Food, love and the way to a man's heart

This morning Hubby spoke the words that strikes fear deep into my heart.

"Will you cook dinner tonight?"

Oh. Shit.

See, I rely on him to do the cooking. Whenever I do suggest something for dinner, he shrugs it off as not what he 'feels like' tonight or suggests something a million times better. It just works out better if he cooks dinner, and I sit and watch.

But Hubby is having a very rough month at work. I think he has had one day off this month so far, and on that day I made him drive an hour to see my cousins and aunt and uncle. And most of his days are more than 14 hours long; four of his work days have started at 6 am and ended at 2 am. I guess the least I could do is cook him dinner one night.

What makes this even harder is that he is on Phase 1 of the South Beach Diet. So, all the stuff I like (bread, pasta, tomatoes, sweets) he can't have. He can have meats and zucchini and spinach and. . . . well, that's pretty much all I can think of.

You might be thinking right now 'Well, why don't you just look in a cookbook? It can't be that hard to find a recipe.' But it is. See, I don't like chicken. Or beef. Or fish. Which is pretty much all he can eat. So, not only do I have to cook one meal, but really, I have to cook two. One for him and one for me. But I can't cook pasta and bread and fun stuff like pizza for me, because then I would have to eat it in front of him, and, really, that is just a cruel thing to do to a man on a diet. You don't eat french fries in front of a woman eating a salad, and you don't eat pasta in front of a man on South Beach.

And I find that cookbooks always have way too many ingredients in their recipes. Seriously, do I really need 1/2 teaspoon of lemon zest? Or a splash of cumin? I don't know if I do or not, and since I'm not sure and I don't want to go to the grocery store, I delete that recipe from my list of hopefuls. If I don't have the spices or ingredients, I'm not a good enough cook to know what can be substituted.

Sigh. . . dinner is in two hours.