Why I'm never inviting you over for dinner.

Look.

I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just come out with it…

I can’t cook.

I know , I know – I can hear their cries from here.

Can’t COOK?! A 35-year-old WOMAN?!

The horror, the gall, the disgust!

But it’s true. I don’t know my way around the kitchen. At all.

And even more unforgivably, I have no plans to ever learn.

(Cleaning up, however? I’m President of the Human Home Dishwashers Association (PHHDA) and will NEVER abdicate my position, so help me god)

I don’t sautee, flambe or simmer.

I couldn’t tell you the difference between a slow cooker and crockpot if my life depended on it.

I refuse to crane my neck over videos of people slicing and spicing, hoping to learn a trick or two from the balletic dance of their hands around a hot pan. It’s just not in me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried.

There was a good two-year period in my early twenties when I ate the same bizarre bean casserole dish because it didn’t taste awful and seemed not to have a negative effect. I even put avocado on it after a few months and it took on a vaguely Mexican flavour, which was…fine.

I persisted with this horror purely because this was a food that I could successfully push around in a pan over heat – you know, cooking.

After 10 years working on sets in film in television, being fed en masse in great hunks and steaming dollops and only really needing to snack in the five hours you have at home, I stopped with this madness. Cooking was so futile, it was almost an insult to the film industry. Or so I told myself.

Now, I arrange, collage and pastiche my meals – and that, for me, is plenty. Anything that can be indelicately squashed into a sandwich, torpedoed into a wrap or scattered into a salad is my forte. And I’m good at it.

But for many years, I tried desperately to hide the fact that I couldn’t cook.

The amount times I’ve loudly announced a sudden hankering for takeaway to a room as an impending mealtime descended like a lead curtain…

When I first started dating my now-wife, she came to stay at my place for the weekend.

This was both the best news of my life and an immediate Category 1 disaster situation.

I remember frantically calling my friend Charlotte for advice, as if I could possibly download her 20+ years of culinary skill down the phoneline in 20 minutes. Shockingly, this is not actually possible.

After several frustrating minutes, Charlotte and I agreed that I would stock the fridge to impress her and make elaborate charcuterie boards for the next three days.

When Aurelia arrived, my fridge was bulging with a truly inhuman amount of produce that I had not the foggiest idea what to do with.

(Spoiler: we got pizza and I distributed the rest of the fridge contents to my neighbours, who were appropriately confused but happy for the chicken breast and saffron)

Cooking is one of Aurelia’s true passions and she is a Michelin-starred home chef (awarded by the prestigious Human Home Dishwashers Association) which is a very happy accident. It took me a good few days to admit that I, in fact, wasn’t. I was petrified that constantly burning frozen gyoza and pathologically undercooking spaghetti would make me ineligible for her love.

Actually, it was the opposite.

Aurelia loves being ‘the cook’ (her words) and any time she doesn’t, I’m straight on the assembly line whipping up a toastie with crisps and a side salad or picking up a feast for two from her favourite Lebanese chicken joint.

All of which has given me the confidence to finally admit that if I invite you around for dinner – you’re bringing the dinner.

But honestly, it’s a relief to be truly shit at something. What a fucking joy!

Not because I’m good at everything (Spoiler: I’m not) but because we’re always expected to right that wrong. To turn ‘can’t’ into ‘can’. Every time.

We’re all so capable of so very much – we have jobs that we work at, skills and hobbies we develop, educations, kids and pets that we parent, personal hygiene and relationships that we maintain.

Every day, we’re good at things. We do and know so much. It feels like a small act of rebellion to not know, for once.

To have something be a complete mystery. To fail and let it sit in the ‘failure’ category, rather trying to rescue it with attempt after attempt at success. Especially for women – and especially in the domestic space.

‘Girl stuff’ used to terrify me, as a young self-aware lesbian. When I went to other people’s houses, they would know their way around morning pancakes, nail polish bottles and the glorious art of tampon insertion. I would go on to master two out of three of those things. But in the interim, I felt like an impostor.

If I couldn’t slap on a French tip, throw together a spag bol and confidently wear a g-string while my uterus was spewing what felt like my yearly allowance of blood through a deeply insufficient opening, what kind of girl was I?

Men are expected to be terrible cooks. It’s expected. If they’re good at it, they’re immediately awarded ‘catch’ status, even if they’re ugly or, worse, Republicans.

By the same token, it’s also expected that women, as their born-to-be wives, will learn how to cook so that their men can concentrate on other things – like cheating on them.

It’s also expected that men will know things women won’t – like basic carpentry, plumbing and how to ‘look at the car’ if there’s smoke coming out of it.

So, for a little while there, I thought not still using pads and knowing that cars need oil to avoid catching on fire meant I was a man.

According to boys at the time, it actually meant I was a bitch. According to me, not knowing how to cook those boys pancakes in the morning rendered me the smartest girl in the world.

I still might think that.

Over the years, countless well-meaning heroes have tried to throw their life rafts to me as I sank into the delicious abyss of kitchen non-comprehension.

I’ve had many a kind hand try to guide me. Those hands inevitably ended up streaking the hair of a confused do-gooder mumbling to themselves about ‘how can you not…’ and ‘why would you put…’

But I’ve kept myself alive. Hell, my doctor even claims to think I’m healthy. (He’s an old Footscray boy with a total of three hairs on his head who blows his nose on the American flag, I love him)

So, as I sit here – a 35-year-old married lesbian who can recite her local Lebanese chicken joint’s phone number by heart and has the cleanest kitchen in greater Melbourne – I’d like to leave you with this.

Maybe we shouldn’t try to be constantly trying to fill the gaps in our knowledge.

Maybe instead, we could hook up a hammock and swing over them in the breeze of our delicious unknowing.

To me, that sounds good enough to eat.

TN