I recently learned how to make a decent pasta salad. (Pasta salad: truly the perfect pregnancy food, no I will not be taking any questions.) It took several attempts, including one memorable occasion where my wife texted me to get some basil from her herb garden and mix it in and I confidently went out, clipped a bunch of rosemary, and tossed it in. (Pro tip: don’t do that. Just … just don’t do it.)

I’d like to be able to blame this mix-up on “pregnancy brain” but unfortunately I think it was just a regular Victoria mistake. For a long time I hid my eating habits from others. I knew they were different, and probably weird, and I was embarrassed.

When I was in relationships, my partners usually did the cooking. When I was single, I was left to my own devices. Left to my own devices, my diet generally consisted of: cucumbers drizzled in Newman’s Own oil and vinegar salad dressing, Granny Smith apples, peanut butter sandwiches, homemade cornbread, spaghetti with sauce from a jar and the occasional frozen pizza.

Somehow, I did not get scurvy. In fact, before I donated a kidney, my diet was cleared by a nutritionist and I was pronounced perfectly healthy (to my mother’s everlasting surprise).

Learning to do new and unfamiliar things is harder for me than I think it is for most people. If there a task that I’m not inherently interested in, and it’s not an absolute necessity for me to do, I probably won’t get around to doing it. (This is one of my many personal flaws.)

And for a long time, I didn’t need to cook. You can get by with just sort of assembling as it turns out. I have an anxiety disorder and one of the topics it has gotten its claws into and burrowed in over the years is food safety.

I’ve made improvements over time — I used to be unable to eat leftovers — but it still rears up, especially when cooking meat. My wife can throw some chicken on the grill and confidently tell when it’s done by looking at it. I absolutely need to know how long to cook something in the oven and at what exact temperature and you can bet I’m checking with a meat thermometer every time.

I tend to crave specific instructions. I still have no idea what adding an ingredient “to taste” is. Whose taste? Mine? Yours? What if I like a plainer flavor and you like more spice? This is why baking has always come a little easier to me; it tends to have more concrete and specific instructions.

Of course, the longer I waited to learn these skills, the more they got built up in my mind as a Big Huge Deal that would be very difficult and would probably make me look stupid to boot. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely did look a little stupid occasionally (see: the great rosemary mix-up of 2025), but I haven’t been dumb enough yet to get served divorce papers, so I think I’m winning.

Yesterday when I wanted a snack, I peeled some carrots and steamed them. Took me less than 10 minutes. It’s one of the most simple things one could possibly do on a stovetop and I still feel like I’ve been handed the keys to the kingdom of snack time.

There were two reasons I finally got my butt in gear, buckled down and learned some incredibly basic cooking.

The first is, I’ve got a kid on the way. At some point he will be eating actual food. While I won’t be the mom whose cooking he remembers with misty eyes when he’s an old man (that would be my wife’s cooking), I can at least make sure he gets a reasonably healthy combination of protein, carbs and vegetables.

In fact, my wife has already bought a cute food processor that matches the toaster so we can make homemade baby food. (I tried using it for the first time to cut a pepper and accidentally pureed it while trying to turn the processor off. I didn’t injure myself, so I’m counting it as a victory.)

Which leads me to the second, more immediately urgent reason I began cooking: it was unfair of me to rely on my wife to do it all the time, or to cop out of “my night” to cook by throwing a frozen pizza in the oven.

Not that a frozen pizza doesn’t have its place in the kitchen pantheon — I try to always have an emergency pie in the back of the freezer — but when one partner is carefully balancing macros and calculating nutrients and meal prepping a week’s worth of lunch at a time, well, the other can at least learn how to roast delicata squash.

It was unfair for me to just lean back and let her come home from work and then put together dinner every night. Yes, even though she likes cooking more than I do and yes even though she is better at it than I am. I didn’t want to turn into a bumbling, useless sitcom husband.

I don’t know if I’ll be successful at that goal; I set off the smoke alarm while trying to toast some hot dog buns but, darn it, I am trying. It feels a little silly and embarrassing to learn such a basic skill in my 30s. On the other hand, I can now eat my feelings about it.