Four-cheese special

Until I learned to cook I had a problem with gift-giving. Blame it on the romantic in me: I had this notion that a gift was supposed to be special. Wasn’t that silly?

I mean, why give at all? To fulfill a social obligation? To return a favor? To get laid? Valid reasons all, but none that special. (Besides, if you have to give something for sex, it’s most likely criminal solicitation.) Look up “gift” in the dictionary: “something voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation.” Bloodless, isn’t it? Someone could give you syphilis and that would, by virtue of your not having paid for the sex, constitute a gift.

What makes a gift special? I’m sure you have your own ideas, most probably from the standpoint of a recipient. That’s just the way it is; people have to be constantly reminded that it’s better to give than to receive, and that’s because it’s not. It’s hard enough to give without taking the bother to make the gift special, too. That’s why people like to say that it’s the thought that counts. The romantic in me totally agrees — and by that I mean to a fault: if I have to think about it then it might as well be special.

Then I took up cooking. Cooking solves a lot of problems, the most immediate being hunger. That you can also make a gift of your cooking is really just a bonus, and yet nothing screams “special” like something you actually took time to make with your own hands (and sweat — the secret ingredient, I make a point of telling people). Take that lasagna, for instance. The recipient was thrilled, said he felt like Garfield.

“Garfield’s a pig.”

“A cat,” he said. “This stuff’s good.”

To be honest, it was the first lasagna I made that I actually liked. I used no-cook sheets, which was the only kind I could find and with which I had never had anything but disaster (they always turned out dry, like undercooked prawn crackers). This time I pre-soaked the sheets in cold water for ten minutes and that did the trick. Sealing the deal were the four kinds of cheese that went into it — cheddar, cream, parmesan, and mozzarella — a veritable overload of saturated fat, but I couldn’t help myself. We romantics like to go the extra mile, even if in the wrong direction. We’re special and silly that way.