Reply #89: My mother didn't raise me to be a housewife.

[SheWhoMustBeObeyed]

That statement is NOT a slam at anyone, male or female, who keeps house. It's simply a fact. My mother did not want her daughters to focus on domestic skills because she wanted us to have careers. So if we weren't interested in cooking or gardening or sewing, she didn't make us learn it.

The only exceptions were cleaning and ironing. All us kids had cleaning chores - we were cheap labor. :) And you can't look professional in wrinkled clothes, so we had to learn that. But I never did laundry till I was out on my own.

Gardening? Plants die in my care. Sewing, knitting, crocheting? I tried but no good at it. (I can embroider - that's useful, eh?) I can paint and patch and repair around the house, but electricity still scares me. I can bake, and I'm better at cooking than I used to be. It's been years since I ate fast food.

I used to buy cookbooks but now I get all my recipes online. Google something like 'coq au vin' and you will get a slew of returns. allrecipes.com is a good fast resource: enter the ingredients you have on hand and they will search for recipes. When I find one that really works, I print it out, put it in a vinyl sleeve and keep it in a 3-ring binder. Voila - custom cookbook.