Matt cooked!

While I clearly enjoy cooking or I wouldn't have this blog, I have always believed in both of the parties in a relationship sharing all the necessary household stuff, including cooking. Especially now that I work basically just as much as he does, I was getting frustrated with almost always being the one to turn on the stove/oven/microwave right after getting home. It's not that he had never offered either, it's more that whenever he offered, it was almost inevitably the same two things - macaroni and cheese or pasta with canned tomato sauce. While I am a fan of both, I crave variety in my life and there are a lot of dishes I love a lot more. But finally, yesterday my boyfriend expanded his repertoire to include one of them - miso soup.

Delicious. I love miso soup. For those who aren't familiar with it, it is a traditional Japanese soup with a dashi (we used katsuobushi, or bonito in English, a type of fish, but other types of soup stock can be used) base, soybean paste (miso), and we added tofu, wakame (seaweed), and green onions. All these ingredients can be found at your local Asian grocery store.

The other dish is mostly comprised of what has been saving us those nights we are both too tired to do much of anything - Trader Joe's frozen vegetables and chicken. Definitely the supermarket with the highest quality frozen foods hands down, and one of the places I missed the most while in Japan.

Anyway, hopefully my boyfriend will be cooking more as I firmly believe he is capable of cooking different delicious things if he practices. I think his parents even picked up on my desire for this, because they bought him not one, but two cookbooks for his birthday, which I thought was great. However, as cooking is still something I think I enjoy more than he does right now, I figure I can live with compromises on not completely sharing the cooking (such as him washing the dishes, which he usually does) and concentrating on expanding my own food repertoire. What to cook next...