Part the second

Where did I leave off?  Oh yeah...growing up and romance.  *cough*  Well....

In my late teens, I abruptly decided to get married.  Figuring I was going to need to cook, I wrote down a lot of my mother's recipes.  Also, along with the new husband, I got four new cookbooks.  One generic cookbook from one of his distant relatives and three that I had put down on the gift registry.

I'd been watching the Frugal Gourmet on TV and liked the show.  I needed cookbooks and he made it look easy.  So what if I've never cooked with wine before?

Why I put a Martin Yan book on the list, I don't know.  To add a little adventure?  I don't remember ever watching his show (back then), and my one and only adventure into a Chinese restaurant was pretty awful. (At some point later on in life, I realized that I really should have let my sister order for me, and I admit here of my own free will that my sister was right.)  But yeah, one copy of 

Aha! I hear some of you say. This is how she began to collect cookbooks.  Well, no.  I was young and inexperienced, we were broke most of the time, and he didn't much care what he ate.  So there were a lot of very simple things like Kraft dinner and more Hamburger Helper than I want to remember. And if I did try to put a little more effort into it, it was shoveled in with the same speed as everything else and as little notice.  I had no encouragement to stretch.  I still have all four of those cookbooks, though to this day I don't think I have cooked anything out of them.

I expect you can guess what happened to that relationship.