Cooking

Joshua and I love to eat, and I love to cook, an activity I no doubt picked up from my mother.

Joshua never did much cooking before we met, but now he likes to cook with me. We talk and we laugh and we horse around as we prepare dinner every night, and we talk and we laugh and we horse around as we perform the after-meal cleanup. Our necessary time in the kitchen is fun.

We are both meat-and-potatoes guys, and we typically eat standard American fare. We know four different ways to prepare a pot roast, our favorite of which involves green onions, mushrooms and real cream. We know four different ways to prepare a baked, stuffed chicken and we know four different ways to prepare pork chops. Most of the recipes we use come from my Mom.

We eat steak, too, and we also like tuna steaks and salmon steaks. Once in a while we will bake a ham.

We love mashed potatoes, and we probably eat mashed potatoes four nights a week. We peel and boil our own potatoes, as nothing compares with the real thing.

We are big eaters of vegetables, and we even eat some of the less-common vegetables, like Brussel Sprouts and parsnips. We will eat three or four different vegetables every night.

One of the few non-American foods I can cook is authentic Viennese Wiener Schnitzel, from an old Viennese recipe. Josh likes it, and we always eat it with hot, sour Viennese potato salad.

Truly, however, my specialty is breakfast. I have been cooking breakfast for years and years, probably since I was about twelve years old. From that time forward, I would tell my mother, most nights, not to bother getting up early the next morning to prepare breakfast for my Dad and for my brothers, and that I would do it instead.

I can do any type of eggs to perfection, and I am a master of any type of morning potatoes. I can do any type of pancakes, and I can do waffles and French toast. Something I learned to do, from a French cookbook, was French-style French toast, made with French bread and served with a special caramel butter.

Because Josh and I both love breakfasts, and because we only have breakfast at home on weekend mornings, owing to my work schedule, we will sometimes have breakfast foods for dinner.

There are certain foods I have never been able to master. I can fry chicken in the oven, but I cannot fry chicken in a pan. For some reason, meatloaf is beyond me. There is nothing I can do with shrimp to make it work right.

I already know, pretty much, what I can do and what I cannot do, and I try not to experiment very much on poor Josh!