Marination of a Cook

by

Ginger Hanson

For those of you who think eloping to Ozark doesn't mean commitment, my husband and I will be celebrating our twenty-eighth anniversary tomorrow. Now you might wonder why we eloped to Ozark when we lived in Enterprise. It seemed a little crazy to me, too, but in those days, the Justices of the Peace for Dale and Coffee counties alternated the days they were available to perform marriage ceremonies. We just happened to pick the off night for Coffee County which meant a trip to Ozark.

Don't think our marriage was a spur of the moment decision. We'd had a lot of serious conversations about marriage. One of which centered around food. When my husband-to-be interrupted our discussion of the future to ask me if I could cook, I dodged the question. Rather than answer directly, I told him I could read. I also reminded him I'd taken home economics in high school.
Why clutter the discussion of our future happiness with any fine points? Why mention that it was my sewing talents, not my cooking skills that had saved me in home ec? Why describe the disastrous results of my forays into the kitchen? Hadn't my group partners eaten the unjelled tuna casserole and sugarless sugar cookies without complaint?
Having soothed Bob's fears–he couldn't cook and feared starvation after twenty-one years of his mother's cooking–we marched down the aisle.

Eventually, I had to march into the kitchen. Now you need to understand that I didn't have any real role model for the art of cooking. My mother did it because it was some kind of female requirement, not because she found any real joy in it. Although, I think she liked cooking chocolate cakes because I remember a lot of them.

Looking back, I realize now that my family spent an disproportionate amount of the family's income on food. My father was a child of the Great Depression and though it's hard to separate fact from fiction, I don't think they ate "high on the hog" when he was young. He loved steak and usually grilled us several for a weekend treat. Baked potatoes, roasted that an hour in foil on the charcoals would accompany his favorite side dish of Caesar salad topped with his own cheesy dressing that never tasted the same twice. He also made a great pizza and even tried distilling his own beer when he found out Coffee County was dry.

All of which meant I wasn't too familiar with any section of the meat counter except the one that held steak. That's why Bob and I ate steak every night: Porterhouse, T-bone, bottom round, sirloin, or chuck. They all cooked easily on the broiler, a technique I mastered the first week of marriage. I even developed little household tricks, like lining the pan to cut down on the mess. I was making real progress.

One day my husband asked me if I could cook something different, such as spaghetti. I was crushed. The honeymoon was over. He wanted me in the kitchen cooking delectable meals instead of in the bedroom looking delectable. After meditating for an hour in the locked bedroom, I decided he'd made a reasonable request. While he slept on the couch that night, I read my cookbook and chose a menu for the great experiment.

At long last, our first non-steak meal was ready. Smiling with culinary anticipation, my husband loaded his plate with pork chops. Plunging his knife into the browned chop, he almost broke his arm when the knife hit the bricklike meat.

All right, I overcooked the chops. But that measly forty minutes didn't seen long enough when faced by trichinosis. Have you seen what those little worms can do to a brain? I have, courtesy of my high school biology teacher. That lesson stuck better than the cooking lessons.

With this failure under my belt, the gauntlet was thrown. I was going to learn how to cook.
Armed with an even bigger cookbook, I began my campaign. On the road to success, I discovered spices–they were constantly mentioned in the recipes so I figured I better get to know them. To my amazement, these handy little jars gave ordinary foods an exotic flavor.

Not more than four feet from the spices, I found the packaged mix display. There in one packet were all the necessary spices in the required quantities to create the pictured meal. Whole new worlds of cooking opened before my dazzled eyes.

Fast on the heels of spices and mixes came the discovery of marinades. I especially enjoyed the ones that used wine. A cup of wine for the marinade and a glass of wine for the marinadee. It was such a tipsy experience I had to limit myself to one marinade a day.

My husband had his cook.

It's been twenty-eight years or 10,000+ meals. Pork chops to chicken chow mein to Thanksgiving turkey, anyway you look at it, that's a lot of cooking. Obviously, I've come a long way from that early conversation about my cooking skills. In fact, I've come so far in the food preparation category that I'm a vegetarian now. I like to look on the bright side: we just drink the wine now and don't waste any on the marinade.

THE END

©1997 Ginger Hanson