‘What’ll we have for dinner tonight?’
‘Pasta.’
‘So three or four hours then?’
‘Yeah. Maybe four and a half.’
You have time to catch a movie and wash the dogs, because when this bloke says pasta he means freshly made by him with ten free-range egg yolks, the special Italian flour that costs $15 a packet, and The River Café Cook Book propped open for instructions. It’s the only time men ever willingly read instructions.
Inspired by TV cooking programs, they buy cookbooks that were never meant to leave the top of a coffee table and actually read them. Then they make shopping lists that include squid ink and quinoa, and demand comparative assessments:
‘How’s this one compare with last week’s? Out of ten?’
‘Fabulous, eleven,’ you say, with your mouth full of high-cholesterol gourmet goodies. It’s just as well because you are going to need the energy for the washing up.
We’ve been washing up by hand since the old Vulcan retired hurt. Once having had a dishwasher, you fall into slothful ways; you have got used to shoving used dishes out of sight in the dishwasher till it’s full, so now you stack them artistically around the sink.
And since having had a dishwasher meant that you tended to have more crockery on the go, you don’t do the sensible thing and retire the second set of dishes. You have acquired enough plates and cups for a boarding school and they all get used. You stack them ever higher and quarrel about whose turn it is to do them.
‘How does it get like this so damn quickly?’ I snarl, chipping more enamel off the French casserole that my beloved bought me.
‘She’s doing her washing-up rant,’ says my son, who suddenly remembers a pressing engagement.
‘But it’s always me who gets to clean up the results,’ I whine. ‘How come it takes four pans, the food processor and a bloody jaffle iron to make a cup of coffee?’
Then my husband says something reasonable, the swine, and all hell breaks loose.
When your men cook, a simple steak and two veg will require you to scour a mountain of dirty dishes, sticky spatulas, purulent pots, putrid pans, disgusting double-boilers, filthy fish kettles, rotten roasting tins and … hey, come back here, I’m not finished.
There’s a fascinating British makeover program showing on Foxtel at the moment, but soon to come to Australia—How