I’m married to a pretty low maintenance sort of guy, which has many advantages. For instance, I can server him just about anything for dinner and he won’t complain. Now I could, of course, take advantage of that, be a compete and utter lazy person, and just serve him a bowl of cereal for dinner but I don’t. The reason I don’t is because I enjoy cooking and eating.
That also means it’s rare that I’ll cook something I don’t like. For instance, you will never, ever find me serving liver. I don’t care if it’s Frank’s absolute favorite food in the world. Sorry but it just isn’t going to happen. Not only can I not stand the smell or taste of it, I can’t even look at it.
Over the past 23 years of married life, I have come to learn what things Frank doesn’t like to eat. One thing he doesn’t like, to my great sorrow, is mixing seafood with pasta. No spaghetti with clam sauce or crab sauce. No fettuccini alfredo with shrimp. The only way I get any of that is if I order it out.
Last week I made penne ala vodka. To make it a little more interesting, I threw in some pancetta (Italian bacon) and some grated mozzarella. Frank rarely sees the actual process of cooking, just the end results. When I served that to him, he asked, “What is this in here? Shrimp?”
“Uh, honey? You don’t like pasta with seafood. That’s mozzarella and pancetta.”
I did take a look at the suspected shrimp and I guess if you have really bad vision and dim lighting, I suppose it sorta looked like a shrimp.
And the moral to this story is this: Don’t serve something good for dinner when your husband gets home from work at 10 p.m., after spending 12 hours in work plus an hour & a half traveling each way - because he’ll be so damn tired, he won’t know what the heck he’s eating.
