Modern life
CAN'T COOK WON'T COOK
Sharon Wright can’t even boil an egg, let alone stuff a mushroom – and, frankly, she’s fine with it
The kitchen is silent apart from the highlighter pens my husband and I are squeaking across bank statements. We’re attempting to shock ourselves with how much we spend on eating out. He refrains from pointing out that this startling sum would be a whole lot less if someone (me) did their fair share of the cooking. Of the two of us, he’s the one who puts food on the table in our house and it’s me who suggests bobbing out for another curry on the overdraft.
I can’t cook, you see. And I don’t mean that in a self-deprecating ‘nothing fancy, this, just a little soufflé’ way. I mean in the way that your entire family takes the smoke alarm going off as a signal that dinner’s nearly ready. My retort to any request for an alternative to burnt offerings is, ‘I’m not running a cafe!’ Imagine the Tripadvisor scores if I did: ‘We could barely see our plates at The Shaz Cafe as smoke billowed from the kitchen along with some choice swear words. One star.’
Luckily, at no point before we skipped down the aisle did I pretend that this was a temporary problem. Twenty years on, it’s very, very clear that I will NEVER be able to cook. We’ll have to find other ways to economise because the cost-of-not-cooking crisis is permanent.
Stomach-churner
Looking back, the signs were there that, just like wearing court shoes and understanding eyeshadow, cooking was a life skill I’d never master. Food fails run in the family, you see. Mum’s first Christmas dinner had my dad rolling on the floor clutching his stomach. Who knew she should have removed the plastic bag of giblets before bunging the turkey in the oven? Could happen to anyone. Well, anyone in our clan.
At my grandma’s, there was no mucking about making homemade chicken soup like they did in books. Not when there was a box of Cup a Soup and a kettle right there. When she did attempt to bake, she’d end up covered from perm to housecoat hem in flour, and would need a cig and a sit-down to recover. She’s the reason I still like tinned spuds and boilin-the bag fish. We spent time together reading our library books with a shopbought vanilla slice and agreed with Shirley Conran, who famously observed, ‘Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.’
Unfortunately, when I became a mother myself, I discovered that not everyone shared this insight or its sensible cousin, ‘Life is too short to bake for a school cake sale.’ Once I picked up a pal to go to the PTA-run bun figh
