Love in the Kitchen

It's funny when people talk about how they met their significant others. They talk about bars and parties and websites. Churches, workplaces, and classes. But really, that's not the important part. My husband and I met in a class room. Technically, just outside of one, while picking up our quizzes from the week before. But where we fell in love? That was the kitchen.

It started with the chocolate chip cookies. He brought them over to my apartment for our first study session. They won him my roommate's instant approval so you know they were good.

Then there were the bread parties with our friends. Weekends spent with recipe print outs attempting to make decent breads in my too-small apartment kitchen. The breads shared a common blandness but the friendships have endured.

Cooking our first real meal together. A chicken, rice, and veggie dinner that took us over two hours to serially assemble.

Staying up all night to make nectarine pie in my husband's college apartment. Using a drinking glass as a rolling pin and eating piping hot pie straight out of the oven at 2am punch drunk on infatuation and exhaustion.

At one of our many college potlucks, a friend taught us the wonder of seven layer dip, a recipe that still makes an appearance as an occasional dinner.

The thanksgiving after we were married we spent hours contorting to make apple pie in our closet sized kitchen. Our first contribution to the family meal as a family of our own.

Graduate school was a long string of bowls filled with doctored up Ramen, eaten in our computer chairs while watching Naruto and Slayers and Trigun.

We moved to Alabama and faced our first Thanksgiving alone with a meal concocted mostly from boxes. It was my husband's roasted turkey breast that gave me the hope that our own traditions could be just as joyous as the crowded bustle of the holidays I had grown up with.

My mother gave us a kitchen aid mixer and we made a chocolate cake from scratch. A first foray away from boxes and mixes.

The kitchen in this house was what sold us. Open, spacious, and filled with brilliant light and counter space. The bonanza of culinary creations which followed started even before all of the boxes were unpacked. Muffins, cookies, and cakes. Quick breads and biscuits topped with our first jam. Canning spaghetti sauce, salsa, even green beans. Homemade sandwich bread and soups.

It's what we do. On free weekends, we try new recipes. On busy weeknights we cook and clean side by side, many hands dividing the work. Kitchen gadgets are household purchases, carefully considered and deliberated upon.

And it's in the kitchen that I most clearly see our future, our dreams. I see little hands rolling out cookie dough. A pantry stocked with nothing but staples and Ball jars filled with every color of the rainbow. Friends crowded around the island, perched on stools and chatting over tea. And those quiet moments with my husband, when the kitchen is clean, the lights turned out, and it's just us, the moonlight, and our latest creation.