Becoming a Domestic Goddess

I've been living with Bryan for 3 weeks now, and I am becoming quite the Domestic Goddess. Since August 2003 up until the beginning of the month, I was living at St. John's College at UBC, where breakfast and dinner are provided 5 days a week. And on the weekends of course we usually went out for brunch or dinner. So I would estimate that in the 14 months prior to moving out of SJC, I would have cooked about 6 meals, and usually that involved a barbeque.

In the first week we lived in our new place Bryan did most of the cooking, partly because I couldn't remember how to do it, and partly because I would show up at 6:15 pm sharp wondering why dinner wasn't waiting for me. We also had to get used to the idea of doing our own washing up, rather than putting our dinner plates on a trolley and somebody cleaning them for us. Luckily we have a dishwasher to soften the blow of cleaning up after ourselves.

But gradually things are coming back to me - like what measuring cups are used for, and how to turn on the oven. Now that we do our own grocery shopping, I also find myself thinking about how to use up leftovers to reduce waste. For example, last weekend I used up a bunch of over-ripe bananas by making banana and pecan bread. And even as we speak I have some leftover pumpkin (I call it pumpkin, Canadians call it squash) roasting in the oven with onions, garlic and maple syrup, which I will turn into soup. I will then put the soup into the freezer for those days when we come home from work forgetting that we have to cook my own dindins. I also made tomato and ginger soup yesterday, some of which we had for lunch today, and the rest went into the freezer.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to make an onion fritatta for dinner, which will use up leftover eggs.