If you're married to a chef . . .

I was just reading a book on home management, when under the caption "cooking" I found the line, "If you're married to a chef, you can skip the following section." HA! Seriously, let's review what it's like when you are really married to a chef.

If you're married to a chef,

• You can expect to have your cupboards rearranged so that they are partly organized by his system and partly by yours, which means that you permanently can't find anything. He doesn't have time to overhaul the whole system, but believes that your system is unprofessional and therefore embarks on fixing it for about five minutes. Then you get to wonder where in the world it would be professional to store your angel food cake pan, which by the way is far, far away from anything useful because he doesn't like angel food cake and thinks the pan is silly.


• Your cooking will always meet with a running commentary on how to do everything differently or better or like so and so, or my personal favorite, the "real" way.


• He will have many suggestions and plans about how to buy and use food to prevent spoilage and waste, but he will expect you, like any good prep cook, to implement his plan. And laud his wisdom in creating more work for you.


• On holidays, he will conveniently disappear during major food prep periods. And IF you find him, he will amazingly orchestrate the event so that everyone is following his instructions, working like little busy bees. This he will call expediting.


• If you cook him a nice meal and wait to eat together, he will not be hungry when he gets home. And he won't want to eat with you, insisting that more leftovers would be nice.


• He will not cook at home. Ever. The only exceptions to this being if you are seriously incapacitated for an extended period of time and there are no church ladies or mothers or sisters left in the world. Or, if he is trying to prove a point about how you should use something up or do something. Or if he wants something out of you.

So, if you are married to a chef, you should read and study the section on cooking more than anyone else because he isn't going to solve your problems in the kitchen. He will create a few. He will offer advice and suggestions. But, he will not cook at home. And you have to feed a chef, in my case a darn good one, dinner.