The Kindness Of Friends

by angelica

whereas poor blanche always depended on the kindness of strangers I did so on the kindness of my friends. to cook for me, to help me mend clothes (helping means they would have to do it, of course), to explain to me various things ‘domestic’.

lately I noticed that my NDS syndrome seems to inspire certain behavioral patterns in my VS⁺ (very domestic) friends in spite – or maybe because? – of my obvious symptoms. for example: the innocent remark to a homemade soup elicits the statement “oh, this is easy to make, I’ll show you.”

NO, you don’t!

sometimes they don’t even wait for an answer and go on to tell me anyhow on how to do it by pouring a bucketful of chinese gibberish into my ears. “sauté the onions”, “scald the milk”, “heat oil in large skillet” – how am I supposed to understand that?

a month ago a friend came visiting, went into my kitchen and put a black thing on my stove. a gift , he said and it was, as I learned, called an iron pan.

I got instructions, they sounded easy enough, and I then looked at the pan for the next few weeks with a mixture of dread and temptation until I finally decided it was time to maybe fight NDS.

first try: smoke alarm went off, experiment was stopped.

second try: everything went well until I added the ready-to-go-come-out-of-bottle teriyaki sauce. as it turns out you don’t heat the sauce up in the hot pan but add it later.

third try: I didn’t realize you have to cook the rice first.

fourth try: I managed to prepare a meal consisting of tofu cubes with precooked rice (my neighbor cooked the rice for me), flavored with teriyaki sauce.

I’m eating rice with tofu and teriyaki for a month now and am considering asking my friend for another recipe because it starts to get a bit boring…..

I think I may have just taken the first step to eventually overcome NDS.

How I Found Out

by angelica

I had no idea that I suffered from NDS-syndrome (No Domestic Skills) until I reached my early thirties.

first my mother cooked and did the homework, then my various boyfriends and later my now ex-husband did the chores.

when I was single I hired a cleaning lady and ate out.

then came the day when a friend of mine was helping re-roofing my garage and I was too lazy to drive to a restaurant to get some take out for lunch.

after just having spent two weeks visiting another dear friend of mine who loves to cook and being subjected to watching her do just that for 14 whole days I decided to FIX LUNCH myself.

I had eggs in the fridge, and potatoes that weren’t too old, and frozen spinach. I always have frozen vegetables in my freezer cause they are healthy. every few month I throw the old ones out and replenish them with new ones. I do the same with the potatoes.

anyways – how hard could it be to cook some potatoes and serve them with spinach and scrambled eggs?

to make a long story short: if we’d been in an Italian restaurant this would have been on the menu:

potatoes al dente, served with spinach porridge and egg flambé.

and a look into the kitchen made the lebanon in 2006 after the israeli campaign come to mind.

this was my first hint that I might suffer from NDS-syndrome. and soon the evidence mounted!

to be continued…..