Home by Matt Dunn

Author:Matt Dunn [Dunn, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Contemporary Women, Family Life
ISBN: 9781503948396
Google: xwTxsgEACAAJ
Amazon: B00YGZU0V4
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Published: 2015-11-09T13:30:00+00:00

My dad’s still a little frosty with me after the other day’s ‘Anna’ incident, and my mum’s a little tired after her driving exploits (and a little miffed that the first thing my dad did when we got back was make me wheel him around the car to check it for dents), so in an effort to restore some sort of peace in the house, I’ve shut them in the front room with a large glass of wine each while I cook dinner. This is actually quite a big deal, because a) the kitchen is/has always been my mum’s domain – and it’s a reflection of just how exhausted and stressed she is by everything that’s going on that she accepts my offer without the slightest protest, and b) I can’t cook.

Though that’s mainly because I don’t cook. On the nights Mikayla couldn’t be bothered to rustle up something from a cookbook written by a chef whose name was a bigger mouthful than the quinoa salads he’d try (and fail) to make tasty (which was most nights), she always preferred to go out to eat, or alternatively, call in at Waitrose to buy something that just needed heating, rather than let me – and I quote – ‘blunder my way’ round her kitchen. But since Derton doesn’t have a Waitrose (virtually a sign of a third-world country as far as Mikayla was concerned) I don’t have a lot of choice. Plus, I’ve spotted the Jamie Oliver 30 Minute Meals cookbook on the kitchen shelf that I bought my mum last Christmas (though from the looks of it, it’s never been opened), so I’m reasoning how hard can ‘Easy Spaghetti Carbonara’ be?

Though ‘quite hard’ turns out to be the answer to that particular question, as I soon discover that in order to make any of these meals in the prescribed thirty minutes, you have to have eight pairs of hands. And at least two cookers. And, it transpires, know your way around a kitchen.

Now, I’m a pretty methodical kind of guy. Give me a set of instructions – to assemble an IKEA bookshelf, for example – and like most men, I can follow them (assuming I’ve bothered to read them in the first place). One step follows another, which makes sense to the way the male brain is wired. But Jamie Bloody Oliver (and trust me, I’m soon calling him a lot worse) seems to assume that we can be sautéing with one hand, dicing with the other, while simultaneously using our teeth to grate the Parmesan, all the while keeping an eye on the kitchen timer to make sure our pasta is ‘al dente’ – and quite frankly, doing any one of those things on their own is hard enough.

I’m twenty-five minutes in when I realise I haven’t a hope of making the thirty-minute deadline, Mikayla’s favourite insult (‘Why can’t men f**k off and die? Because they can’t multi-task!’) running through my head. Fortunately, my mum and dad seem to

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