Thoughts about a couple of great women

There's a lot of reasons why a boy should love his mom and a husband should love his wife...but the older I get, the more my mind seems to center on one thing...food. Both my mom and my wife are great cooks.

I guess I started thinking about this last Sunday when Belinda was gone and I was in charge of making lunch for dad and me. I used to fancy myself as quite a cook. I remember when the boys were in grade school and they used to write papers about their dad cooking breakfast for them on the weekend. The publicity must have gone to my head because I really did think I was a good cook, the master of both the kitchen and the barbecue grill. Last Sunday, the fame came crashing down on me as I looked at my plate and decided that I can't cook. I have no talent for cooking and if I was left to my own devices, I probably would have starved to death long ago.

That's why I'm so happy to have a mom and a wife. There's something to be said for people who can cook. It's really not so much about having the most expensive cuts of meats or anything else. It's really about preparing a meal so that people want to eat it.

If you gave me the same ingredients as Belinda, whatever I made wouldn't taste as good. I'm sure of it. I'm also not much of a BBQer as my family will attest. A lot of what I cook ends up in the microwave as my family doesn't like eating beef that's still mooing. (I have a Type A personality and I don't seem to have the patience to grill meat until it's done.)

Now, my diet requires very little salt. So something has to take the place of the salt shaker to make food taste good. My mom required the same diet. What I should have done was pay a little more attention and watched how she cooked. But I didn't.

So now when I cook without salt, the food is fairly tasteless. This is in addition to generally not being done or overdone. I'm a fairly tough critic of my cooking, but the real critic is dad. When you put something on his plate and he doesn't like it, you know it. He's not above putting a paper napkin on it and scraping it off into the garbage can. Of course, before that, he'll ask me if I would like to eat it. This really galls me because I'm having a hard time eating as it is...and then he wants to give me his, too? What kind of madman is he? No, I don't want to eat his food. I don't want to eat mine.

So, I go back to my original premise. Thank goodness for the women in my life. I know there are men that can cook and some of the best chefs are men. But not me.

Food is important to me. Some might say it's too important. But let's face it. You need food to be healthy and you need food for energy.

When I was growing up, my mom was my favorite cook. And when you get married, you want your wife to cook just like your mom....but you can't tell her that...so you give her little subtle hints, like, "Boy, I sure like my mom's scalloped potatoes and ham...which you could cook like that."

No, I'm kidding. No matter how bad you want to say that, you never do. Luckily, I married a gal who can cook. And while I'm not in love with her German dishes (although my boys are), I love most everything else that she cooks.

On Wednesdays, she cooks dinner at our church. Now I could cook for dad and me...and hate what I make. Or we could eat out and consume way too much salt. Instead, dad and I make it a point to go up to the church and eat with our church family because we know the food is going to be good and good for us.

So, yes, I loved my mom's cooking and I love Belinda's. So if a way to a man's heart is through his stomach, I'll be sticking pretty close to my wife for a long, long time.