issue 01 - cooking for my boyfriend
dating a non-cook, the lie of perfection and finding metaphors in cooking
Around this time last year, I cooked for my boyfriend for the first time. I spent $80 at Superstore (thanks, Trudeau) to make shrimp pad thai. I poured sauv blanc into stemless wine glasses, lit candles and folded colourful napkins. I needed to craft the perfect dish so he would fall in love and marry me. I feel I must mention at this point that we’d only known each other for five weeks. I imbued that simple pad thai with far too much meaning. Tears were shed as I cooked and panicked about the texture of the noodles, the way the sauce stuck to the pan, if I was going to give my new beau food poisoning.
A year-ish later, I’ve cooked for him countless times (and have never given him food poisoning!). I still sometimes cry when I make a mistake in the kitchen, either because I’m searching for perfection, or because I only want my boyfriend to eat delicious food that isn’t burnt on one side (sorry about those empanadas the other week, babe). Actually, calling it perfectionism is a cop out. It’s an attractive narrative for what is actually anxiety and low self-esteem. “Perfectionism” is a way for me to pretend that my sense of self doesn’t rest upon the quality of my creative outputs, or my ability to serve others. But that’s exactly what I base my already thin self-esteem on. If I can make myself indispensable via service to others, I will never be alone.
Turns out I never took a photo of the pad thai. This was another early dish I made for him.
My boyfriend is not much of a cook. He always hops up at the end of the meal to wash the dishes, so it’s not like he doesn’t pull his weight in the kitchen. He’s held a joint to my lips while I tended to the pan on the stove – a service many chefs I’ve worked with would probably love to have at their disposal.
But the fact that he doesn’t really cook should take some of the pressure off of me. It doesn’t, though. It makes cooking for him even more vexing.
I strive for an ever better meal every time I cook. Every recipe has room for improvement. My boyfriend, meanwhile, is annoyingly easy to please. If I say the pasta was a little soft, he says he didn’t notice. If I mumble about the sauce needing more acid next time, he says it tasted great and also any home cooked meal is appreciated. He won’t play the home cook’s game of treating a recipe like a first draft, something to be edited, tweaked, futzed with. He doesn’t approach cooking as an iterative process the way that I do.
I learned to cook this way from watching my mom, whose cookbooks, crinkled from spills, were filled with culinary marginalia. An extra tablespoon of parmesan, more chilli flakes, less sauce. Always in pursuit of a more perfect recipe.
Brunch on the balcony with my boyfriend and best friend.
To me, this is where cooking and writing are most similar: draft after draft pursuing the satisfaction of getting a sentence or a sauce just right. Learning to publish or plate something that’s not quite perfect. Knowing that tomorrow, I will come to the page or the pan again. It’s a craft and a practice. The pleasure is found in the generative tension – knowing you can’t be perfect, but reaching for perfection anyway.
There are meals that don’t require this level of striving and reworking. I eat the same PC Blue Menu Superfood oatmeal, topped with raspberries, peanut butter and dark chocolate chips every weekday morning. There’s a way of cooking and eating that is solely for sustenance. This, too, is like writing. Some writing I do because it pays my rent, keeps me in dirty gin martinis, vintage coats and used books. And some writing I do for love of the process, the very act of doing, fuck the final product, I’m here to get my hands sticky with egg whites, to lick batter off a spatula. To show my boyfriend I love him with stir fry and chocolate banana muffins. To find joy in the process.
Still, that can all unravel and turn to anxiety in an instant – what if I fuck up and the gnocchi comes out tough, the brussel sprouts still raw? If I mess up, why bother? Someone else will do a better job.
It’s the same fear that prevents me from writing sometimes, the fear of falling short. Allow me an aside to tell you a story. I promise it’s relevant.
In grade ten, my English teacher assigned us a short story writing assignment. He showed us a former student’s story as an example. As I read it, I started weeping. My friend Kevin patted my back and shrugged at our teacher. No one understood why I was crying in the middle of class about some random girl’s assignment. But I was ready to give up right there. That other girl’s story was so good. I don’t remember what made it worth shedding tears over, but her excellence made me question my own value as a writer. If you’re a perfectionist, or an insecure person, or an artist of any kind, you’ve probably had many experiences like this. You see someone perform and feel a pang because what if you’re never that good? If I’m not good at this, who am I? What am I worth?
It’s impossible to care about creating something and not feel that way, unless you're, like, Donald Trump-level self-confident, which if you are, congrats, you’re probably going to be way more successful and less afraid in whatever you pursue. But for the rest of us home cooks and writers and photographers and artists, the pain of comparison will probably lead us to a lot of procrastination, self-criticism and inertia in our creative lives.
The challenge is to see this as part of the process, to accept the mistakes, to write down other ideas, to learn as you go.
I suck at this, by the way. I left this document sitting open in a tab, untouched, for a week, convinced it would not live up to the lofty aspirations I have for my newsletter. But the point of this newsletter isn’t to be so amazing that an agent or publisher reaches out to me. The point isn’t to write something that encompasses all human emotion. It’s to push myself to write. To get a little more vulnerable in my work as a practice.
Sometimes all I “cook” is bagged salad.
I’m learning to bring this submission and humility to my relationship, too. The purpose of a romantic relationship is not to become perfect, or create some kind of flawless final product – it’s a practice of communication, vulnerability, generosity and trust. Whew!
So my boyfriend doesn’t understand the kitchen meltdowns. He doesn’t get what makes the meal only 90% right. He just loves that I made it for him. Doesn’t that speak to the inherent worth of creating something? Isn’t that all we can really do?
Came here from your comment in Clementine Morrigan's post and found this so charming! I get affronted by my boyfriend's bland praise of my cooking, but you're right that sometimes it's enough that it's just food and it makes him happy. I still can't keep myself from nitpicking but he's a good sport about it.