Skip to main content

TIFU by making my world-class chef girlfriend the perfect toastie

TL;DR: My girlfriend is a top-tier chef who's so good she's rejected opportunities to work at one of the world's best restaurants. I made her one toastie during her period and now she's demanding I make it daily because apparently I'm better at melted cheese between bread than she is.

This happened about a month ago but I'm still processing the absurdity of it all (as I'm making her a toastie).

So my girlfriend is basically a Goddess tier chef. She's worked at restaurants that people literally book flights to visit. We're talking the kind of place where you need to make reservations months in advance. She once turned down a job offer some rating authorities consider one of the best restaurants in the world, because she ate there as a customer first and decided their garden salad was uninspired and their wait staff were weird.

When we moved in together, I quickly learned that despite being a decent cook myself, I was now living with someone who could probably make roadkill taste like wagyu beef. She has opinions about salt types and doesn't want me touching her fancy cookware. I love cooking, but I'm not about to go to war with someone who makes me dishes with love hearts made of sauce (Reduction? Foam?) So I gracefully stepped aside and let her handle the kitchen duties at home.

Fast forward to last month. She's on her period, feeling like absolute garbage, and asks me to make her a tomatoe toastie (grilled cheese for you Americans). Simple request, right? I figure even I can't mess up butter, bread, tomato and cheese. So I make her this completely basic toastie, nothing fancy, just sourdough, some good aged cheddar, butter both sides, medium heat, flip once. Standard stuff that literally any functioning adult should be able to do.

She takes one bite and goes completely silent. I'm thinking I've somehow managed to offend her palate with my peasant-level toastie skills. Then she looks at me with genuine confusion and says, "I can't make it this good."

I laughed because I thought she was joking. This woman can do things with molecular gastronomy that would make Heston Blumenthal weep. She's forgotten more about food than I'll ever know. There's no way she can't make a better toastie than me.

But here's where I fucked up: I was wrong.

For the past month, she's been asking me to make her toasties almost every single day. Yesterday she literally came home from work where she probably spent 12 hours creating culinary masterpieces that cost more per plate than most people's weekly groceries - and the first thing she said was "Can you make me that toastie?"

I've created a monster. This woman who can taste a soup and rattle off all the ingredients in it can't figure out how to make melted cheese between bread as well as I can.

The worst part? I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing differently. I've tried telling her my "technique" but it's literally just... making a toastie. There's no secret. I'm not doing anything special. But somehow my basic-ass toastie game has broken the brain of someone who could probably cook circles around most professional chefs.

Now I'm trapped in this weird situation where I'm too afraid to refuse because she gets genuinely excited about these toasties, but also I'm pretty sure I've accidentally insulted her entire professional identity with my superior bread-and-cheese skills.

The irony is not lost on me that the one thing I can cook better than her is something that requires literally no skill whatsoever.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

TIFU - Don’t do what I did

On Sunday morning Aug. 24th, I awoke to discover a large blind spot in my right eye, which turned out to be what is called wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). It has resulted in a very significant, permanent loss of vision in that eye. Although I maintain good peripheral vision, whatever I focus on at best is very blurry, and mostly disappears. I can barely make out the large E at the top of the eye chart. If this happens to my left eye I’ll be unable to read or drive. It turns out that I missed the opportunity that I had to prevent this from becoming a serious problem because I failed to report what appeared to be minor changes in my vision. In the weeks prior to August I had noticed that what I knew to be straight lines appeared to my right eye to have a little waviness. I also noticed that the color of my front lawn, which I could see through the window from my recliner,  was subdued, looked almost gray, in my right eye. So I scheduled an eye exam, which revealed the p...

TIFU by getting suspended for 2 days by my front office in school.

I (13M) am an African American student at Jeannette junior high who had got suspended for 2 days here. I was in math class minding my business until my teacher had told me to go to the main office, which posed no problem to me. As i went down there, the people of the front office had stopped me and made me get a new ID (yes, we have id's.) so i had asked them if i could maybe do a different alternative and call my mother to let her bring the Id here, even then, the Id isn't that important. So, although i was talking to them in a calm manner and not showing any signs of rebellion, they had threatened to call the police on me without thinking twice before calling my parents. This is where i started getting angry, and even then now the black peers agree that could have been a racially motivated action. They then told me to sit in the office conference room because of that, leading into more anger. They had then called my mother who had came over to the school didn't even let ...

TIFU by putting my already skinny jeans in the dryer on high heat.

TL;DR: Was stupid and didn't realize I put my clothes on extra high heat in the dryer. Had to rock skintight skinny jeans all day with tighty whities (only clean pair I had since I procrastinate doing laundry like crazy). I guess the constant wedgies and squishing are punishment for my stupidity. Honestly don’t know who else to blame but myself for this. I’m a scatterbrained guy so I literally put the highest setting on a load with most of my clothes, and my skinny jeans that I was planning to wear today. You can probably already see where this is going, but somehow I didn’t. For context, these jeans were already pushing the limits of what could reasonably be called wearable. They fit, technically, but only in the sense that I could get them on with enough determination and a bit of strategic breathing. Sitting down in them was more of a commitment than a casual action. Still, they looked good, and I had convinced myself that discomfort was just part of the aesthetic. So this m...