Cookin'

I'd never cooked much before I got married.  Oh, I cooked once in a while.  I also made desserts.  Bill cooked for himself when he was single, and when he was first in the Army, he was a cook.  He still cooks, and I'm grateful for that. 

When I cooked, Bill liked to be in the kitchen.  At first it bothered me that he was there because I thought a husband was supposed to sit in the living room and read the paper or watch TV until dinner was ready.  Then I realized that it was okay.  It didn't hurt anything for him to be with me, and it was nice to have him help me.  I think that is when I started realizing that all the traditional roles of husbands and wives did not need to be followed.  If Bill wanted to cook, he could cook.  If I wanted to do something that a husband would normally do, I could.  Bill helped change my thinking.  Because he didn't have a father after the age of eight, his mother did things that fathers usually do.  For him the roles of husbands and wives were not so rigid. 

When I started cooking for Bill and me, I always made too much.  Bill was so nice; he'd eat it because he didn't want to hurt my feelings.  He ended up gaining weight pretty fast.  Here are two meals that didn't help.

Beans and Cornbread.  Bill introduced me to a meal that I had never had before--beans and cornbread with fried potatoes.  I'd never had an evening meal where meat was not the main ingredient.  We used great northern beans and sometimes added a ham hock.  When I make this meal now, I make it in the crock pot and use regular ham chopped, and I throw in an onion and a jalapeno or two.  I usually don't make the potatoes either.  After all these years, I now consider it a comfort food.

Pizza.  We made our own pizza from a box.  It was Appian Way Pizza with crust mix and pizza sauce.  We added our own cheese and toppings, which was a lot.  We didn't have a pizza pan, so we used a cookie sheet.  We had a continuous bet--whoever put the dough on the cookie sheet had to pay the other a coke if there was a hole in it.  I guess Appian Way Pizza isn't that easy to find anymore.  I found the picture below on the Internet.