My wife gets upset sometimes because she doesn’t think that she’s my muse. In a way, there’s some truth to it, but only because I don’t consider myself a true artist, at least in the fine art sense. I’m a bit flighty when it comes to being an artist and haven’t really come across one thing that had driven me to be passionately creative the way that it’s normally portrayed in movies or whatever. It’s just not in me and I’m creatively lazy, I’m also a conflicted person, and have had a left/right brain conflict my whole life. My undergraduate degree is an art degree and my master’s is a computer science degree. I flipped majors from art to finance to computer science to art again and eventually came up with a mix of the two brain halves some 30-ish years later.

I absolutely adore my wife and she’s been the inspiration to make myself a better person for the last nine years, in quite a few areas. It makes me sad when she says that she’s not an inspiration to me because that’s quite far from the truth. More specifically, I really love to cook. I’m a self-taught chef and have a good background in restaurant work that afforded me a bit of time to learn from some great chefs. I got some good tips was exposed to some wonderful different types of cuisine and for the past ten years while living in the city, ate at some fantastic restaurants. My wife was my primary dining companion for almost all of that dining out and one of our first dates was dinner at my apartment, which I made. She loved the dinner and a new relationship was born and it had a sound foundation on food. I’ve been cooking for her ever since and have cooked some meals that made her squeal with joy after the first bite and it’s one of the best feelings I’ve ever experienced.

There have been occasions where dinner didn’t turn out, well, all that great-tonight was one of those meals. I’ve occasionally used boxed rices as a side to what I was preparing (e.g. Uncle Ben’s mushroom whatever or something like that) but never as part of the dish. I tried making a kind of dirty rice with shrimp inspired by a cooking show I just watched. The shrimp got good reviews, the dirty rice didn’t. Thankfully I can blame Zatarain’s for the dirty rice failure and not myself. I’ve had luck with Zatarain’s products before but this rice just came out rubbery. The resulting dish was overall, disappointing. This led my wife to become-yep, sad. It’s something that she says she’s done all her life and in the few times that I’ve made meals for her like tonight, the reaction has been the same. It never fails to make me miserable, like I really let her down. She’s the reason I continue to cook with the passion that I’ve got, cause really I could live on cereal and peanut butter and jelly.

I hadn’t thought of the idea of a cooking muse until Ginger brought up the idea that she didn’t think I inspired her to be creative awhile back. I suppose I did have the same idea that is thought about when thinking about a typical muse, the flippant Edie Sedgwick kind. Really, there’s always someone in your life that drives you to be better at something and I guess that’s your muse for that particular thing. I’m still not sure if they pick you or you find them, or any combination of all that but when you’ve found yours treat her good, she’ll make your life better.