Dinner at My House

I am fortunate in that my husband likes to cook.  He is very good at making sure a steak or piece of fish is not overcooked...both of which require different attention.  The only thing he overcooks is scrambled eggs, but he likes them that way!  He also likes to make sauces and use spices and has a few stir fry Thai dishes he has developed.   He is an intense cook because he really does not cook  often enough to be a casual cook.

While I also like to cook, and am the primary chef in the house, I try to step back now and again to give him an opportunity to find his creative talents.

We finally caught some perch for bait the other day and were able to bait our crab traps appropriately to FINALLY catch blue crabs.  We did not get a lot, but were able to steam five big crabs for dinner.  Hubby was excited and so I asked if he would like cook dinner while I continued to photograph with my new tripod (my old one broke!)

He was excited.  We had our first harvest of eggplant, there was a bunch of lemon basil growing, blueberries on the vine, etc. etc.

I had forgotten that as a cook he gets easily distracted by reading a recipe or two or 40 for ideas, spending extensive time meditatively harvesting in the garden and then beginning the sauce or two!  An hour before we usually eat dinner he had a pound of lemon basil in the sink being washed.  A pound!  I am a medium fan of  lemon basil, preferring Italian, or red or many of the others, but he likes it.  And lemon basil was the only basil that had not been eaten to the ground by a rabbit or ground hog in my un-fenced herb bed.  Yes, I know!  Basil!  Never eaten before in my herb bed, but with the tons of rain, perhaps it is less pungent to the animals.

There was lots of chopping and mashing and slicing and dicing and steaming in the kitchen.  I  begged him to use one pesto recipe if he was going to try to make a pesto after he asked if he should  use sugar in it.   So there was walking back and forth studying the cook book and several thousand trips to the pantry.

While dinner was late we did have steamed crabs with a lime butter sauce, fried eggplant with a lemon pesto basil sauce, corn on the cob and freshly sliced cucumbers as our salad.  The pesto was a little strong in lemon basil, but complimented the gentle nutty flavor  of  fried eggplant nicely.  Crab is always good and the rest of the veggies were a nice change from the rich and spicy foods.

My payment for this good dinner was about an hour of cleaning a kitchen that looked as if six chefs had prepared some banquet and then left in a hurry.  I clean as I cook.  Men do not usually do that.  They just move to the next clean counter and begin again.  The counter was covered in tiny green  leaves, oily puddles, the floor in tiny garlic skins, the sink in corn husks and there were measuring cups and bowls everywhere.  But I stuck to my guns and worked off those calories nicely as I returned the kitchen to its former glory to use another day.