This is true. I eat out more than anyone else I know. In fact, as I write this, I’m thinking about which restaurant I’d like to frequent tonight, despite the fact that I have thawed and am now marinating chicken breasts in Mojo to grill later. My fascination with eating out comes down to two things. I love good food and I love to be served.
While the latter may sound elitist, it isn’t mean to. I love to be served because when I’m sitting at a table in a restaurant confident that the food is going to be good and the service attentive, I can focus my attention on the company I’m with. It’s actually the ultimate compliment to have me return to your restaurant. It means we have established a level of trust that you will meet or exceed my expectations every time we’re together. It’s an exchange of faith on a very deep, personal level.
It’s not that I can’t or don’t like to cook either. I can and do, at least three times a week. I’ve studied microwave cooking, though that may well be an oxymoron, vegetarian cooking, the art of grilling, Chinese, Jewish, Greek and Italian cooking.
Before I had kids I even hosted all sorts of food-related parties. We had flavorful barbeques after softball games and a murder mystery dinner party where I served my very first Coquilles St. Jacques and Coq au Vin. I’ve had make-your-own-pizza parties. We had seafood fests that included, shrimp scampi, clams casino and lobsters boiled alive served simply with drawn butter and lemon. I had a fondue dinners, appetizer-only parties and vodka tasting parties.
And after fly fishing for sockeye salmon in the Kenai River in Alaska (where I slipped on the slippery uneven rocks in the river bed, filled up my chest-high waders with the ice-cold water, screamed like a banshee as my ass froze literally, and had to be helped out of the water to the sound of applause), I hosted a brunch where the star of the meal was the freshly smoked salmon I actually caught.
And given my predilection for restaurants, I am intrigued by chefs too. I’ve written a chapter in Master SEAL where the hero cooks for the heroine. I call him Chefalicious (thanks to @chefalicious on Twitter) for various reasons you’ll just have to wait til it comes out to find out. But I do think there is something really sexy about a man who can cook…just…for…me. I think it’s a similar fascination I have with the SEALs whereby I admire his ability, he has a specific expertise and skill set from which I can learn, he has a unique specialty, discipline and focus. All these attributes add up to my being able to give up control of a given situation, which frees me up to focus on other things…
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