Recently, my husband invited a visiting Polish co-worker to our home for dinner. He told this engineer that his wife was a gourmet cook. 

That’s a lot of pressure.

I am not a gourmet cook. I am a gourmet eater. I know good food when I have it. I was a food critic (which may be where this erroneous reputation started), but I get panic attacks if I am expected to do what I know a gourmet meal should be.

I know food. I know nutrition, and I know what a great presentation looks like. I can do the first two, but the artistic element to serving food is not my baliwick. I am kind of like Salieri with his feelings of inferiority to Mozart. Well, truthfully, I am not even close to the talent of Salieri. Salieri’s frustration was centered on that he could totally appreciate genius, but couldn’t produce it like Mozart did, even though he was very talented.  

So when our guest arrived for his supposed gourmet meal, I made a pork roast with root vegetables, thinking that this would be similar to a meal for him back in Poland, and I made the mistake of using my oven, instead of doing the Dutch oven on the countertop range. The pork wasn’t done enough, the potatoes were OK, and the carrots never really roasted.

I had to inform our guest, who was appreciative, polite and kind, that I was not a gourmet cook–I was a gourmet eater. And later, I informed my dear hunkyhubby NEVER to tell anyone that again.

I know he was just being proud of me, but I can tell you, next time, we will invite them for hunkyhubby’s Spanish tortilla breakfast (a dish he learned to make while we were in Spain), which is waymore gourmet than my meals.