Cooking for Congenital Morons

It should come as no surprise that fewer and fewer people in America know how to cook. The Washington Post reports the extreme confusion and ineptitude that food manufacturers face when trying to give home cooks the most simple instructions - for example, the numb-nut who saw "grease the bottom of the pan" in a baking recipe and slathered the underside of the dish with butter. Needless to say, a fire ensued. The article didn't say - but we can only hope the aspiring chef perished in the blaze.

I don't have any patience for men or women who are baffled by the simplest forms of food preparation. One of the reasons why our country is so massively overweight is related to our inability to chop up a vegetable or boil pasta. I suspect some people are truly mystified by these tasks, while others are just lazy, and prefer to outsource meal after meal to Chipotle, Burger King, and the conglomerate dining cabal behind strip-mall restaurants - trusting their ongoing health and nourishment to strangers and teenagers in these restaurant kitchens.

It shouldn't be a gender issue either. Any man who can't make a simple plate of spaghetti and Ragu sauce without the help of his mother, girlfriend, or wife hasn't really become a full adult. And the same is true for women - some of whom claim ineptitude because they are also working professionals, and see basic cooking skills as a sign of the type of home-maker domesticity they hope to avoid, or at least delay. But this too is an excuse. Every full-fledged adult should know how to cook something - even if it's a simple dish: French toast, chili, an omelet, rice and beans. I'm a believer in bringing something to the table - figuratively, and literally.

In the Spacetropic household this chore is divided more or less evenly, and every weekend we usually try something new. For dinner she chops vegetables while I burn stuff on the stove, or perhaps the other way around. She does most of the baking - but I've got some skill with Italian food. Some efforts are unsuccessful - such as the time I attempted Japanese tempura - but those are the exceptions to the rule, and they build character. You never really know someone until you've worked as a team to throw a blackened sauté pan outside into the snow and raced around the house to pull the batteries out of the smoke alarms.