Would you let this man loose with your Thermomix?
This is written with love and affection for my DH and shared (with permission) to amuse my readers! This is a snippet of our evolving home cooking journey! I could have called it our ‘Epic Dinner Fail’, but I dislike that phrase on a number of levels.
My DH grew up in Israel and neither of his parents cooked (his Mum does make a mean Israeli salad and eggs though)! At thirteen he moved to a Kibbutz, which had a dining room that supplied all his meals. Therefore, he didn’t spend much time in the kitchen during his youth.
And sadly, as an adult, he has not developed an interest in food preparation or cooking at all! That is until he bought me a Thermomix for my birthday last year. He likes making smoothies, so the thermomix is perfect for him because it is just like a smoothie maker. And he is a guy, and most guys love gadgets. His thermomix enthusiasm lasted about one week!
Last night, however, he kindly suggested that he would make dinner in the thermomix to renew his thermie passion. He chose the recipes and went to the supermarket to get the ingredients. That’s when the fun began….
He decided to make organic refried beans and a healthy coleslaw from a new recipe book. The refried beans turned out really well, but a bean dip does not constitute a meal – more on this later!
I wandered into the kitchen as he was getting ready to make the coleslaw and I noticed a lettuce on the bench. I asked him what the lettuce was for and he said it was for the coleslaw (he didn’t know the difference between a lettuce and a cabbage). He had chopped 1/4 off the bottom and thrown it in the bin, while the rest of the core remained (he didn’t know how to cut up a lettuce either)!
So we had no coleslaw and that left us with bean dip for dinner! He offered to go to the supermarket to buy the cabbage and I suggested that he buy some organic corn chips and some cheese to go with the bean dip (to make nachos, but it was getting late, so I didn’t worry about a tomato based sauce). Being a nutritionist, I thought ‘let’s try mozarella on the corn chips because it is a less allergenic yellow cheese’. The organic corn chips tasted like cardboard and mozarella does not work on nachos at all! It tasted terrible. DH thought it was alright, but in his words ‘I have very low standards’. I, on the other hand, am a perfectionist and it is not easy for me to deal with a terrible home-cooked meal! I am working on it…..
So back to the coleslaw – I showed him how to cut around the core of the cabbage and then I said that I needed to roughly chop it before putting it in the thermomix. He refused to let me roughly chop it and ordered me out of the kitchen (he had a plan in his head and he was not going to take on any ‘food preparation advice’ in that instance). He thought that the thermomix would do the rough chopping for him!
So he put the cabbage in the thermomix in huge chunks and the thermomix did not chop it into a nice coleslaw consistency at all. Thankfully he didn’t explode my $2000 appliance! The coleslaw (which was a healthy one using yoghurt in the dressing rather than mayonnaise) tasted like c@#p and was full of huge chunks of cabbage. He didn’t mind it! Maybe my annoyance at ‘not being listened to’ had something to do with my aversion, or maybe this particular recipe it is just not my ‘cup-of-tea’?
Ps. I cleaned up the mess!
Thankfully it is an ever evolving journey!
With love and light
3 Comments
I love this Helene! Your house certainly sounds very entertaining.
I believe that all geniuses are initially misunderstood.
I believe that the story above demonstrates the creation of a misunderstood visionary culinary genius.
What a fantastic story! It was quite a relief to hear that no thermomixes were harmed :)