My mother gets tired of cooking dinner every night, although she continues to do so. My father often barbeques steaks on the weekend, and every Friday he prepares tacos for dinner. However, Mum does the majority of the cooking and certainly does it with more regularity than I do. If I’m not hungry or don’t feel like cooking I simply don’t do it. This may not please my husband, but as I’ve told him I was not put on this earth to serve him. In addition, if he makes a mess in the kitchen I expect him to clean it.

 

The idea of cooking every night is also very boring to me, especially if the meals are standard fare. Mum also reaches this point on occasion, so tonight she called me and said she was making the Pork & Corn Stuffing Bake from my blog entry the other day. As she was assembling the dish, my father came into the kitchen to see what she was doing and then made a wry face. Anything “new” can make my father apprehensive, although most of the time he likes the new food.

 

When I hear about cooking experiences from my mother, there are two memories that always come to my mind. When she and my father first married, he mentioned that he liked rice so she started presenting it as a side dish every night for a week. Finally, my father came home one day pulling at the corners of his eyes so that they appeared as slits, and asked her: “What’s for dinner tonight?” There was no racial pun intended in the relation of the above anecdote…

 

As Mum told me about her dinner experience tonight, almost in the same breath we mentioned the 1972 Alfred Hitchcock movie Frenzy. In several scenes in the film, the chief inspector investigating the “neck-tie” murderer comes home to his French-born wife, and every night she prepares some exotic and almost inedible fare for their meal. The scenes are quite amusing, and they remind me of my own approach to cooking and sometimes my mother’s. The only difference is our “off-center” meals are usually appetizing.