Cooking for the one you love

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".

Due to the nature of his job, which requires him to travel a lot, my husband has also learned how to cook many delicious and unique dishes.

My husband's daily meals sometimes open my eyes to dishes I have never even heard of, let alone eaten, from whale fish cooked with star fruit, silver pomfret fish cooked with pickled melon, frog soup cooked with green banana, fish noodle soup with betel leaves, stir-fried mushrooms with eggs, anchovies braised with 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" the meals my husband cooks, my friends exclaim that I'm lucky to have a husband who is a "housewife", others beautifully call them "loving meals". Once a friend commented "you are such a good husband", I immediately corrected her "you are a successful wife".

I am indeed lucky, but it is luck to have a wife who knows how to take care of the family rather than being a woman who doesn’t have to cook. Besides, I have probably seen this luck many times.

Since childhood, the family kitchen has always been my father's "territory", where he cooked dishes that my siblings and I loved, such as braised pork, sour soup, taro soup...

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 work and are no longer with their children, the cooking process of grandparents is still a "together" process, rhythmic and clear.

Sometimes I find it too complicated. After my mother prepares the ingredients, she calls my father to go into the kitchen to cook. When he finishes cooking, he calls, "Grandma, sprinkle some pepper, some green onion, and then serve the rice." "Why bother? Why can't one person do it all?" - I asked many times.

I later understood that it was a matter of division of labor and working together to take care of the family.

My family also has a clear division of labor. Before meals, the wife leisurely waits for her husband to cook. After meals, the husband leisurely watches TV while his wife cleans up. Whoever is good at what does what.

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.

Is it time to think that the idea that women earn money to "help" men, or that men "help" women with housework is no longer relevant? Don't "monopolize" the kitchen for one gender, let it be a place where anyone can come in to cook loving meals for the ones they love.

Housework should not be seen as the exclusive domain of women.

According to the thinking of the majority from the past until now, cooking and housework has always been the "privilege" of women. If a woman marries a husband who is capable of "helping" his wife, she is 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 $6,431 more housework per year than men if converted into money. Accordingly, men do housework for an average of 19 minutes per day, equivalent to $3,909 per year, while women do it for an average of 49 minutes per day, equivalent to $10,341 per year.

That's why the saying "housework is for women" is not only a thought in our country but also everywhere on the planet. Although that imbalance still exists, it is an undeniable fact that many women today no longer consider housework as their "exclusive" right.

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