Look, having breakfast as a family at
our house was customary, on weekends it was even a spread and ritual of thanksgiving.
Anyway, this particular Saturday morning, my mother asked me to watch the plantains she was frying; I am standing over the frying pan with fork in one hand and a book in the other; and I got so lost into what I was reading that the plantain burnt to a crisp, my mother was so irate that she grabbed the book out of my hand and pelt it through the kitchen door, down the gully.
By now, I know my mother was conspiring with somebody to teach me a lesson, and I was right.
The next thing I know she signed me up for cooking classes, ‘cooking class, I retorted, I am not going to cook for any man or darn his socks’ and I thought, what the hell, I am not going to win this one, you can’t beat them, join them.
I resigned myself to my fate and a like a true ring leader, I inveigled my cousin, the master of manipulation to convince my aunt to allow him to be a girly boy, just for this one time, of course, his father was livid, God forbid, that his one son, the apple of soul should suddenly morphed or metamorphosized into a ‘mamparla’ Needless to say, my cousin used some circular logic argument to twist his parents minds into thinking of cooking as the science of food preparation, this charlatan, went a step further and convince not only the parents of the my friends, but also, the parents of girls he had itchy pants for into taking art of gourmet cuisine – A summer’s past time, this crock was coming from a guy who had never washed a cup in his life.
Listen, my intention was to have fun and that I did, or more precisely, we had fun, for example, during a pastry dough class somebody was short a piece of dough, so I sailed a piece across the room to her; one of us moron would forget to bring a main ingredient, for instance, we were making Swiss tea rolls and my friend forget sugar, what’s a cake without sugar? So she substituted salt instead, every time I think about that albino looking roll and the look on the teacher’s face when she tasted the roll, I crack myself up laughing.
What can I say, that woman resented us! Suffice to say, that cooking class became a watershed moment for me, as I discovered that I beat to the detrimental sounds of my own drum, a provocateur that takes an antagonistic view on baseless assumptions.
Atrabiliously, I just wanted to slap Dorothy from the wizard of Oz silly and painted that yellow brick road red, but I digress.
Anyway, on this particular occasion, the lesson of the day was to fix something local for a pretend husband, a kind of coming of age soirée, so everyone planned a fancy dinner party and I, the contrarian, decided that I was doing nothing more than an entrée of green banana salad with me as both the appetizer and desert, oh my God, the teacher went choleric, and expressed wrathfully that any man that picked me up was going to ‘buss’ my arse.
Also, found out that I unknowingly loved big things, when I prepared my dishes they had to be big and in excess. Annoying to others, my stuff would be bursting, overflowing or flooding into somebody else’s space. Infuriated, the teacher exclaimed, Etta Thorpe, everything you do have to be bigggg!, it’s not everything that is big is sweet, I did not know at the time what she meant, but I sure do now – A little wine gets your head screwed on!
PS. Sometime ago, I had a one and a half gallon container of vinegar in my bathroom, just too was too lazy to pour some in a smaller container.
I had to have some work done in the bathroom, and of course, the work man’s eyes caught my gigantic bottle of vinegar, and he had the temerity to suggest that I partake in the act of cunnilingus et fellation, now you tell me?
