My Kind of Cookbook

     I love writing so much I’ve sometimes forgotten to eat. If it weren’t for my husband, a great chef, I’d turn into a scrap of dried leather. (He thinks I compliment his culinary skills only to keep him in the kitchen, but I relish every meal he creates - especially because I’m not making it.)     
     It’s not that I’m a bad cook. It’s that I’m distracted. My mother used to concoct a twenty-four-hour salad - prepare it a day in advance so the flavors meld. I never start it until it’s nearly time to eat, so I call it my twenty-four-second salad.     
     I’m not the only writer like this. C. Robertson says her poetry is “a disease, a sort of recurrent itch that keeps me awake nights and makes me burn the bacon and causes my husband to use unholy adjectives.”     
     I’ve set some burnt offerings on the table, but I call them “blackened.”     
     Author Virginia Greene Millikin says that just as loaves of bread won’t rise without yeast, stories don’t rise “without that piece of your very heart that you have put into it.”     
     So that’s my problem. I don’t put my heart into cooking. Maybe if I…oops, gotta run. I need to have a meal ready in fifteen minutes so we can get out the door.     
​     (Did I mention my husband is a great chef?)