I'm Not Tyler Perry

I don't ever claim to be a typical 1950s wife. Number one example: I don't skip in the door after school, put on an apron, and proceed to fix a gourmet dinner for my waiting and hungry husband. The only nights that Justin and I eat dinner together are Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday and the routine usually goes like this: I get home from school (except Sunday of course), start asking Justin around 4 p.m. when he wants to have dinner, start begging him at 5 p.m. if we can start dinner, go into the kitchen around 5:30 or 6 when he is finally hungry and I put some kind of meat product in a pot/skillet/baking dish and start cooking it. I then maliciously go over to the computer and start doing something for school and let Justin finish the rest of the dinner. I think he has caught onto this game.

Unlike me, though, Justin is Mr. Experiment in the kitchen. He's slightly obsessed with the Food Network and secretly idolizes Tyler Florence and Guy Fieri. Thank goodness for this. I am a creature of habit and would really be OK with eating the same thing for dinner for a couple of weeks straight. I think I have made a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch for the past 13 days. But Justin is always looking for new recipes and meals he can add his own touch to. I honestly think that if we were quarantined in our apartment for a month, we could survive on recipes that he would come up with based on what food is in the freezer and in the back of the cabinets.

Tonight, we planned to have hamburgers. I knew this would be all his doing so I didn't even try my start-dinner-and-run-away-sneak-attack. He started making the patties with different spices flying everywhere. He looked like a chemist trying for the Nobel prize. I feel this is where I should mention my habit of being a backseat chef. While I was on the couch organizing my English 9 vocabulary binder, I couldn't help but to question the temperature of the skillet since I heard very loud sizzling like he was burning the hamburgers right to the core. He is the one that burnt bacon one Sunday morning and our apartment smelled like charred pig for a week. But he kept insisting it was OK and I finally accepted the fact that he probably knew what he was doing and that these burgers would probably turn out better than the ones he made a month ago that were completely raw in the center. I'm still thankful that dinner didn't land us both in the emergency room with E-coli.

When it was precisely time to eat, and I say precisely because apparently there is a fine art to how many minutes to cook each patty on each side, I prepared my hamburger bun (I'm a plain Miracle Whip kind of girl; Justin likes Miracle Whip and ketchup), put the perfectly browned patty with cheese oozing out of it on my plate and proceeded to the dining room. Oh wait. I meant that I proceeded to the TV trays in the living room since our dining room still functions as a catch-all with no table and chairs. Anyway, I was nervous to bite into Justin's latest concoction on my plate. Either it would be like last time and I would sink my teeth into the raw innards of a cow, or it would be good. It was the latter. It really was one of the best hamburgers I've ever had in my life. It tasted a bit like my mom's used to and a little like a Five Guys burger. So when we both finished the last bites of our respective Nobel prize-worthy hamburgers, I tried to give him a compliment, but I think it turned into an insult. The exchange went like this:

Me: "You're a regular Tyler Perry aren't you?"

Justin (confused): "I'm Tyler Florence. I'm not Tyler Perry."

Me: "Right. That's it. Will you let me take a picture with you and the other two hamburgers?"

Justin: "You want to blog about this, don't you?"

Me: "Yeah. You can put a hat on in the picture if you want."

Justin (insulted that I thought he might look better in a hat than his disheveled hair): "Thanks, babe. Don't forget to mention that in your blog."

Oops. However, if this dinner is any preview on how our marriage will be, I'll be happy to have Justin experiment more often in the kitchen. And thankfully for him, I may be able to clutter our spare bedroom to the ceiling, but I can't stand a messy or dirty kitchen...so I cleaned up. Check him out with his awesome creations: