Not How Mom Does It
A Mother’s Day reflection on work, home, and the small things that matter
A few days ago, Dr. Teodora Szasz said something that lodged itself in my mind: “If you typed it twice today, it should be a skill.” I have been thinking about that line all weekend, and decided to run with it.
In our house, I have done most of the cooking for almost all of our marriage. There have been exactly two stretches where Sean was in charge of more than one meal in a row. The first was in 1995, when we moved to Canada and I had a job waiting while he was interviewing. The second was this year, when he was laid off and I was working through the early waves of RTO at Microsoft, trying to learn a new role and a new team at the same time.
Sean can cook. Truly. But he is a strict constructionist in the kitchen. He follows the recipe. He does not improvise. He does not tweak. He does not season to taste. I treat recipes as polite suggestions.
At the beginning of the year we started using Home Chef. Everything arrives mostly prepped, and all he has to do is follow the card. About a month into his tenure as household chef, he complained to his sisters that he did not like being the mom, it’s hard work. They gave him exactly the amount of pity that deserved.
For the first few weeks, I would wander into the kitchen while he cooked. We quickly discovered our marriage would not survive that arrangement. So now I stay out. But every so often I would ask, “Why did you do X?” only to hear, “Because that is what it says on the recipe.”
Yes, but no one in this house likes that ingredient.
Yes, but the stove runs hot.
Yes, but the oven is convection.
Yes, but we do not do cooked spinach.
Eventually I started marking up the recipe cards with how I would tweak them. Leave out the red pepper flakes. Two flakes is plenty (Sean can spice his up, but I can’t lower the spice). Swap the cooked spinach for a side salad. Lower the burner because medium on our gas stove is basically volcanic. Use convection for anything that needs crisping, standard for anything that needs gentleness.
After four months, Sean has internalized most of these adjustments. He now leaves out the spinach without asking. He no longer tries to incinerate the chicken. He has accepted that red pepper flakes are a controlled substance in this house.
The first time I heard one of our daughters say, “That is not how Mom does it,” I was instantly transported to that Brady Bunch episode where Mr. Brady tries to help the girls cook. And just like Mr. Brady, Sean made it clear that he is not Mom.
This weekend, I decided to take the whole thing one step further. I pulled the recipes from the Home Chef site and built a skill to automatically clean them up. All the tweaks I have been making manually, encoded. I started by working with my thinking partners to define what I wanted. Then I generated a build prompt, they went into build mode, and in about ninety minutes I had a working system. The first output was decent, but I had not given enough detail about the input PDF. Once I fixed that, everything snapped into place. I even ended with a learnings document, because of course I did. I only added a couple rules for testing.
All that is left is to grab the physical recipe cards I scribbled all over and add those adjustments to the skill. Then I can generate new, Alison approved recipes for Sean. I might even see if I can pipe them directly into my Cook’n account.
Will I be the one cooking again soon? Probably. Which means no more Home Chef. But honestly, this whole project was not really about the recipes. It was an experiment, a small Mother’s Day gift to myself. A reminder that being the mom is hard, and funny, and occasionally exasperating, and also deeply worth it.
Alison + Marlowe