I Married a Food Snob

That’s not a true statement. He credits me for creating a food snob!

Jim and I met by accident (he says I picked him up at lunch at our local TGIFridays) two weeks after 9/11, when it was easy to get into a conversation with total strangers. We parted company in the parking lot and he called me the next day for our first of a seven-year history of dinner-and-a-movie dates.

He bravely showed me the contents of his refrigerator, half of a 72-oz. Big Gulp of Dr. Pepper, Dallas’ answer to Beaujolais. One boxed, frozen meal, courtesy of his Mom upon her visit a few months earlier. And individually-wrapped string cheese. As a matter of fact, there were string cheese wrappers littering the living room rug between the kitchen and his dual-brained, dual-monitored server that he built from scratch and was his pride and joy.

These were the dot-bomb years and his start-up laid off 1/3 of the staff so he returned to the homestead in Texas three weeks after we met, then immediately got a new job in SoCal, stayed with relatives for a few weeks before we found him a house 1,000 feet from mine.

He couldn’t enter my condo because of a deathly allergy to cats, of which I had one. So the first day he moved in, I moved enough of my kitchen over there to be able to cook. He brought one thing, a garish blue plastic colander given by his mother when he went away to college. He’d unloaded the frozen dinner on a neighbor and quit the string cheese habit cold-turkey. I did break him of the “clean pile, dirty pile” laundry habit by simply taking over the laundry. We went out and bought a used washer and dryer, and the largest refrigerator available (for the largest utility bills, of course) and he had a cook and laundress – I could do my laundry there instead of at a laundromat – who lived 1,000 feet away.

So, what brought me to write this is lunch. I made hamburgers on our ridged grill pan last night and had 1 1/2 burgers left over. I asked if he wanted the burgers and some of my jicama salad, cold. He said, “what, not heated?” Note to self: would you like some string cheese instead?

When we first met he’d come home for lunch every day and one day I was making grilled cheese sandwiches and he said, “oh, so that’s how you do it.” His Mom gave me a photo of him making toast at age four. It only took another thirty years before he made it to step 2, the grilled cheese sandwich. Jim’s degree is in physics and he can do calculus in his head, but doesn’t know his shirt size and couldn’t cook for himself if he were Tom Hanks in Castaway.

He was stuck on tasteless cheeses like Monterey Jack (why waste the calories on something with no taste?) Save it for quesadillas and spice them up with pico de gallo and homemade guacamole. Now he knows he prefers sharp Vermont or Canadian cheddar or Italian fontina.

After a family dinner debacle when I was in college, where we decided to rate Mom’s regular dishes and a few weekly staples didn’t come out with high marks in Dad’s book, to Mom’s chagrin, I encouraged Jim to be honest about my cooking. One day I spent four hours making spaghetti sauce, and making a beautiful lasagne which he pronounced “OK.” Now I make the 10-minute version I shared with you the other day, and he loves it.

His “likes” usually involve inverse proportions of time and effort. The four-hour lasagne is OK but the six-minute pounded and sauteed chicken breast with butter, lemon and capers is “the best meal you’ve ever made!”

In the end, I’ve created a monster, but he’s my monster. When we go to a new restaurant I instinctively open my menu with his dining enjoyment in mind and point to what will inevitably be his favorite dish. It never fails. I can do the same for my brother Kevin as well, because our tastes are so similar and he won’t order a dish if someone else at the table wants it as well. So I let him take the lamb and order something else.

Sometimes I’d love it if Jim and I could cook together, at least once in a while. But most of the pots and pans his parents bought us several years ago have been knocked off the counter while drying, and are not exactly round anymore so I prefer if he uses the computer, plays video games or sits at the breakfast bar and chats and stays out of my kitchen domain.

Happy cooking! Dee