To most, not monumental. In fact, a grilled cheese sandwich would typically be one of those few simple items in the repertoire of most non-cooks. Certainly that of any guy who had been a bachelor during his 30's.
But not Bob. When I say my husband doesn't cook, I mean he DOES. NOT. COOK. Anything. Ever. He'll operate a barbecue but inside the house? Nothing. Nada. When left to his own devices he spreads peanut butter on bread or crackers. And that's truly it.
So yesterday morning when I, temporarily crippled and confined to the family room couch, suggested that he make us some grilled green chile and cheese sandwiches, he balked but since the alternatives were slim and the reward great, it seemed a cinch for me to talk him through it.
The first trauma was defrosting the chiles. I was actually rather shocked to learn that he has never used the defrost button on our microwave. Really? In 13 years here, I'd never gone away and left him a frozen meal? Apparently not.
"How many minutes?", he wanted to know, standing in front of the microwave, index finger ready to go.
"You don't tell it minutes, you tell it the approximate weight. It decides the time based on that."
"Where's your scale?"
"Just estimate it. Tell it point three."
"Where's the point button?"
"It's a decimal! Just press the number three, that will mean three tenths. Five would be half a pound. Then START."
Ping, ping, and the chiles were underway. BEEP BEEP BEEP.
"It says turn over!" He sounded panicked.
"Too small, don't bother. Just press START again." He did. Then: BEEP BEEP BEEP. The chiles were ready.
"Do I put them in whole?"
"No, they need to be peeled. Bring me a cutting board and a knife for scraping, I'll do that for you."
While I did that he opened a brand new bag of sliced sourdough bread and, purely on his own initiative, removed the whole round from the bag and selected the best four center slices (he did not learn this from me). He brought them over to show me. Then from my vantage point next to the open kitchen but two steps lower from which I could hear well but see nothing, I heard him swearing as he tried to get the rest of the "f***ing slices" to stay stacked and go back in the bag. I bit down on my fingers to keep from laughing. He was already making this hard.
Next he wanted instructions on the cheese. (An aside: Did I ever tell you about the time I went on an errand in the middle of a panicked dinner party preparation, and he offered to help while I was gone. I said yes, peel half of those potatoes. I pointed to a bag. When I returned, I found every potato in the bag peeled halfway.)
"So, how does the cheese go in?", he wanted to know.
This furrowed my brow a bit, wondering how many ways there could be but one, but okay, I played along. "Figure about one and half slices per sandwich. Tear one to fit sideways under the chiles and tear the extra half into a couple pieces to go on top of the chiles and glue the upper slice of bread to the rest of the sandwich."
Bob whistles a lot. So he was whistling while he worked and this time it was 'White Christmas' of all things. This stage went on so long I thought he was going to blow through the entire Bing Crosby Christmas songbook before he brought the open sandwich over for me to approve. Whistle whistle whistle. It just can't take that long to tear a slice of cheese in half!
I wish I had a picture. He had torn the cheese into pretty exact small pieces about 1" long, half an inch wide, even pinching off corners where needed to fit the round contours of the bread's crustline, and built this intricate jigsaw puzzle wherein each piece was exactly about three sixteenths away from the next, like the patterns on a turtle shell, so that the entire slice of bread was more or less evenly covered. He had done this across the entire slice, nested the chiles dead center, and then added another layer of carefully torn bits of cheese around the edge. The chiles were in the "middle", all right.
Remember the potatoes?
Apparently, after 30 years of marriage, I find we don't have the same understanding of "middle"! His is a flat plane and mine is vertical! Now I really wanted to burst out laughing, but that would have killed him. So I said admiringly, "You arranged the cheese so nicely, you made that slice and a half go far!" Then came the confession: he used three slices. So I just spread out the chiles and moved some of his edging pieces toward the middle and instructed him to put the tops back on and microwave the sandwiches for one minute. This would heat them through such that their time in the pan would be about crisping, not melting. Then, into the pan.
Now he wanted to butter the bread. No, I said, "just put some butter in the pan and when it melts, put the sandwiches on top of it. Less work, less butter, fewer calories."
I heard the microwave, and then I heard the process of the sandwiches going into the pan. Normally, there would be no sound associated with this, right? Just plop them in, eventually turn them, finish and serve. But I heard scraping. Lots of it. Scrape scrape scrape, continuously so. I tried, I promise I tried real hard, not to ask what in the world he was doing, but I finally had to ask, "What are you making, chop suey?" No. He was adding butter in bits, stirring it to melt, then lifting the sandwiches to scoot more underneath. Plus checking the sandwiches every five seconds.
Took a good 30 minutes to whip up those sammies; the result was perfect, though!
Bob can teach him. Bob does most of our laundry--am I lucky or what?