I grew up in Santa Rosa, California. It is the wine country. I was half a mile from Matanzas Creek Winery, at the foot of an extinct volcano that loomed overhead. It was a weird place to grow up. The days would get hot, then the fog would surge in from the Pacific, roiling over the hills, ushered by the icy breeze. Temperatures would drop from 85'F down to 55'F in about an hour, sometimes less. If you went to the movies in an afternoon, you came out into fog that clung to your eyelashes and dropped visibility to a mere 200 feet. It was mystical and awesome and I miss it. I don't miss all the jerks who lived there, however, which is why I don't. If there's a plague and they die off? I'd move back.
Growing up in foodie heaven, surrounded by wine, excellent bakeries, and the world's highest density of restaurants, one for every 40 people, being familiar with the very best food would easily lead to preparing it. I got good in the kitchen, between natural interest and exposure. When I finally married, I thought I'd found someone who shared my passion, but not so much. Since I am single again, and in a dateless zone of meth junkies, potheads, and creepy cougars, I feel like reminiscing on what I can no longer find.
Know what would be awesome? A wife who cooks better than I do. That's asking a lot, since I'm nearly to restaurant quality. Still, a wife who could genuinely and seriously cook, likes it, and shows off because she's just that awesome a chef? That would impress me.
An Italian or French woman, skilled and happy in her kitchen the way I am? That would be something. I would marry a woman like that. In my first marriage, I cooked most of the meals. I got good at it. I got better since cooking for my aging parents. I've learned how to time meals, and cooking appropriate portions and including the necessary nutrition.
A pity that real cooking is astonishingly rare in my generation. Few women my age or younger actually cook anymore. In the last 20 years I've met ONE serious female cook from my generation. And none in the younger generations (Y and Millenials). Lots of women barely know how to heat food, or even know that microwaves have more settings than "TIME". Most women consider cooking a massive chore and refuse to be good at it as a sign of contempt for men, which they often are barely familiar with. Strange, these same women believe men should be able to tear down and rebuild an engine in a weekend, or build an entire house in a month in chiseled and sculpted bodies they saw in a magazine this one time. Sigh. Men and women both have real issues with expectations. Most women get pretty frosty at my ability to cook. There's unspoken outrage.
Our culture is so broken. Women are taught by their teachers are role models to hate men, resent men. They have the same opportunities but insist that simply isn't enough and they deserve to have EVERYTHING, a fulfilling career AND children they somehow have time to raise, and a nanny and a driver, and a limo, and a Versacchi pantsuit that looks slimming and the fatty desert and a stairmaster and .... yeah. Insane stuff. Yet, they won't go into a kitchen and learn to cook unless they have children of their own, and only to assert their babies are getting the best care, those times when they remember they are supposed to be good mothers rather than neurotic. Sigh. I would hope this isn't true for my entire generation, but that's what I've seen. And evidence trumps beliefs and wishful thinking.
I've never met a woman who liked engines enough to take them apart and fix them. Or cared about performance of her car enough to do the research herself. Most women I've met would use the wrong tool and utterly wrecked the thing they were trying to fix. So pathetic, and vicious, and deliberately hateful. Mechanical Sympathy is a thing ascribed to men for good reason. There seems to be real differences in Gender that seriously matter and aren't talked about.
If I had an Italian wife, who liked to cook, I suspect we'd spend a lot of time together, stuffing pasta, roasting peppers and meats, creating dishes and handing them out to the little old ladies as "cooked too much to finish". I would need a kitchen with two working stations in it, same sized, so we'd have room to work and not accidentally drop things or cut ourselves being jostled. Finding out that the actress who played the sex droid Seven of Nine would come home from the job of looking statuesque in her fetish costume, strip the silly things off, put on her apron and whites, and get to work cooking meals at her restaurant in LA? I really respected that. It's endearing, too. For a foodie like me, who started learning to cook at age 4? Sounds like the perfect woman. So perfect she married a French chef herself and they are happily married. Good for them both.
If a lady mechanical engineer working on optimized and balanced engines for ultralight cars strips off her coveralls, scrubs off all the grease and swaps for whites, and takes up a long knife in order to build a complex meal? That's even better. There would be conversation and laughter and sketches and solutions. Good times could be had. A pity such people are rare enough to be nearly mythical.
This being California, there's a lot of tasty fishes worth cooking with. Sea Bass, Rock Cod, Red Snapper, Salmon, Halibut, even Anchovies can be turned into delicious dishes. You have to be an unfussy eater. Our Pacific waters produce excellent fish for the table. They need a couple years break to get their numbers back, and once oil is too valuable to waste on powering trawlers crossing oceans for fish, we'll be in good shape minding our OWN fish on our OWN coast, thanks much. I could see myself living in a stepped community like Bodega Bay, despite the faultline running there, since it would allow me daily access to fresh fish. And the tourists would know that, if I ran a B&B, for example. I expect to live another 50 years, possibly more. Plenty of time to take the windtorn and ragged Bodega Bay and convert that hillside into something resembling one of those tidy provincial towns people drive 1000 miles to see in person. And yes, it will fall down in the earthquakes, but it will be rebuilt, too. The locals are hardy folk. They don't whine about how hard it is. They just pick sweep up the mess, and build again. A woman who can do that is worth something. No histrionics, no drama. Just sweep up the mess and get on with it. That's what I want in a wife.
I wonder what a woman like that wants in a husband?
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