Happiness In The Kitchen

Sometime mid-afternoon yesterday my husband pounded in the very last nail to hang the very last item of my vast hoard of paintings and photographs which the moving van deposited here at our condo some few days before I arrived myself on August 10th.  All the dvds have been shelved, and nearly all the books; only his tools await sorting out for their very own special place on the gallery of the so-called "guest" condo.  I would have put them in a less conspicuous place, but then I do not have the romance of building and repairing things in my blood, an inheritance from a father who made his living by carpentry.  Last night I made risotto with freshly pesto sauce into which I had put chunks of cooked chicken.  The risotto was made in six minutes in our excellent pressure cooker while I sat idly by in the living room sipping slowly on a white wine spritzer.  The fact of the matter was that, if I had not almost entirely given up drinking, I would have downed one or two martinis to take away the incredible edge of nervousness and dread which my moments of cookery inspired.  I had approached the kitchen in so light hearted a manner it was hard to believe how broken I left it.  First of all, this was the first meal we had not eaten in a restaurant in the last two and a half months, so that, despite a lifetime of cooking--for many years three or at least two times a day, with between one and four hungry, discriminating, rebellious teenagers at table--I had pretty much, hard to believe this, forgotten the drill.  Assembling the pesto was as though I were putting my grandfather's gold watch back together again, somehow I just kept forgetting basics, like the garlic, for god's sake!  I had to go back to the processor time and again to blend in yet something else originally overlooked.  When I had got the gleaming multi purpose electric gizmo from Bellevue or something like that which friends rave over--it steams, sautees, slow cooks, pressure cooks, who knows what else--I discovered I had quite forgotten how to put on the sealing rim for the lid, how you turned the thing on, the timer, too, how you set the valves so as to avoid being blown up.  By this time we were approaching six o'clock, after I had told my husband an hour earlier that the meal would be out "in no time."  I got that damn lid on, set the timer, took a white wine spritzer into the living room and waited for the explosion.  Six minutes later I did not even hear the"six little beeps,"  which the instruction booklet told me accompanied the appearance of zero on the timer panel.  Dare I open the damn thing without the beeps?  But I could not go back in time to await the beeps, how could I?  So, steeling myself, I repeatedly pushed some pressure release and the steam came out and eventually stopped and I opened the thing.  A spoonful proclaimed "delicious!", called hubby to the table, ladled out steaming platefuls after having stirred in the chicken bits, the pesto and grated parmigiano.  "Fabulous" came from my spouse.  I was almost too broken to eat, God, I thought to myself, am I going to have to go on doing this for the rest of my  life?