Yes. I've Burned Rice.

I am not a foodie. I definitely enjoy a nice meal out, Nobu's ok. But the other day at the grocery store I passed by the taco aisle. Ah taco night. Who didn't have taco night on occasion as a kid when mom didn't feel like cooking anymore? Now that I'm older, I can't say that I blame her. I hate to cook. Lucky for me, I have had the good fortune of being in relationships with men who were gifted in culinary arts.

Years ago, on the set of an independent film you've neither heard of nor will ever see, I picked up a few recipes from the chef on set. Shortly after the film wrapped, I tried a few of them out and had much success. Cut to- years later where I attempt to impress my Ex with a home cooked meal. Being a good Cape Cod-er of sorts, I thought he'd appreciate the crab cake recipe that had been a hit many years ago. How hard could it be to remember how to make crab cakes?

I had the idea while enjoying happy hour at Haru on 19th and Park, a favorite pastime with Jessie, who is a fabulous cook. She wished me luck as I ventured out of Haru and headed towards the Whole Foods at Union Square with only half an ingredient list in my head.

Needless to say we ended up going out for dinner that night. Who would have remembered you needed eggs to keep the crab cakes together, I thought that's what mayonnaise was for. Ever since, my lack of culinary skill was a point of hilarity. Except for the time when I burned the rice and he rushed to the kitchen to see what had happened and ended up losing a large video assembly he had been working on all day. It was infact the fault of the harddrive but I couldn't help feeling somewhat responsible. That wasn't so funny, but usually I didn't mind being a kitchen catastophe.

Thank God for a mother who teaches you the importance of being able to laugh at yourself. This same mother has also relentlessly suggested cooking classes.

My Ex not only was a good cook but was also OCD enough that he didn't like the way I cleaned or did the dishes. A man who cooks and cleans....I seemed to have hit a love jackpot. He did however, tell me I needed a fastball as he called it- that one meal you could whip up on a moments notice designed to impress. Really, I still needed one?

Mine became oatmeal, surprisingly, something he loved to have in the morning but never quite got right. It was a small cooking coup on my part which he said was a very sexy fast ball, “I can't cook you dinner but...I can make you breakfast.”

Before the oatmeal had been established, I had decided to bring back a childhood memory and successfuly made tacos. At fist, the reaction I got was “TACOS?”. “It'll be fun,” I prompted, Tacate already poured. I was right. We had taco night more times than I thought two grown adults would and they were as delicious as you remember them being.

More recently, on the set of another film you will never see nor hear of, one of the actors was heading home to his fiancé for...that's right...taco night.

Wow, it was real. Taco night made us a real couple the way the velveteen rabbit became real because the boy truly loved him. Taco night came to represent something more than a cheap dinner. It was family, it was intimate.

In a small New York City apartment, two adults often cooked a nostalgic meal together (he'd taken to cooking the meat the way he liked it...I chopped) and sat on stools at the eat-in counter top in his small but nicely laid out and very functional kitchen, literally inches apart from one another and rehashed the day.

It's hard to get that kind of closeness at Nobu. Besides, in these tougher economic times, I'm also reminded that somehow, the two times we went, I ended up with the bill.