This will probably sound quite odd but until I married Rob, I had never really prepared supper in the traditional sense. When I was growing up, it was my mother who cooked and my sister and I who cleaned up. It was a routine that worked well for my mother and although she claims she tried to teach me to cook, the truth is that she taught me to bake. Cookies, cakes, dessert bars, pies, bread. These were uber time consuming tasks that she didn’t enjoy at all and I can remember being assigned the task of replenishing the cookie jar literally from scratch on many a Saturday morning in my junior high and high school days. Consequently I can follow a recipe but when it comes to the more complex task of preparing multiple dishes for the evening meal, I am at a disadvantage. I don’t really have the knack for organization that you need when all the “ingredients” of a dinner have to be ready at the same time.

I think maybe Rob thought I was exaggerating a bit when I told him I don’t cook and hadn’t really ever made dinner, or supper as it is known here in Alberta, but it just wasn’t something I ever needed to be able to do. I was on my own until I met my first husband. When we were first married, dinner consisted of me taking something to him at the paint store he worked at as a second job. It was usually later in the evening, so I would hit a drive-thru, tacos or a burger and fries. I seldom ate with him because I ate breakfast and then lunch so early in the day, being a teacher, that I couldn’t wait until 7 or so at night for another meal. Often I stayed and we would chat while he wolfed down his food in-between customers, but more often than not he was too busy and I would simply drop off his dinner and stop back in at closing time which normally coincided with the end of my nightly run. When Katy came along, Will was already ill. He was still preparing most of the evening meals but they were inedible for a nursing mom of a lactose intolerant baby and he wouldn’t eat anything I prepared because it was never what he was hungry for at the time. I quickly gave up and we prepared our meals separately. It was really not much different than being single. After he was ill, he barely ate. It made no sense to prepare a meal when he wasn’t eating more than it took to keep a small house pet alive and Katy wasn’t really eating much more as she was still more interested in nursing than food unless it was fruit or veggies. Then it was just Katy and I, and I couldn’t eat and she was a grazer. Which brings me up to marriage again and a new husband who was used to dinner at the table (though he will admit sometimes that often he ate in front of the TV off a TV table). In the beginning I let him do it, and I sometimes still let him do it, but I am slowly getting used to the Mrs. Cleaver (not Brady because Carol had Alice for the heavy lifting) routine of supper, not dinner, on the table in the evenings when Rob gets home from work.

I am slowly building a meager repertoire. Tacos, from a kit. Spaghetti, green salad and garlic toast (okay, Rob still does the toast though I can now peel, and mince when necessary, the garlic clove……yes, fresh garlic, don’t act so surprised.) Tuna with salad. Steamed veggies and rice. Feta cheese pizza. Pancakes. Rob still makes the “cracked eggs” for wraps though I prepare the veggies, and he prepares a delicious salmon and grills a mean selection of veggie meat products. I guess supper should be a joint effort when time permits. It certainly wasn’t that way when I was growing up. Cooking was woman’s work. I saw it as yet another reason to wish I had been born a boy. There were few “perks” to womanhood from my childish perspective at that point.

On the immigration questionnaire yesterday, the doctor needed to ascertain my previous profession and inquire into what I was interested in doing once I became a resident. I told him I had been a teacher, and he asked if I would be interested in doing that again. Judging from the news stories I have been reading about an impending province-wide teacher strike over a meager contract raise that is barely half the rate of inflation, an interesting thing in such an oil-rich place, I barely thought about it before telling him that no, I was going to be a writer. On the form he wrote “housewife”. I guess I know what he thinks, but in my opinion, learning to cook (I already know how to do laundry, clean and take care of the needs of a husband and child…..thanks ever so much), doesn’t make me a housewife anymore than it makes me Rachel Ray. I have found that cooking isn’t the onerous task I once thought it was when I gladly shirked it or ignored it completely. It’s just cooking because, well, we need to eat.