On the Job Training

David loves sausage, biscuits and gravy. But there are degrees of love. He doesn’t love them enough to wake up on a Saturday morning and us all out to a restaurant just so he can have his beloved breakfast. He’s much too frugal for that. There are things I love that much, like pancakes for instance, but since I’m not the bacon-bringer-homer, I make my own. And that’s how he loves sausage, biscuits and gravy—enough to ask me to make them for him on a somewhat regular basis.

The first year we were married I really wanted to make his birthday special. I asked him the day before if there was anything specific he wanted to eat the next day. What he really wanted was sausage, biscuits and gravy but since we were trying to be vegetarians, he guessed I shouldn’t make it for him. We had only been vegetarians for a short time, and it was before we adopted the high moral stance of believing that special events like birthdays were exempt from any dampening of the holiday.

The next morning he woke up to the smell of his favorite breakfast. He stumbled into the kitchen where I greeted him with a cup of coffee and the confirmation that his nose had not deceived him.

He initially dug into the first few bites with relish and then slowed to ask how I had made it. I hadn’t yet decided weather I would tell him, but since he asked:

“Well, the sausage is soy sausage and the biscuits and gravy are made with soymilk!” It was evident I thought I was very clever, but that he didn’t.

“The soymilk that’s in the fridge?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The same soymilk that I just put in my coffee?”

“Yes….” My smile faded into puzzlement now. He stood up, walked to the refrigerator and opened it.

“Rachel, this is vanilla soymilk.”

I tasted my Frankenstein’s monster for the first time. It was sickeningly sweet—though the texture and undertone were reminiscent of what I had tried to create.

Even though I told him he didn’t have to, he choked down the entire plate.