NdukuOutLoud

What food would you say is your specialty?

Short answer: none.

Long answer? I’ve got plenty. Plenty of reasons why, at this age, I have no specialty when it comes to food and cooking it/ Being a woman-yes, I know, we don’t stereotype anymore. Anybody can cook, everybody can work at the office, and women were not meant to just cook and clean. But let’s not pretend the expectation isn’t still there. That a woman should know her way around the kitchen. And a mother even more so.

I am both.

What’s more, I was raised in a somewhat traditional setting. Yes we could go to school, and we did. Chase our dreams to the ends of the world. But come back and cook and clean and know our way around the kitchen. Enough time there to have a specialty. A signature dish. a “this is what I’m known for.”

And yet.

I have never really been fascinated with food. I don’t understand the whole ” foodie” thing. I cannot feign enough excitement about new foods and restaurants to leave the comfort of my house to go try them out. I get ired easily when the flour I measured so precisely doesn’t comply and the cake doesn’t turn out as it did in my head. Oh, and the first pancake? Makes me want to throw out the whole mix and set the kitchen on fire. What’s up with that, by the way? I know it’s not jus me that always messes up the first piece.

Or maybe it’s because there’s always been someone else to do it for me. And now I’m wondering if this earns me a spot in the spoilt brats group. But in my defense, I am the last child. In a family of six. The third daughter. Both of my sisters love cooking. Couldn’t get them out of the kitchen if I tried-and so I never really tried. I somehow always ended up doing the dishes. And this I still do to date. In fact, I usually just volunteer to do the dishes in a setting where there’ll be lots of cooking and plenty of dirty dishes.

Or maybe it’s the lack of somebody. More specifically a partner, to enjoy the dishes- this is probably the lonely me speaking. The part that would like to try out new recipes and share the experiences. To have them chop the onions and blame them for the salt. No? But this, too, is an excuse.

I can actually leave on bread alone. I have done it. Not just because of laziness and the lack of enthusiasm where food is involved. But because I genuinely enjoyed bread. I ate so much of it that currently, eating even three slices is a challenge.

And also because I don’t get it. Why can’t I just put all the ingredients together and watch them become something beautiful? What’s all this fuss with everything having to go in a certain order, cook for a certain period, at set levels of heat? It’s evidently too much trouble.

Maybe in a couple of years, when WP decided to recycle this prompt-as I’ve heard many people mention that it does- I’ll have a recipe to share. And o, how proud my mum will be. I feel like she worries sometimes that she didn’t do the whole mother- daughter activities with me well enough.

But until then, I remain on this other side of the kitchen.