***Have Wok/Will Travel

Departing the “Single/Never Married” demographic group and entering the “Married” category didn’t occur for me until I was one month shy of my 36th birthday. This tidbit holds importance for two reasons: I dated for 18 years before meeting my wife, and I can honestly say I was ready to marry when the big day arrived. There’s a somewhat puzzling dynamic present within these two stages of my life, and I wonder how many 50 plus males join me in laying claim to this incongruity…during my dating years, I would often cook dinner at home for my “female companions”, while my married years have produced a notable dearth of kitchen activity on my part.

Inviting a woman home for dinner only occurred after we had enjoyed a few “standard” dates (going-out for dinners, drinks, movies, and shows) and reached a level of comfort and trust with one another. I had take
Chinese cooking lessons in the evening at a township-sponsored course for adults for this very purpose. Wok cooking was relatively simple yet appeared fairly impressive; as long as I stuck to two or three tried-and-true recipes, I was master of my domain. Ethnic-style cooking only added to the aura of the evening.

A “time-out” is called for here; if you think I was cooking just to highlight my creative side, you’d be mistaken. If you think the effort was solely meant to underscore my growing feelings for the lady, you’d be half-right. I was also hoping the effort of preparing an exotic home-cooked meal presented under candlelight ignited the ultimate aphrodisiac…in other words, ”exotica for erotica.” Hey, if any of you guys are shaking your heads about now, you can quit kidding yourselves; admit it, many of you have tried the same…but as long as you remained a gentleman throughout the evening, couching this ulterior motive in thought only was basically harmless.

Flash forward through the past twenty-one years and you can count on two hands how many dinners I’ve prepared for my wife. I’m not even daring to count preparing simple pasta meals or being the self-proclaimed BBQ grill-master of the household; I’m referring to preparing a full-blown dinner from scratch. I do my share of the dishes and other clean-up chores, but for some reason, I have ceased to don the apron. I have a good friend named Frank, deservedly proud of his Italian heritage, who is a whiz at exhibiting a passion for cooking that would make his kinfolk proud. A sit-down at one of his (and wife Ina’s) dinners is akin to passing through the gates of Italian food heaven. My only problem is that my dessert many times consists of guilt topped with a layer of shame from a lack of similar effort on my part at home.

Don’t kid yourselves guys; take-out doesn’t count either in lessening the cooking load for your better half. At most, it grants you a day off from addressing the issue. But you’ll please excuse me if I don’t think about that now, I have to run out and pick-up the Chinese for dinner…

-Neal