Making a Good Team

The Scene:  Saturday Night at our house.  Our kitchen.  The Big Kid is watching TV and the Little Kid is settled in his bouncy seat while Brian and I are cooking dinner.  Dinner:  Steak Stir-Fry.

Brian:  We're a little short on veggies for the stir-fry, so I cut up a carrot, too.

Ginny:  We're short because there's still two cucumbers in the fridge.  Those are supposed to go in there, too.

Brian:  Cucumbers in stir-fry?  No, that sounds bad.

Ginny:  Trust me, you've had it this way and you like it, you just don't remember.

So the cucumbers are peeled and seeded, and chopped coarsely to be added.  Brian starts cooking the veggies and I start making the sauce from scratch.  We had bottled stuff in the house, but it comes out better with homemade stir-fry sauce, and we have the stuff on hand.  In a large mixing cup goes soy sauce, hoisin, minced garlic, ginger paste and, since we finished up the onions with chili earlier in the week, a pinch of onion powder for flavor. The meal serves up nicely with some white rice and some toasted sesame seeds sprinkled on top.   Then Brian says something really nice, "You know what?  We make a great team in the kitchen.  I know a lot of technique and skills, and you really know what flavors go together."

I got to thinking about that, and he's absolutely right, we do make a good team!  He knows how to properly flip an omelette, bake something to the perfect degree of golden brown deliciousness and what's the best tool for the job.  If I tried to flip a pancake or an egg in the air and catch it like he does, I'd watch it fly to the floor.  And, I would have done it way too early so there'd be batter all over the side of the fridge from it's clumsy journey.  He always knows which knife to use from the knifeblock, I'm one of those irritating types that uses the steak knife to cut up everything!  He does a better job breading meat so it's coated evenly, mine looks like a hack job.  But flavors....that's my department.  I once stopped him from making a dish that he was throwing together with fresh tomatoes, honey and sesame seeds.   When we made "garlic chicken stew" last month, he wanted to make a rice dish with garlic and lime in it.  The recipe already had forty cloves of fresh garlic, why add something with jarred garlic, not to mention lime doesn't go well with that at all!  And herbs/spices, he always asks me what sounds good together, and does tarragon go well with scrambled eggs, etc.  

But the biggest reason why we make a good team in the kitchen is because we both love good food.  There's nothing we enjoy better  than preparing a meal together, something fabulous that tastes like restaurant dining in our own home.  Plus, being in the kitchen together, chatting about our respective days, giggling over something the boys did, it just is such a sparkle in my day.  We don't get to do a lot of cooking together like we used to, with a toddler and an infant in the house.  So when it comes together like today, that's a sweet thing.