DOKE

Regular readers of my blogs are no doubt aware that for many years I was in charge of the kitchen until my illness put an end to that. Although, as I dictate this blog, my dear wife is in the background protesting, (therefore, adding her comments to the text, which is making the process of writing it less efficient), I will not be deterred from saying, putting it as delicately as possible, that when she took over the cooking from me, the meal schedule in our happy home underwent a change that makes the Federal Government look like a model of efficiency. (Just kidding, Honey, please put down that rolling pin.)

Taking my cue from Elon Musk, who probably has more money than I do but, I would guess, fewer cooking skills, I have established, DOKE, the Department of Kitchen Efficiency. Despite resistance from the household deep state I am endeavoring to maintain an organized approach to food preparation and to minimize food waste in our domestic bureaucracy.

Being an artist, my dear Sandy has a tendency to approach tasks in a manner quite different from mine. While making art and preparing meals are both creative processes, the protocols with which they are best undertaken often diverge markedly. While she goes about applying paint to a canvas in a manner that appears to the casual observer to be a helter-skelter process, the end result is always sublime. That approach in the kitchen may yield equally enjoyable results, however, the time it takes for those results to come to fruition may sometimes be a bit longer than ideal. This morning can serve as an excellent example.

Sandy has been planning on preparing blueberry muffins for breakfast for the past couple of weeks, and today she decided to put those plans into effect. Now, if I were able to prepare the muffins, I would first of all not require a recipe. I have a recipe in my head that is applicable to many different categories of baked goods. The difference between a scone, a muffin, pancakes, biscuits, waffles, and quick breads lies only in the relative quantities of mostly identical ingredients. I learned those variations a long time ago. Were I to have been in charge of baking those muffins here’s what would have happened:

Directly upon getting out of bed, and even before fully dressing, I would’ve thrown the ingredients together, poured the batter into the muffin tins and started them baking. Then I would have started the coffee machine and completed my brief morning grooming routine. By the time I had emerged from the bedroom, the muffins would have been almost done, leaving me just enough time to cut up the oranges and set the table. We would have eaten breakfast at actual breakfast time.

Sandy, on the other hand has been ruminating upon two different recipes and wondering how to combine them to create her muffins. A couple of days ago DOKE marched (actually hobbled) into the kitchen and suggested she should pick one recipe and stick with it. Seriously, are House Committee sessions required in order to determine that would be a more efficient way to prepare her muffins? Still when I observed the scene in our kitchen today I saw her poring over the two cookbooks still trying to decide how to hybridize them to create her delicacies. As chief of DOKE, and a hungry one at that, I issued an executive order, (well, actually a plea.) “Please pick one or the other.” Surprisingly, she complied and closed one of the cookbooks.

Now, satisfied as to how she would ultimately create her culinary masterpiece she could finally get down to the business of muffin making. But that did not happen. Instead, she proceeded to sit down at her computer and start reading her emails. All the while she asked my opinion on how to respond to the extremely urgent messages concerning what petty disputes du jour were going on in her art gallery, regaled me with the latest doings of her friends’ grandchildren and photos of art colleagues’ latest works, pondered which emails were phishing scams, etc. She then read to me from the weather channel to inform me of the dire and deadly weather events that were happening in far flung regions of the globe, the amount of snowfall, temperatures and wind velocities in the Far West, the Midwest, New England, and other areas of vital importance to our Virginia location.

Fortunately, she has been in the habit of setting up the coffee maker for the next morning’s breakfast in the evening after dinner, so I was able to perform the complex task of pushing the button, one that she tends not to remember to do many mornings, that starts the machine. At least we would have some coffee while she continued her incredibly efficient process of preparing our morning repast. Actually, since we have no earthshaking responsibilities other than dealing with healthcare providers and insurance companies and the various other bureaucratic issues that have arisen in the wake of my illness, whether we eat breakfast or brunch is of little moment. When it comes to dinner on the other hand, the sequence of preparation of the various components of the meal takes on a bit more importance.

No worries, DOKE supervises every step of dinner preparation and ensures everything arrives on the table at the appropriate time. The “good” news is that the number of diners in our home will soon be cut in half. (Beat that, Musk, a 50% cut in the food budget!) The bad news is that the director of DOKE is the employee facing termination. (If only that were the case with DOGE.)

Don’t feel bad, dear readers. That’s the whole purpose of the “efficiency” department. Human life and well-being are irrelevant. One can only hope that the remaining employee will have learned enough about meal preparation efficiency to carry on her duties before starving to death.

Fortunately, DOKE is not as cruel as DOGE. If it were, DOKE would be pleased with her demise by starvation since the budgetary savings would be 100%. DOKE hopes it won’t come to that and, rather, that under its auspices she will have streamlined her cooking functions to the point that she will continue to eat well and on a reasonable schedule in the future.

DOKE and DOGE may sound alike, but they are so different. DOKE is efficiency with a heart. I hope the lessons learned under DOKE will keep Sandy well fed, but should the the project fail to take hold, if she learns how to order online she should survive. In that case, looking on the bright side, she would be relieved of all food preparation responsibilities as well as out from under the jackboot of DOKE. In truth, despite her occasional protests, I suspect she experiences DOKE as more of a comfort than a threat, even though she jokes(?) that she plans to initiate litigation. I hope it won’t come to that. If it does and the Supreme Court weighs in on the newly installed department’s constitutionally, who knows if we will ever eat again?