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Cooking With Nightngale
assembled @ 4:25 p.m. on 2001-09-09

Aaahh... peace and quiet. Pearl is napping, and Hero is at the local laundromat, washing our copious amounts of laundry, like he does every week. (Are you beginning to see where his pseudonym comes from?). So I am avoiding starting dinner, and updating y'all on my exciting life instead.

I went through a a couple brief stints where I really liked to cook. Now that I think about it, those times always coincided with the times that I was pregnant. Must have been some nesting thing. When Hero and I got married, I was a notoriously bad cook. I could make decent spaghetti and grilled cheese, and my homemade shortbread was amazing, but that's where it ended. So Hero and I made a deal: he would do the cooking, and I would wash the dishes. No problem (at the time, my icky old food phobia must not have been present. Or maybe using the dishwasher suppressed it). But then Hero went off to boot camp to become a United States Marine, and I got to cook and do the dishes. This hardly seemed fair, since I was also suffering from acute miss-my-husband-itis, but I was a couple months pregnant at the time, so living on fast food didn't cut it. I became a great cook. I got to the point where I could throw in a bunch of spices for fun, and the stuff would taste great. This led to the creation of a recipe called "Lonely Chicken" since I made it a lot while Hero was gone. I stopped timing my cooking, and got to know when something was done by the way it smelled. Perfect shortbread has this magical smell. Yes, I am aware of how strange I am.

Now, when I moved out to California, after Hero had completed boot, and was stationed out there in 29 Palms, we lived in base housing. Nice big kitchen, dishwasher, etc. Hero had amassed a large group of friends, and since we were the only ones who had a house, that house became headquarters for the gang. But these were Marines that loved to cook. I worked at the PX on the base (the department store-like place), and when I came home at night, there would be at least two Marines in my kitchen making us all dinner. Usually shirtless. God bless America. And there went my cooking.

The second time I got pregnant, which produced little Pearl, Hero had gotten addicted to a game called Everquest, of which some of you may have heard. If you haven't, email me and I'll explain it. Or look it up on amazon.com. Anyway, due to said addiction, if I wanted to eat healthy, cooking was up to me. I have to admit that I really resented this at the time, since I was pregnant, working more than full-time, and so exhausted when I got home. But I became really good at cooking again, at least the simple stuff. Now, I'd like to get back into making more complex things, like my mom's tortellini salad. Or more honestly, I would like to get back into eating them. Making them seems like a lot of work. Probably just because I haven't done it in so long. Tonight will be steak and tortellini salad. Mm-mmm good.

I'd better get going now, so I can get dinner made and eaten before my sister gets here. Woohoo! I haven't seen my sister since our baby shower in April, so she's never met her new niece. She just got married in February, and that's an interesting story in itself. But I'll save that for another time. Gotta keep y'all interested, heehee.

-N

then || now