Captain OCD does a lot of the cooking around here, but by no means all. When we first started going out, we decided that a pork-roast dinner with mashed potatoes and all that goes along with it sounded good. At the grocery store, after we’d chosen a roast, he was wandering the aisles. I asked what he was looking for: potato buds. Because that’s what his mom used, and those were the “good” ones. If he’d said he was looking for severed puppy heads I would have been only equally as horrified. My mom didn’t do mixes of any kind (I still don’t), and she made cake or cookies several times a week (I don’t), so instant mashed potatoes was a crime against nature that I could not fathom. Although, my whole life I wanted nothing more than a bakery cake for my birthday. But, no, cake from scratch was all we ever got. It was a hard life.
Why, then, when the kids have questions about cooking, do the phone calls go like this?
Hi, is Daddy home?
No, why?
I need to know how to make mashed potatoes.
I’m the one who taught Captain OCD how to make mashed potatoes. True, he usually makes the mashed potatoes now, and he’s perfected the art to such a degree that when we’re at someone else’s house for dinner, and the cook is looking for help, we all volunteer him to mash the potatoes, but I was making real mashed potatoes while he was pouring freeze-dried crap out of a box.
