#TheSW30: Day 18, Better Than Betty Crocker

Day 18: What is something about you that people would be surprised to learn?

I go to Whole Foods every single weekday.  Sometimes I go to Whole Foods twice a day.  The hot bar is the closest thing I can get to the a home cooked meal every day.  Go ahead and judge.  Poor, poor Michelle.  She can't cook.  She doesn't have a man that can cook for her either.  How sad.

It's not all that sad.  And the surprising thing you don't know about me isn't that I CAN'T cook...it's that I can.  I just choose not to, because of one of the few cons of living the single life - cooking for one really sucks.  Like tonight, I made a pot of soup.  I'll probably end up freezing part of it and eating the same soup every night for like three weeks.  But I can cook.

It all started with baking.  I think my mom's got a picture of me and my grandpa baking chocolate chip cookies when I was a toddler.  Till this day those are still the best cookies I have in my baking arsenal.  In fact, I attribute to them to me even having a job in radio.  I use to bake them for the on-air personalities back at my old station when I was an intern and continued to bring them by after I completed my internship.  Eventually they gave me a job as an overnight board-op and often joked it was the chocolate chip cookies.  In fact, when I go home for Christmas the few of my former co-workers that are still with the cluster expect them.  Hell, I sent Keke the recipe when I was trying to get my job as his co-host!  I've made minor tweaks to family recipes.  I've grabbed some recipes from the internet and made similar tweaks.  All of it has made me a pretty bomb baker (and I have references!) One day when I eventually do find the one, we have a football jersey wearing little kid and that kid is old enough to go to school...I'm gonna rock the PTA bake sale.

As for cooking?  That's a newer skill for me.  My ex-fiance did most of the cooking the last year that I lived at home.  My contribution was buying the ingredients from time to time when he was out of work and maybe whipping up a pot of my family's wedding soup but that was really about it.  That changed over two years ago when I accepted an invitation to the salesman's Sunday Dinner that I had been peer pressured into going to.  Every weekend he made quite a spread for the friends and family he invited over, before every would gather around to play a game like spoons.  It felt good to be included in that.  When you're 2,100 miles from your own family it really does feel good to be part of something like that.  But if something's too good to be true, it's gotta be right?  That statement is entirely true.

His dad was there for dinner on father's day weekend.  At some point in conversation his dad asked if he was seeing anyone.  The salesman told him he wasn't.  I was shocked...because I knew I was staying the night there again.  We always played it off like I had had one too many glasses of wine so I needed to stay and sober up a bit before I left.  But all those weeks of Sunday Dinner?  I never left.  I stayed the night every week.  The next week after that?  There was no Sunday dinner.  Or I wasn't invited anymore.  I'll never know the truth.  Needless to say that became the first week that I became really uncomfortable with what was going on with us and wanted to figure out what exactly this situationship with him was.  I didn't get a real answer, I got a sales pitch.  That's where everything got dark and twisty but for some reason I thought the answer to the unraveling of our situationship was to learn how to cook.  I got this weird "anything he can do, I can do better" complex that developed out of the heartache I was experiencing.  So I cooked.  Baked ziti, salmon cakes, mini turkey meat loaves, pizzas, wedding soup, curry, pierogis...did it make me feel better?  Not for the reasons I thought it would, but I did feel accomplished and proud of what I put together in the kitchen.  In fact, until it got too overwhelming with 10+ people and a bunch of kids in my one bedroom apartment, I held my own Sunday dinners for a while.

So even though I learned to cook out of spite, it's become something I've come to really enjoy and want to share with others.  There's some strength in knowing that I got something I love out of heartbreak that really destroyed me.

Surprise! Michelle Heart can actually cook.  And is quite good at it!  Hopefully one day I'll get to share a recipe or meal with you!  Tweet me what surprising fact people don't know about you or a favorite recipe of yours to @michelleonkiss!