The Kitchen – an unknown room in the house

The Kitchen – an unknown room in the house

Manfreedinthekitchen.com Blog 2

I can remember the moment like it was yesterday.  It was August ’85, we were living in Nairobi, Kenya, and my wife, Corinne, The Camera Girl on our online cooking series, was bedridden suffering from a second bout of malaria.  We’d both been bitten by an infected mosquito in Bujumbura, Burundi, and come down with severe cases of malaria.

We’d survived the first bout.  That’s scary crap in one’s life.  We’d heard of travelers and volunteers dieing of malaria while we were in Africa.  Happily, Corinne recovered.

The moment I’m currently alluding to occurred when I walked into the kitchen to prepare something for her to eat.  I was suddenly responsible for preparing something nutritious for my wife.  I stood there in the middle of the room.  It was a fully kitted out kitchen in the house we were taking care of while the owners vacationed abroad.  It was one of those imaginary but painfully enlightening Zen sticks over the head.  I was next to useless in the kitchen.

All I could make was a few simple sandwiches.  Other than a fried egg sandwich there was no other hot food that I could prepare.   There were no canned goods in the house.  Everything was fresh, bought at the local market.  I couldn’t prepare a soup from scratch.  I didn’t know how to cook rice.  The basics were missing.

It was that moment to remember, that cartoon-ish light-bulb flashing over one’s head, that glimpse of the blatantly obvious, I was inept as a cook!