SOME Like It Hot

My family has a complex relationship with food.  Judging by my waist line, so do I.

When I got married I didn’t know how to cook, as in, at all.  This came about for two reasons, the first being that no one in my family expected me to ever marry (“I pity the man who’ll take you” was mom’s favorite exclamation) and if I didn’t marry, culturally, I probably would never have moved out of my parents’ house, where mom cooked.

Except by the time I was fourteen or so, they were starting to suspect t...