Getting my groove back

All I have to say is that Monkey Man better get well soon, or my ass is going to be three miles wide.

Growing up, my mom always encouraged me to get in the kitchen and get my hands dirty. She is a great cook, and was never too busy to show me how to do things. My first dish, from what I remember, was a creme brulee. Followed by a wonderful chocolate mousse. Obviously, my early specialty was dessert.

In college, my cooking got a little funky since I had the pickiest roommate on the face of the planet. Our deal was that I would cook for us, she would clean and do laundry. Honestly, I got the better end of the deal because her tastes were so bland that anything wilder than tuna casserole would send her right over the edge. I remember one recipe in particular that involved chicken, pepperoni, and jarred spaghetti sauce that still makes me wince even thinking about it.

Once I moved out on my own, I got a lot braver and tried new things all of the time. And over time, I developed a reputation as being a pretty good cook. Almost every night I would cook a full dinner after a day at the office. I belonged to a couple of bulletin boards with other people who liked cooking as much as I did and we would trade recipes - most of them wonderfully exquisite, some of them...not so much. I'd bring food into work for my coworkers to share, we had people over for dinner all of the time, and I really enjoyed putting together a feast.

When we put our last house on the market in November of 2004, I put the kitchen clutter away in the interest of making our kitchen look better - not to mention the fact that the first house that we sold tended to have showings around dinnertime and more often than not I was shoving dirty dishes and half-eaten casseroles into our oven to hide them and hastily boiling cinnamon water on the stove to hide the cooking smells. (And if you ever do this, make sure you get the stuff out before you turn the oven on. I'm just sayin'.)

Well, it took our house a while to sell and then our new house wasn't ready to move into until March 1st, so I really got out of the cooking groove.

That was March 2005. It's now October 2006 and Builder Mama still don't have her groove back. Until now. Since last Friday when Monkey Man got sick, I've pulled my recipes back out and made:

Bread pudding with some of Gretchen's caramel sauce (damn you, G....that stuff is sinful!)
Chicken casserole
Salted thyme flatbread
Spaghetti (and not Ragu either)
Chocolate pudding from scratch
Macaroni and cheese

And so on. I did give myself the night off last night and picked up a pizza, but other than that we've been eating home cooking and both Joey and Monkey Man have been happy as clams. And now that summer work hours are coming to an end and I'll be getting off work at 4 PM every day, the chances are a little better that I'll be cooking at least a few nights a week.

I still reserve the right, however, to make the nightly call as to whether we eat at home or eat out. I may have cooked more in the past five days than I have in the past year but you can't rush these things, you know.