Romantic Cooking Tips For Guys

All right guys, Valentine's Day is just around the corner. And if not Valentine's Day there's also Mother's Day, Sweetest Day, your wife's birthday, or your anniversary. I'm sure that some traditionally romantic date is right around the corner, no matter when you're reading this. What better way to show your wife* you care than to cook her a delicious and romantic dinner?

*_{Assuming that you have a wife, of course. If you have some other variety of significant other you can pretend he or she is your wife, because saying "significant other" over and over again is cumbersome and I refuse to use the abbreviation "SO" in a quasi-professional snarky online article, thank you much.}

"But Eric!" you cry; hopefully you're not reading this in a public place or people will probably be looking at you funny. "My idea of navigating the kitchen is getting a beer out of the fridge without knocking anything else over! How could I possibly cook an entire meal?"

Yes, if you're like most guys the kitchen is a fairly foreign land for you. Some of you know how to man a grill in a manly fashion, which puts you several steps above me, and a few of you actually know how to cook. This guide is not for you. It's for the rest of us.

But never fear; I will be your guide. I have a great deal of experience making Haute Cuisine ("haute" is a French word that means "lean"). I have even cooked an actual meal on a couple of occasions. By a couple I literally mean like twice, but they didn't turn out disastrously. Granted, they turned out mediocre, and both meals were ready to eat at around ten in the evening, but that hardly qualifies as disastrous. So I've had two modest successes with cooking, and in internet parlance this makes me an expert on the subject. So if you're worried about accidentally treating your wife to a smoking lump of carbon on her (or both of your) special day, don't be. Ol' Eric will take you through the process step by step.

1. Acquire Some Recipes

This is important. You have no idea what you're doing, so you might as well have some idea what you're trying to do.

Browsing recipes is a good way to get ideas, because you can also get a feel for what kind of undertaking each dish will be, and whether it will fit into your wife's tastes. For example, you will probably want to avoid dishes that include beef if your wife is vegan, Hindi, or a cow (the latter is more common than you'd think, especially in the Midwest). But another common beginner mistake is to accidentally pick out "guy" foods because they look easy to make and they appeal to your tastes. Even if your wife occasionally eats such food, the key word is "romance," and foods typically found at fast food restaurants, sports bars, or tailgate parties will not help you set the mood. So when you're looking at a recipe, make sure you keep an eye out for keywords that might flag it as guy food, such as "deep fryer," "buffalo," or "hearty."

Conversely, you don't want to go too fancy or you will guarantee failure. Certain types of cooking demand that you break the laws of physics to achieve a desired effect. Watch out for danger words like "reduction," "emulsify," or "caramelize." Look instead for words that indicate universal female appeal, such as "chocolate."

Ok, so you've got your menu figured out. It's time to:

2. Get Ye Ingredients

Now that you have your recipe in hand (or on screen, or whatever), your first task is to frown thoughtfully at it. Ideally there should be a list of stuff with numbers next to them at the beginning. You must prowl the kitchen and/or pantry and see what, if anything, you already have.

Don't panic if this task seems daunting. There is a proven method for finding everything. Look at the first item on your list; let's say that it's tomatoes. Simply open the refrigerator and yell, "Honey, where are the tomatoes?"

Easy, right? Your wife may know the actual location of the tomatoes without even looking ("They're on the top shelf right in front! Can't you see them?"). Sometimes, however—and you can not judge them harshly for this—they will be wrong. Gently alert them to their error ("They're not there, honey!"). Some coaxing may be required ("Yes they are! I put them there just this morning!" "They are seriously not here! I am looking right at the top shelf, right in front! There is nothing here!").

At this point your wife, because she loves you, will walk over, reach into the refrigerator, and a bag of tomatoes will magically appear in her hand. "Right in front!" she will say, lovingly, while she gives you a loving look. "I told you!"

On to the next item. Don't bother your wife needlessly. Give her a break for a few minutes; let her settle back in and start watching her show again or whatever she was doing. Rummage for a bit. Open and close some cupboards. This will create the impression that not only are you actually looking but that maybe you're finding other ingredients, perhaps several of them, before you need to ask for help again. Then look at the second ingredient on your list and open the 'fridge again. "Honey, where's the lettuce?"

Eventually ("Right next to the tomatoes! Are you blind?") you will have an inventory of what you have and what you need. Now, like the truly chivalrous manly man you are, it's time to put together a list and head to the grocery store. This is a gift to your wife, after all, and it's important that you let her relax while you do all the work ("Honey? It's me again. What aisle are the spices in?" "The spice aisle! Stop calling me!").

3. Get Your Cooking Crap

Home at last, and it's time for the cooking to begin. This may be a good time to set up some kind of romantic, relaxing diversion for your wife, such as lying in a bathtub full of salts and oils and maybe get her hair wrapped up in a turban and her face smeared with goop with cucumber slices over her eyes. Have you ever noticed, when women do this, that if the light hits the goop just right it looks like ranch dressing, and if their hair wrap towel is green it kind of looks like lettuce, so that overall she looks like the Salad Woman From Mars? Anyway, try to stifle your laughter as you light some scented candles, play some soothing new age music, and leave her to her bliss while you tackle the kitchen.

Except...Ok, get your recipe back out. Some of the more blessed recipes will have a handy list of required cooking utensils. If not, below the ingredients should be several barely comprehensible paragraphs detailing the actual procedure for making the food. Scan this for keywords like "pan" or "whisk." Better grab a ruler because a lot of recipes ask for ridiculously exact measurements like "grease a 5¹/₄-inch x 7³/₈-inch x 2³⁷/₆₄-inch baking pan with sides 2 millimeters thick, making sure the grease layer is uniform at no more than 7¹²/₈ microns thick, having left Sacramento at 3:17PM traveling at 47¹/₂ MPH, give or take." Then proceed to make a noise like a metal garbage can factory crashing into a drum set factory as you rummage for everything. Inevitably there will be something you simply can not find, or you will be unsure whether a pan is 9³/₈ or 9⁷/₁₆ inches wide. Looks like your wife's bath will require a slight intermission. Make sure you bring her a towel she can wrap around herself. After all, this is her present, and there's no need to inconvenience her unduly.

If all else fails it's back to the store. Make sure you lovingly and chivalrously leave your wife's cell phone where she can easily reach it. ("Honey, it's me again. A saucepan is the same thing as a pot, right?")

4. Time For Some Actual Cooking

By now there should hopefully still be a few hours left in your special day. Your wife may be watching you sullenly from the kitchen table at this point, her lettuce turban askew and some ranch dressing still clinging to her chin (probably best if you don't draw attention to this). This may be a good time to set the mood, maybe get a little provocative. You could, for instance, cook shirtless, or even completely in the nude (CAUTION: You'll need good reflexes if you're cooking with oil or fatty meat on the stovetop). Or you could try wearing nothing but an apron, kind of like in that one country song, but given the parts of you that would show off I think it would only be slightly more sexy than a hospital gown. Let's stick with fully dressed.

Start by mixing up whatever your recipe says to mix up. It's kind of hard to screw up mixing, but maybe you'll surprise me. But mixing is, for the most part, not a time critical process, so you can't ruin it nearly as badly as you can the cooking of the meat, so let's focus on that.

Frown at your recipe some more. If you see references to things like "skillets" and "saucepans" and vague settings like "medium heat" you're probably going to be cooking on top of the stove. If you see "baking pan," "sheet," "dish," or super specific temperatures like "347.84°" you're talking about that big box underneath with the wire racks.

For stovetop, study the instructions until you're sure you've memorized them, then spray a random pan with some Pam, throw a lump of your chosen meat or meat-like substance in, crank up one of the burners, and hope. After a few minutes, if you notice that nothing is happening to your pan and smoke is rising from the grocery bag you carelessly placed on a different part of the stove, you might need to move things around a bit.

Examine the meat every now and then to make sure it hasn't welded itself to the bottom of the pan; poke it uncertainly and flip it over at random intervals. Make note of the color it's turning. If it's turning brown you are cooking steak or some other kind of red meat, and it should be cooked medium rare like God intended. Of course, you will second-guess yourself and forget to account for the fact that the meat keeps cooking for a while after you remove it from heat, so the best you can hope for is a Texas medium rare, which most of the rest of the world would call well done verging on burnt. If it turns pink you are hopefully cooking fish, which should be served raw like God intended (sorry, I'm a bit of a sushi buff). If it turns beige-ish you are either cooking pork, in which case you should cook it to rock-like consistency because you're terrified of undercooking it, or chicken, in which case you should just give up because chicken is evil. If it doesn't change color at all check the burners again; if everything looks right then you're cooking algae or whatever the crap hippie vegan types use instead of meat, in which case I'm sure it will be delicious. When in doubt, cut the meat open and beckon your wife over to see if it looks done to her. Make sure you freak out and jabber like a monkey when the pots containing your side dishes boil over, as this might cause your wife to crack a smile. What? You didn't realize you had side dishes cooking too? Exactly my point.

The oven tends to be simpler. Put your food in your atomically precise baking container, throw it in there, set a timer, wait for the allotted time, open the oven, stare quizzically at your dish for a minute or two, close the oven, and turn it on. When the timer dings again, open the oven and study your dish. Stick a fork in it. If it comes out clean your food is probably done, unless you were making lasagna, in which case it might be a little overcooked. If the fork comes out dirty, examine it closely to make sure it isn't actually a toilet brush; if it is you might need to let your food cook a few minutes longer, maybe even turn the heat up a little.

5. Enjoy!

Now comes the moment of truth. The table is set, the candles are lit, and a heavenly aroma wafts in from the kitchen. Your wife is waiting there—perhaps she went to bed but you got her back up because this is her present, damn it, and you worked hard for it. She looks radiant, if slightly tired and irritated. You emerge from the kitchen, fresh from the field of battle. You've bandaged your worst burns and wiped the carbon residue from your face. You stride manfully over to your wife and get down on one knee, setting your fire extinguisher down as you do. You look into her radiant, loving eyes, which soften as they see the genuine love burning in your own (or is that something else that's burning?). You take her hand in yours.

"Dear," you say, "Your dinner is ready. I hope you enjoy it. I love you."

And, of course, she will enjoy it. She will enjoy it because everything tastes good when it is made with love. She will also enjoy it because it's not the meal you made for her; you jammed that crap down the garbage disposal as soon as you were sure it was not going to reignite.

You see, you wisely made reservations at a swank restaurant in case of just such an emergency. You sly dog, you. This is going to be a romantic night indeed.