Me, a housewife?

24. April 2006

Well, I don’t think so. Not that I don’t want to, I just seem to be lacking slightly in ability.

I mean I am quite capable of cleaning the house, doing the washing and putting together well-meaning but slightly dubious looking dinners fished out of the freezer. At least the Stud Muffin ate it without too much protest. The worried look on his face must have been due to something else. And I take great pleasure from throwing dinner parties serving a very acceptable taco dinner. And although you might think that tacos are pretty idiot proof I can tell you that it is quite possible to hash it up. Just ask Kay how her ex-boyfriend reacted when he was presented with mince that had that protective piece of paper nicely baked into it. But with her being a vegetarian I suppose she should be let of. It was more disappointing when I went round another friend’s house and was served taco shells that had just been heated in the microwave –and she has two children. Disgraceful.

But before I start bashing my friends’ cooking abilities I will tear apart my own. Well it is not much to say really, because I’m pretty much just terrible. This I think is partially due to lack of training and lack of interest. My idea of dinner is something that takes about ten minutes to put together. Needless to say that does not lead me to the great culinary heights. The only thing I have been known to be able to do semi successfully it is baked goods. But then this week that went wrong too. Not once but three times. The fourth I’d rather forget about.

You see baking really has been my only claim to possessing any cooking abilities. With some real effort and practice I think I might have the potential to fairly good at it. People will think well at least she can bake if nothing else and I can live with that. While I was living and working in Denmark I actually baked quite a lot. I mean what else was there to do, the girl I lived with did not seem to posses any social skills what so ever, the rest of the work force preferred watching TV at home –alone - and I was left with my only real friend being a horse. Not great. I mean I like horses a lot but there are limits to their social skills too, although I think the stallion was fractionally better company than most of my Danish coworkers.

Living in a little Danish farmhouse surrounded by fields, daffodils and a pond with geese it seemed like the only right thing to do. So I baked. The few hours I had left in the day after the horses were happily tucked away, and the stallion double checked and pampered some more, believe it or not I spent baking. I was even quite close to cracking the dry yeast mystery by the time I left there. Who would have thought.

But back in Oslo spring 2007 my former confidence had disappeared like most men when you mention the word shopping or IKEA on a Saturday. Courtesy of Full Moon Poya Day I had a day off on a to me random Monday and after returning from doing the horses in the morning I picked up a cooking book to try and get some inspiration for dinner. The Stud Muffin was busy working away on his computer software what ever it was and after failing to come up with a fantastic dinner idea and having studied the dessert section of the book in great detail I decided to bake a cake before lunch instead. Full of enthusiasm that I rarely sport in food related matters I got going and soon the kitchen looked like it had been attacked by three-year-olds. And lots of them.

45 minutes later as I looked in the book to find out how long it should be in the oven one sentence I had overlooked threw me completely. “Pour the cake into the form”. Right, no how do you do that when you have made a dough? It did not say anything about that and the book lacked a help button for desperately inadequate housewives so I wrestled the dough out of the bowl and did my best to spread it out in the form I had carefully prepared. The result did not look great. In fact it looked pretty terrible and nothing like the photo in the book. But then I am pretty sure they even airbrush cake photos these days. I was just about to start all over again to hide my incompetence when the Stud Muffin asked how I was getting on. With a nervous laughter I said “fine” as calmly as possible when all you want to do is freak out and quickly started to cover the cake in apples before I hid it in the oven preventing him from taking a closer look.

The end result looked strange, had a slightly funny consistency but tasted nice I was assured. What else could he say, it’s still early days. Determined to do better and pretty confident I would be able to do it perfectly second time around now that I had some experience, I repeated the process a week later when we were expecting a friend for dinner. Bad to worse was never more appropriate. The Stud Muffin took one look at it and just said “So have you put the cake in there yet or what?” The cheek of it -of course it was in there! Even I knew you would never put the apples at the bottom of the form and then pour the actual cake in. But I had to admit it was pretty flat and the stubborn thing refused to rise more than maybe half a centimeter.

So rather annoyed and determined to get it right I decided on a third and then a fourth attempt the following week. Let’s forget about the third attempt, all I can say is that the Stud Muffin is not all that crazy about apple cake anymore.

Fortunately the forth time the mothership was around. Or so she thought anyway, because in my opinion it was rather unfortunate. Having heard of my struggles she was now determined to get involved and show me how to get it right. You see the mothership might not be a fantastic chef, but she sure can bake. She is one of those people who take great pleasure in whipping up the most fantastic creations on any occasion –just like that. And I’ve got to give it to her; she knows what she is doing on this one. So hell knows what happened when she made me because I sure didn’t get any of those genes.

It went well until I had put the first two ingredients in. Then I was told I was doing it all wrong. Wrong order, wrong speed, wrong measurements, wrong equipment, wrong effing everything. But I managed to keep quiet until we had at least got most of it in the bowl. Then I calmly told her to step away from the kitchen. She got the message. It could have been the dough-scraper I was waving in her direction. So she silently left me to pour it the wrong way into the wrong form and put it into the oven on the wrong tray. In fact she did not say a thing until I went to check whether it was done. Well, it wasn’t but I did it the wrong way anyway and for my information the apples were put on wrongly as well. Big surprise. I quite often find it hard to believe that she gave birth to me. That afternoon I think she did too.

But my friends loved it. Or at least they said so. And for their sake I hope they were not lying to me because I will keep serving them my apple cake on every frigging social occasion from now on until I get it right. Then I will never make the damn thing ever again. I might not have all that much housewife potential, but I can be very stubborn.