First of all, these people are insufferably pretentious (and I include the writer).

Secondly, everyone knows that ‘help’ when cooking can be irritating – depending on what you are making and who is helping. ‘Come cook with me’ isn’t the same as ‘Come fly with me’, let’s put it that way. I never allow guests to help me, for example, partly because my kitchen is small, partly because I’ve lived alone for a long time and I’m just not used to it. They can drink wine and chat with me or something while I do it.

Thirdly, it really doesn’t matter a hill of beans whether your onions are sweated or sauteed, your eggs shirred or scrambled and I’ll bet you that none of these pencil-d**ks could tell the difference.

These people have some serious problems, not the least of which is the fact that they have WAY too little to think about.

These ladies should wake up and lose the head cases lickety-split. There’s a whole lot of stuff to do before you die and ditching these bottle-baby martinets would be a step in the right direction.

Sheesh.

So I chuckled when I read this article because one of my first fights with Chef was over the kitchen. I had taken the last of the tomatoes I grew that summer out of the freezer and was making some marinara sauce with all my veggies that I PERSONALLY GREW in MY GARDEN. He’s hovering over the pot smelling things and I see he’s poured some wine in it, which was all fine and good since I would have done it anyway. But then I see him over there AGAIN and I flip out. I ask him what he was doing and I see he has a bottle of hot sauce — Sriracha, for those in the know — and all of a sudden my marinara that I had spent all day making tasted like fucking hot chilies.

I was absolutely livid with him, for good reason. He’d not only tried to improve upon a recipe that I had no want or need for improving, was trying to pull rank on the sly, ruined the last of the tomatoes I’d grown in my garden, and made the tomato sauce too hot for Ethan (7) to eat. When he saw how mad I was that he was altering my sauce behind my back he tried to fix it, but there’s no fixing sriracha — it’s good stuff, but not in pasta sauce.

I made it pretty clear that he can cook anything he wants to and I won’t bother him, but my food is not only my food, but my family’s culture and I didn’t want him trying to “fix” what didn’t need to be fixing. Now, if I want help uding some crazy piece of equipment or learning how to chop something more effectively, I ask. Otherwise he can butt the fuck out.

Truly, that fight was of epic proportions, and yet, being a foodie, he knows why it’s so important to me. Food really is culture, and you don’t abuse somebody’s culture without repurcussions.

I think it has more to do with personality than gender.

Let’s just say I have a *unique* relationship with housework. I do realize that people who visit will judge me unfavorably if my husband’s standards of cleanliness don’t impress them, but that’s not an issue that concerns me. Avoiding another PTSD meltdown is.

If it’s really getting to him, you need something like Merry Maids. They’ll clean your house to a white-glove standard and you can leave the house while they do it.

My husband and I get them because I am the World’s Worst Housekeeper, and we are both much happier now that all of the burden isn’t falling on him. It’s worth every goddamned penny.

Because let me tell you the patriarchy does not rule my home.

Which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t rule in anyone’s home, or that it doesn’t exist.