Cooking is hard. What is a tablespoon?

Cooking is hard, especially if you live with a foodie, part-time master chef.

Where to start? Yes, I can boil water; at least, I think I can. I don’t follow a recipe, but I have heard the rumbling from the tea kettle and witnessed turbulent waters in the pot before I killed lobstahs.

I also do a fine job of throwing dead animal carcasses onto a searing grill. I very rarely create leather out of the slabs of redness. I have learned that meat continues to cook even after taking off the grill.

Oh yea, I can do a nice omelette. I enjoy mixing in a variety of flavors and contents when creating a breakfast start me up. Some of favorites; pesto sauce, salsa, cheeses, spices with a kick, Cholula sauce, vegetables and other culinary treats.

I can do pancakes.

And to conclude with my culinary resume, when I first got married I would make apple pies each fall, making my crust from scratch.

If this sounds like I can manage around the kitchen, I am not sure about that. I have closely observed my wife and other talented individuals in the kitchen and I quickly think, “How do they do that?” I feel like an extreme amateur. Let me emphasize the point with these analogies. I am the neighborhood walker compared to a Mt. Everest climber, I am the high school student struggling writer compared to an accomplished novelist. I am a Cub Scout to a Navy Seal. Get the point on how I feel?

Another example of the difference between a foodie and me. Recently, I learned from my daughter how to make a sweet potato bowl (Basically, a creamy, delicious, smoothy like recipe. I love it!). The first step was to bake the sweet potatoes. When my daughter showed me, we used a casserole dish. For the unaware this pottery has sides and was good at keeping the cut-in-half tubers facing up. I was able to go-solo and have made the dish twice – yea for me. However, during a recent time to make another batch I lamented out loud that I would have to use two dishes because I had more sweet potatoes.

My foodie wife said, “Why not use a baking tray?”

“Because they would roll over” I replied.

Without skipping a beat and delivering her response like she was saying the sky is blue, she said “Then, why don’t you slice off a small piece on the other side of them so they lay flat?”

Why didn’t I think of that? I have so much more to learn.