Mastering the art of love and cooking

Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of female writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you'll find here each week, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.

"This is so easy!" I exclaimed, impressed with my own dexterity as I deftly maneuvered the Spiralizer around the zucchini, transforming the bulbous, vibrant green vegetable into hundreds of slim, pale, symmetrical shreds on the cutting board. I admired my massive pile of vegetable shreds, certain this was the greatest thing I'd accomplished that day.

If you don't watch infomercials, you may not be familiar with the Spiralizer, a revolutionary gadget that magically turns vegetables into noodles, making even the World's Worst Cook (right here, people) feel like Giada, Nigella Lawson and all the other sexy chef ladies who have mastered the art of whipping out a Michelin-worthy dish whilst simultaneously having a perfect hair day. In short, a Spiralizer is the perfect tool for someone who might own Cooking for Dummies. And for a person who can barely boil water without injury, this seemed like a safe place to start.

I Spiralized the entire zucchini, and then another, marveling at the perfection of my work, and decided to move on to something more challenging: a carrot. With its uneven, gnarly skin, I should have known it would require more precision than those symmetrical zucchinis, but I was confident I could handle it.

"There's no way I can hurt myself with this!" I boasted to my boyfriend, who suspiciously peered at me from across the room, the spot I'd banished him to while I prepared dinner. He's a good cook, and I'd assisted him in the kitchen before, so he knew I was prone to wimping out when I had to use a sharp knife on something. But I felt safe with the Spiralizer, its sharp edges hidden within the walls of the palm-sized plastic cylinder, and I was excited to man the kitchen by myself for once.

I think he was still trying to get over the shock of seeing me in the kitchen by myself. A couple of weeks earlier, he'd met my family for the first time, an important rite of passage for any relationship. The visit was pretty much without incident — yay, nobody scared him off! — although I overheard a conversation about cooking between him and my mom that still nagged at me.

"Has Abby ever made you ..." she started to ask.

"Let me stop you right there, Penni," he interjected. "Abby has never made me anything."

I would have cut in to defend myself, but he was right. To me, cooking was always such a hassle. I hated following recipes. I mean, who keeps all those ingredients in the house? I never had the patience to wait for something to be done, unless that wait time was roughly 90 seconds in the microwave. Worst of all, the entire process of cooking was such a mess, with sticky syrups and powders and spices and all the crap getting everywhere. If it takes longer to prepare and clean up than it does to eat it, I'm out.

And those are just the practical complaints — there's so much about cooking that I find mystifying. Like, why is crunchy considered a good thing with pretty much everything except eggshells? Or, how can pressing a button on my oven clean it when I'm not doing anything? And why do people think it's weird to mix chicken and eggs? They're all dead!

Maybe this hatred of cooking was rooted in a fear of being alone, the fear of facing a solitary plate on an empty counter in an underused kitchen. Even the aisle in the grocery store selling "single meals" is depressing; it's usually wedged between frozen pizzas and ice cream, which can't be an accident. The message is loud and clear: If you're single, you probably want to defrost this and eat it as quickly as possible, and since you're all alone anyway, you might as well go to town on this ice cream.

Alternately, cooking together is part of being in a healthy relationship, right? Isn't that why people get all fat and happy when they're in love? I now had someone I actually wanted to eat dinner with, so maybe I'd like making it with him — and for him — too. Also, maybe I could finally use all those cookbooks people kept giving me, which had to date served as props in that underused kitchen.

I turned the carrot clockwise, over and over again, until a tiny nub stuck out. I shoved my thumb in, pushing the rest of the carrot through. Waste not, want not.

Oh, I thought. Apparently you can hurt yourself with a Spiralizer. Blood spurted from my thumb. I waved it helplessly in the air at my boyfriend, letting the blood dramatically spatter across the counter, but not on my perfectly cut vegetables. After all that work, we were definitely eating those, no matter what.

The thumb healed, but after concluding that the Spiralizer is essentially a fancy potato peeler, I banished it to a shadowy corner of the top pantry shelf. I still haven't learned how to cook, although I'm happy to assist my boyfriend in the kitchen (even though I'm not allowed to make coffee anymore, due to an incident involving a kitchen scale, scalding hot water and coffee grounds).

I've also concluded that I wasn't ever afraid of cooking or eating alone. But like most things in life, it's a lot more fun when someone you love is doing it with you.

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