There are many temptations a wife faces. Boarding up the kitchen to protect it from the
husband's culinary experiments is one of them.
It's a temptation few of our mothers had to face, the arrangement in those days being
that if the men killed the fatted pig, the women would slave all day in the hot kitchen
preparing sausage.
Since today I help bring home the bacon, I expect my husband to help fry it. So we play
a game called Dueling Dinners. It's very popular among two-income couples. It goes like
this:
"Ralph, dear, why are you using the 24-gallon pot to cook spaghetti for two adults
and two small picky eaters?"
"Honey, it was handy."
"Darling, how about using the spaghetti pot?"
"Snookums, I'm using that to cook the hamburger meat."
"Cupcake, the spaghetti sauce already has meat in it."
"Gingerbread, I know that, but I like my spaghetti sauce with lots and lots of
hamburger meat."
"But fruitcake, you're on a low cholesterol diet, remember?"
At this point in the contest, I flee to the living room out of fear that if I watch any
more of Ralph's cooking methods, I'll chase him out of the kitchen, which is exactly what
he wants.
The winner of Dueling Dinners is the one who gets the most rest.
Sooner or later, however, I creep back into the kitchen, drawn by an unusual smell.
"Ralph, dear, why does the spaghetti sauce smell different?"
Ralph's only reply is a grin. I know what that means. It means I should peer into the
sauce pot.
"Ralph, honey-bunch, why is the spaghetti sauce so runny?"
"I've invented a new flavor," he states proudly.
"Oh, no! We've run out of Ragu and you've substituted tomato soup!"
His eyes glimmer with a secret he won't tell as he shakes his head no and stirs the
slop. I sniff the steam and mentally take inventory of the groceries in our cabinets.
"Not V-8 Juice," I plead.
The broadening smile on his face tells me all I need to know.
"Shh," I whisper, "don't let the kids know, or they'll never eat the
food you cook ever again."
I begin to pray. I need supernatural strength to resist the temptation to throw him and
his V-8 High Cholesterol Sauce out of the kitchen. I must remember that God wants me to be
charitable toward people who think juice is the same as sauce. Just because my partner in
Dueling Dinners cooks things differently than I do or differently than the family's taste
buds want him to, doesn't mean I have due cause to banish him to the living room sofa
where he can rest.
Sometimes love means saying, "Thank you for cooking this dinner. Please do it
again sometime. It really is quite, um, chewable."
Ralph has been giving me this kind of love for 16 years. He even eats my corn fritters,
although he remembers full well the time I spiced the fritters with an extra ingredient
that had inadvertently gotten mixed in -- bug parts.
