Who Says Men Make the Best Chefs?

Caveman doing the grocery shopping - Image by Wyoming_Jackrabbit via Flickr

“Mummy, when I get married, I’m going to choose a man who likes to do all the cooking,” declared my daughter Laura the other day.

Her assertion surprised me because we’ve recently made a very successful batch of cookies together. Her schoolfriends requested she bring more to school in her next day’s packed lunch.  She also enjoys Let’s Get Cooking Club at school, which I’d hoped would set her on the right track to self-sufficiency in the kitchen.

It’s not that she’s hoping to marry a man like her father.  In ten years of marriage, he’s only ever cooked me three meals.  The first, on our second date, was a stew.  I later discovered it was a blend of everything edible that he could find in his kitchen.  Considering evidence I collected later, I had a lucky escape that night.  Usually, a mutual friend told me, his was the typical bachelor’s fridge, containing only mouldy fruit, bought in a fit of resolve to eat more healthily but never actually consumed, and beer.

The second meal was a frozen supermarket ready meal.  Maybe this was to stop me thinking that this cheffing lark might become a habit.  Then, eight years later, came his third dish: a poached egg on toast, when I was ill with flu in bed.

The poached egg has recently become his signature dish – much as an X becomes the signature of a man who cannot write.  More as a technical enquiry than with the intent of using it, he asked me a little while ago how the egg poacher worked.  To my surprise, he was sufficiently intrigued to try it out.  After many repetitions of the instructions, he finally mastered the art.

I was shocked.  In our household, we have a pretty traditional division of labour: I do the cooking, the food shopping and the laundry, and he does the DIY.  I don’t object, as it gets me off the hook for decorating, and he’s a lot better at it than me.  So I wondered whether his embrace of this tiny corner of catering precipitates a subtle shift in our balance of power.  Suddenly, I was no longer needed to cook his breakfast in the morning: he could make it himself.

Until this point, he’d always been proud of his lack of prowess in the kitchen, citing it as an indication of his descent from stone age man.  Apparently, he-men evolved to operate only on a grand scale in providing food for his family, tracking down wild animals and dragging them back to his cave.  After all that hunting, he’d need to receover his strength while the female of the species prepared his kill for the oven. He claims that’s also why he’s not good at finding things around the house – his glasses, his car keys, his slippers – because men are programmed to find big things far away – like mammoths.

It’s always amused my colleagues that the only phone calls I ever get from him while at work are requests to help him find things: his swimming trunks, his measuring tape, our daughter.  And just last week I had another plaintive call from home.

“Debbie, I can’t find the egg poacher.”

It seems there’s no danger that I’ll be made redundant in the kitchen just yet.

Have Hairdrier, Will Travel

The Flybe Dash 800 - matching curling tongs also available (Image via Wikipedia)

I’m crossing the Channel in a hairdrier.  Or so it seems to me. As soon as the pilot starts the twin engines of the small Flybe Dash 800 on which I’m travelling to Jersey, the propellors judder noisily with that distinctive buzz normally associated with a blow-dry.  It makes my whole body vibrate. Though the speed of their rotation soon renders the propellors invisible, the noise only increases and I quickly realise it’s going to be with us the whole way – in the unlikely event that the engines don’t drop off along the way.

I should have anticipated that our plane would be so tiny when the stewardess at the gate told us we’d be “walked” to it for boarding.  To be able to nuzzle up so closely to the terminal, the aircraft would have to be pretty small.

It turns out to be only slightly bigger than the Air Luxembourg plane I took once as a teenager when couriering computer parts for my engineer father.  (Well, Luxembourg is a tiny country, they have to make best use of their airspace.)  As one of a small group of passengers, I was put on a bus to the plane.  After a few moments’ drive across the tarmac, the bus stopped and opened its doors.  I was puzzled – why were were stopping when there was no plane in sight?  Only when I stepped off the bus did I discover why: the plane was so small that it fitted below the sightline of the bus window.

On board awaiting take-off, a chirpy stewardess strolled down the aisle offering a quaint straw basket of sweets.  We passengers each seized a handful, hopeful that they contained an anti-emetic, if not cyanide.

But our Jersey-bound plane today proves bigger inside than it looks.  The official capacity is 78 passengers.  About a third of this number are on board.  The stewardess quickly curtails anyone’s intention of spreading out.

“Please consult a stewardess before changing seats,” she announces over the tannoy. “This aircraft is movement sensitive.”

We sit very still after that, worried that the slightest motion could change our course. Flip a page of the inflight magazine too quickly and we could end up in Guernsey – or the sea.

In less than an hour, we’re landing in Jersey, but only after a white-knuckle touchdown.  Never usually an anxious flyer, I think I’m about to become one.  Normally I love the moment when the plane first contacts the ground, making you suddenly aware of the tremendous speed at which you’ve been travelling.  But this time the rush is too much. It’s accompanied by loud gasps and ill-suppressed shrieks.  Moving as one, we grip the back of the seat in front of us, stiff-armed to guard against concusion on its headrest.  If ever there was a moment in my flying experience that I’ve expected the stewardess to cry “BRACE, BRACE!” in earnest, as heralded in every preflight safety talk, this is it.  If we carry on taxiing at this rate, we’ll run out of Jersey before we stop. We’ll be ditching into the sea beyond its shore.  That lifejacket under my seat is about to see active service.  I make a mental note not to inflate it before leaving the aircraft.

A Welcome sight indeed - Jersey Airport's welcome sign in local languagu Jerriais (Image via Wikipedia)

But in the nick of time, the brakes take full effect, and not a moment too soon we’re inside the tiny terminal claiming our baggage from the carousel.  As I wait for my polka dot travel bag to appear, I wonder why no-one ever warned me of the perils of this tiny, bumpy, noisy flight to Jersey.  Is it because I don’t know anyone who’s lived to tell the tale?

Ah, but I do – and it comes back to me that just the other week a friend was singing the praises of Channel Island flights.  Who was it again?  Ah yes, my hairdresser, Natasha.  Well, I suppose for her, travelling in a hairdryer would make her feel right at home.