Home-cooked meals, home-cooked noodles, husband's cooking - Photo: NHA XUAN
My husband has maintained that cooking habit since we first fell in love, even though I often grumbled why we didn't go out to eat instead of having to cook and clean up. At those times, he just smiled and said, "Going to the market to cook helps my mind rest, then I can only focus on the food, without worrying about anything else."
Admire husband's good cooking
After 10 years together, our daily routine has remained the same. On weekends when he has no work to do, he takes his wife to the market and personally selects each fresh sea fish that has just been transported from Vung Tau, Phu Quoc, etc. Then he stops by the vegetable stall to buy a handful of raw vegetables, some eggplant, pineapple, and not forgetting some basil leaves to have a pot of delicious sour sea fish soup.
My husband and I both love sour fish soup, without a doubt. Sometimes it's sweetened mackerel, sometimes it's pineapple, mackerel cooked with sour bamboo shoots, baby mackerel cooked with young tamarind leaves... each season has its own dish. On days when we're too lazy to prepare too much, all we need is a bowl of sour soup, a plate of raw vegetables, and a bowl of spicy garlic and chili fish sauce to have a meal where "husband eats and wife slurps, nodding and praising it as delicious".
Because of the nature of his job, which involves traveling to many places, my husband has also learned how to cook many delicious and unusual dishes.
My husband's everyday meals sometimes open my eyes to dishes I've never even heard of, let alone eaten before, from kingfish stew with sour fruits, mackerel stew with pickled vegetables, frog soup with unripe bananas, fish noodle soup, stir-fried Tram mushrooms with eggs, anchovies braised in tamarind...
In addition to his love of learning new dishes, I also admire his dedication to his cooking, even though to him, those things are "normal". One day, I blurted out that I was craving stir-fried river prawns with star fruit. Early the next morning, I saw him riding his bike to the market, and a moment later, he brought back a bag of river prawns "you have to go to the market early to get this".
Another soup that I can’t get enough of is stuffed bitter melon soup. The dish sounds simple, but in the hands of my husband, the chef is so meticulous that it is delicious. The bitter melon must be wild bitter melon, the fruit must be small enough to be about two bites to be delicious. The stuffing is minced meat mixed with a little fat to make it smooth, sometimes mixed with shrimp, seasoned to taste, then put in a mortar with finely chopped wood ear mushrooms and pounded by hand to make it chewy. It must be pounded by hand to be delicious, my husband said.
Work together, love forever
Every time I "show off" a meal my husband cooks, my friends exclaim how lucky I am to have such a skilled homemaker, while others beautifully call them "loving meals." Once, a friend commented, "You're such a great husband," to which I immediately corrected them, "I'm a successful wife."
It's true that I'm lucky, but it's more about finding a life partner who knows how to take care of the family than about not having to cook because I'm a woman. Besides, I've probably seen this kind of luck many times before.
From a young age, the family kitchen was always my father's "territory," where he cooked dishes that my siblings and I loved, such as braised pork, sour soup, taro soup, and more.
My childhood was spent observing the division of labor in the family between my parents. My mother was a businesswoman, my father was a civil servant, whoever had free time took care of the family, one worked while the other did the housework. As for cooking, my mother would buy and prepare the ingredients, and the cooking process would be my father's.
Even now, when parents have reached retirement age, no longer working and not living with their children, their cooking process remains a rhythmic and well-defined "together-based" routine.
Sometimes I find it all so complicated. After Mom prepares the ingredients, she tells Dad to cook. Once Dad finishes cooking, he calls out, "Come sprinkle some pepper and cilantro on top, then we'll serve the meal." "Why make it so difficult? Why can't one person do it all?" I've asked many times.
I later understood that it was a matter of division of labor and working together to take care of the family.
In my family, there's also a clear division of labor. Before meals, the wife leisurely waits for the husband to cook, and after meals, the husband relaxes watching TV while the wife cleans up. Everyone does what they're good at.
Nowadays, there is no shortage of women who consider career goals as important as taking care of their families, and there are also many men who consider cooking a delicious meal for their wives and children as important as their work achievements. Scrolling through social networks, there is no shortage of famous TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram channels with meals cooked for their wives and children.
Perhaps it's time to reconsider the outdated notion that women should be the sole breadwinners for men, or that men should be the sole helpers with household chores? Let's not monopolize the kitchen for one gender; let it be a place where anyone can cook loving meals for their loved ones.
Housework should not be considered the exclusive domain of women.
According to the prevailing mindset from time immemorial, cooking and housework have always been considered the "privilege" of women. A woman who marries a capable husband who knows how to "help" her is considered lucky.
In an article published in the New York Post in March this year, a study by the US home cleaning service Homeaglow showed that the average American adult (both male and female) in 2022 spent 34 minutes a day on housework, which translates to an hourly wage of $19.69/day. In total, they worked 208 hours, equivalent to $7,188/year.
However, when analyzed by gender, the results show that women do more housework than men, earning $6,431 more per year in monetary terms. Specifically, men spend an average of 19 minutes per day doing housework, equivalent to $3,909 per year, while women spend an average of 49 minutes per day, equivalent to $10,341 per year.
That's why the saying "housework is women's work" isn't just a mindset in our country, but exists all over the world. Although that imbalance still exists, it's undeniable that many women today no longer consider housework to be their "exclusive" responsibility.
There is a generation of women born and raised without being taught by their parents that "you have to be good at housework to get married"; there is a generation of women busy enough with work, with their personal careers, with social work; there is a generation of women working side by side with their husbands to build a home, together earning money to take care of the family.
Of course, there are also husbands who stand shoulder to shoulder with their wives in housework and cooking.
Source: https://tuoitre.vn/nau-an-cho-nguoi-minh-thuong-20241019104107664.htm
Comment (0)