself and those around him. At that young age, he was already completely self sufficient and had learned many of the life skills that I had yet to acquire.

The first time I went to his immaculate apartment for dinner,(he was already an amazing house keeper and still is), he made me the best fajitas I had ever had in my life. I grew up in Austin and had definitely tasted more than my share of the regional cuisine. So how was it that this native Californian who had spent most of his formative years in Chicago knew instinctively how to create melt in your mouth beef fajitas that I can still taste almost a quarter of a century later?

I was raised by a gourmet cook. My mother truly has the gift of creativity and perfection in the kitchen. My sisters Betsy and Laura both inherited this gene in spades while culinary know how seems entirely absent from my DNA. Don't get me wrong, I can put food together that doesn't cause illness and sometimes even borders on tasting good, but I am not patient by nature which true cooking unfortunately requires.

When Alan and I began this incarnation of our relationship I decided that I was going to change this. By God, I was going to get into the kitchen and create such mouthwatering sensations that HE would remember almost 25 years later. But he has a hard time staying out of the kitchen when cooking is going on, and invariably he would say kindly "Have you tried...? when I was in the middle of making vegetarian lasagna or even something as simple as pancakes.

At first his offers of help just made me mad. "I can do this on my own!" I would exclaim like a petulant two year old. But by and by I had to admit that his suggestions did make sense and improved my cooking immensely. The most humbling lesson came when I was making him a birthday cake for his 40th last fall.I was making everything completely from scratch including a kind of frosting that I had never tried. He had promised to stay out of the kitchen and let me do it by myself.

But the frosting wasn't thickening. Instead of stiff peaks of chocolate, mine looked more like concave puddles. I hated to admit it, but I needed some help. He gently showed me how to add just the right ingredients to make it the right consistency and saved his own birthday cake. I was glad the cake survived, but humiliated that I hadn't been able to wow him with my skill. I am pretty sure I even cried a little.

As we have spent more time in the kitchen together, I have come to value his help. Cooking is one of the every day things that we really enjoy doing together and I have decided that I would rather humble myself and actually learn than be stubborn and have dripping cake frosting.

As I am sure anyone who has every been in a military partnership can attest to, it is the every day things that really mean the most when you are fortunate enough to share the same time zone and physical space. Months apart during the year infuse the mundane things of life such as making coffee in the morning, sharing stories about your day, and of course, cooking with a kind of inexplicable magic.

Alan is going to be deployed soon. It goes without saying that I will miss him beyond belief and I am not looking forward to the yawning chasm of time and distance before us. But I have determined that I am going to keep cooking while he is gone and continue that learning process. I look forward to many more experiences in the kitchen together when he returns.

This partnership has definitely caused me to see more deeply the wisdom in the Zen "all we have is this moment" way of thinking. I know that I don't truly have the guarantee of more cooking lessons from him in the future, although I pray with everything in me that it is so. But I have today. And today he has promised to teach me how to make real butter cream frosting. Yum. I can't wait for the lesson.