Day 169: I Think I Need a Wife

I am attempting to flex my domestic muscles and am finding that they don’t really exist. I guess it’s true that if you do not work out your muscles regularly they will atrophy. Last week I cleaned my entire apartment top to bottom including organizing all dressers, closets, etc. Today I sat down with a ambitious plan to sort through cookbooks and recipes and to make a weekly meal plan for at least the first two weeks after the husband is home. After several hours of noting recipes, the only progress I’ve made is to clean out much of my fridge (recipes make you hungry) and to obliterate the previously clean and organized living room.

I’m not sure how those of you who cook regularly manage. Planning is something I love to do, but when it comes to eating, I’m a primitive creature (see Blog 1??) and prefer to eat what I’m craving not what was planned out a week earlier. Besides that, how do you shop for a week at a time? How do you keep your plan, ingredients and recipes organized? None of this makes sense to me. I like to shop on a daily basis and make whatever is fresh. The problem with that is that fresh ingredients are pricey and markets in suburban cities do not sell small portions of ingredients. I go to the store, buy groceries to cook for one or two meals, then most of it goes bad because I’m not cooking for a family, I’m cooking for me or me plus one.

Maybe I don’t have the domestic gene. My Mother was a obsessive cleaner and cook, but she had a stable of recipes she tended to rotate every couple of weeks. I prefer to utilize one of my hundred cookbooks for new and interesting meals, but interesting requires specialized ingredients and specialized does not lend itself to multiple meals. More than anything, I’m just not that enamored with the fact that you have to keep doing these things over and over again. I mean I cleaned. I deep cleaned and organized and now, a few days later it needs to be cleaned again. You cook and do the dishes and clean up your mess and then the next night you’re hungry again and the process starts all over.

I’m a good dialer. I like to order take out and when I lived in the city, everyplace delivers. You can get McDonald’s, pot, liquor, and a gourmet meal right to your doorstep. I never ordered the first two, so that was kind of a waste, but it’s comforting to know it’s available. At 36 I keep waiting on the desire to keep a clean house and cook on a daily basis to hit me, but I just don’t think it’s going to. I wonder if most people do these things solely because they have kids? Maybe if I had little creatures that needed cleanliness and nutritious home-cooked meals I’d be less inclined to ignore the clutter and eat on the fly. Guess I’ll never find out, because I have a firm “no creature” policy in my place. Tomorrow I’m ordering sushi, stupid kids can’t even eat raw fish, what’s their problem anyway?