The Household COO

My MIL has gone overseas, so tonight, I cooked for my FIL for the very first time. I’m sure he’s been wondering if I even know how to cook since I haven’t made anything more complicated than tea and coffee for him since I started dating his son. Okay, I lied, I did make a few cakes with varying degrees of success, but now that we know he’s a diabetic, I’ve cut down on making the sweet stuff.

While it’s okay for me to experiment on the hubby every now and then, I figured that FILs fall into a unique little category of their own that warrants the use of tried and tested recipes. The only true tried and tested recipe I have up my sleeve is my Spaghetti Bolognaise which I’m sure would have had me set for life if it weren’t for the fact that I was cooking in my MIL’s house. Due to my MIL’s religious practices, the cooking of beef in the house is a major no-no, so I had to substitute my beef with chicken breast.

Although it’s true that a good bolognaise sauce requires a bit of chicken, I wasn’t sure how it would taste without the beef mince, so I ended up having to experiment - just a little. I’m glad to say that it turned out okay - what a relief for me. My FIL didn’t rave about the food, but then again, he did finish his plate, so I’ll take that as a sign that the food was okay.

I’m not sure that I’d like to try that out again because there is another truth to be said about cooking in your own kitchen. To be honest, it’s never the same when you cook in someone else’s kitchen because you never know whether they have the utensils or ingredients that you require. Ingredients may be easy to resolve with a trip to the supermarket, but cooking utensils and facilities something else altogether.