One of my most important pieces of dating advice for those interested in one day marrying is to find someone who enjoys doing the chores you hate. I’m convinced the surest recipe to a happy marriage is staggering the tasks you each despise.
When I found out my now husband enjoyed washing dishes and folding laundry, I put a ring on his finger so fast I injured him. On the other hand, it’s been six years since our wedding, and I don’t think he has ever learned how to start the lawn mower. Not long ago, he walked into the house in a panic and said, “Have we ever changed the furnace filter?” I told him, “Yes, every month for the past decade.” I’m going to need someone to check in on him when I die. And please come help me set up our smart devices if he goes first.
I’m the resident cook in our home. My husband has no interest in helping. I’m truly fine with this because I enjoy the task. Unfortunately, for both of us, I’m not particularly good at it. But I make dinner for us every night.
My husband is polite so his review of the meal, when I ask for it, is typically something like “I’m just really grateful you made it.” He sounds so sincere that I forget to notice he has refused to answer the question.
He once told me he was going to have “I didn’t really follow a recipe” etched onto my tombstone, referring to my common refrain just before we partake of my vibes-only style of cooking.
I didn’t grow up learning much about culinary arts. This is entirely my fault. My parents are both fabulous cooks. If we ever ate out, I don’t really remember it. We were a household with a wheat grinder in active use. We had chickens and an embattled steam canner. Mom and Dad probably tried to teach me some of this self-sufficiency, but I was an unwilling student.
My mission menu
Mere days into my 2003 Latter-day Saint mission to western Ukraine, where I discovered neither I nor my first companion knew how to turn on a stove, I regretted having never learned to cook. We had a rule in our mission that we weren’t allowed to eat meals with any church members so whatever food we consumed had to be gathered and prepared ourselves.
Every day my companion and I would buy a loaf of white bread and a small jar of raspberry jam and rip and dip with our bare hands, sitting across from each other in our Soviet-era apartment while rabid street dogs fought over a chicken leg outside the window. The only difference between us and them: We had to participate in companionship inventory every Wednesday.
After six weeks, I was transferred to another city with a new companion, who I learned also did not know how to cook and lived off oatmeal and chamomile tea. By this point, we both essentially had scurvy and an eye patch.
There was no way I could possibly live with straight dudes (who had the hygiene to prove it) for the next two years and also have to starve in the process, so I quickly decided I was, without internet or tutors, going to teach myself to cook something, anything.
I’ll note here, quickly, that from time to time someone will ask me if it was difficult for me, a raging closeted homosexual, to live with straight men on my mission. I usually explain that the fact that I cohabitated with heterosexual teenagers for 24 months and still somehow came out of that wanting to date men is definitive proof that conversion therapy could never work.
But I digress.
I raided our apartment, hoping to find a cookbook. In a kitchen cabinet, I unearthed one — a dusty laminated step-by-step guide to beginners cooking, prepared years ago by a former mission president’s wife for someone in my exact predicament.
The cookbook contained 30 recipes. The instructions were so dumbed down I felt offended just reading them, even though they were exactly what I needed. There was an entire page dedicated to explaining how to turn on an oven. “Before you chop up the onion,” a recipe warned, “you need to take off the skin. You don’t want to cook or eat that part. You need to just throw that away.”
I decided to cook my way through this cookbook, like Julie Powell did with Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Thirty recipes in 30 days. I’m still waiting for someone to option my story for a film. (I would like to be played by Meryl Streep because, well, she can do anything.)
It started with a simple spaghetti. The next day I made “pizza” by cutting a loaf of bread in half, spreading tomato sauce from a jar over the two sides, and sprinkling it with cheese before popping it in the oven for a quick broil (there was a long warning about how fast the broil function can turn into a disaster).
The recipes became slightly more complicated as I worked my way through the cookbook. I made a shepherd’s pie. Tacos. Chicken soup. The 30th recipe was a large pot of nine-ingredient Ukrainian borscht. I was so proud of how that turned out I genuinely felt confident I was ready to star in a hit TV cooking show.
By the time I got through the book, I had learned the basics of cooking and was able to start branching out and even modifying or making up new recipes. And then something amazing happened: I started to find this new hobby, once intimidating and insurmountable, to be therapeutic and calming. It quickly became my favorite part of the day. Which, yes. The bar was low, considering that the rest of my day consisted of falling on ice and getting yelled at for pounding on someone’s door to tell them the Lord can see them drinking their nasty green tea and to knock it off.
(Briana Scroggins | Special to The Tribune) A cook cuts up a red pepper for a fire-roasted tomato and chipotle chili meal in 2021. Tribune guest columnist Eli McCann essentially learned how to cook on his Latter-day Saint mission, not that he ever became an expert.
Comfort cooking
Cooking through the years since has become a big part of who I am, which is remarkable, considering that I’ve never really gotten much better at it. I do it because it calms me when I’m stressed, so I have no desire to push myself to improve because it seems like that sort of strain would defeat the purpose.
But no one is knocking down my door for a seat at my dining table.
Still, last week my husband was cleaning out a baking cabinet in our kitchen, where I store all the duplicative supplies I have inadvertently purchased.
“How attached are you to these nine bags of hardened brown sugar,” he yelled at one point. “Are any of them a family heirloom I should know about?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Seriously, Eli,” he shouted, “why are there a dozen half-used identical cans of cooking spray in here?”
“You should be grateful,” I yelled back, feeling a phantom imprint of a missionary nametag over my left breast and almost hearing the sounds of street dogs midfight. “You could be eating a loaf of bread dipped in jam for dinner tonight.”
(Pat Bagley) Eli McCann, Salt Lake Tribune guest columnist.
Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband, new child and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. You can find Eli on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.
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