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It’s mocking me.   It’s whispering to me every night that while I may have gotten quite good at flipping over fried eggs, I will never master the art of baking.”
    Cake flour—not fancy cream cheese spreads—was the whole point of this trek to the Upper West Side .

    A few weeks into learning how to cook, I took the train out to New Jersey with two empty, rolling suitcases, and I went down into my parent’s basement to retrieve all of my unused wedding gifts—gifts to celebrate my now-defunct marriage.
    When Adam and I were engaged, I registered for cookware like all good brides in New York , even though I didn’t know how to use a roasting pan or colander. I mean, how do you admit that fact to friends and family who are so keen to buy new brides cookware? It’s practically written in the Wedding Bible: Thou shall buy brides either cookware or lingerie for their shower.
    So I unwrapped box after box of beautiful William Sonoma silver pots and pans and Le Creuset enamel and silicone spatula bouquets and properly ooohed and aaahed about each gift, all the while knowing that they probably would never be used. I would have loved to have thrown Martha Stewart-inspired dinner parties with linens matching the centerpieces, but emptying a pre-cooked chicken purchased in Chelsea Market into a roasting pan seems like cheating. And though Martha went to jail for some type of stock debacle, I could not see her being down with that type of cheating and sullying her good housekeeping name.
    I considered just admitting that the entire idea of learning my way around the kitchen filled me with exhaustion and ask instead for other gifts—maybe lifetime memberships to various city museums or a subscription to the American Ballet Theatre. But my non-cooking mother encouraged me to register for the cookware because people loved to buy it, imagining the couple hunkering down to some warm soup in the middle of their first winter together. She also helped me repack it in boxes after the guests departed and labeled the outside of each William Sonoma box with a black sharpie. My mother is, if nothing else, practical.
    She took all the boxes back to her New Jersey basement under the guise that we shouldn’t use up precious New York storage space on wedding items.   I think my mother was a tad fearful that I might ignore all the beliefs she drilled in my head as a teenager if I had access to those gorgeous pots and pans in my kitchen.  
    According to my mother, suggesting that women cook dinner rather than order in from a local restaurant is the first step in returning all of the liberties women have obtained in the last fifty years. I might as well declare myself Amish and go sew my own clothing and can green beans from my garden. “You don’t knit your own sweaters, Rachel,” my mother was fond of saying. “So why do you want to cook your own meals? Let Diane Von Furstenberg make your tops and let Hunan Chow make your dinner. You have more important things to do than housework, and it’s just food.”
    Except that, unlike her, in the few months leading up to the trek out to New Jersey to pick up my kitchenware, I really didn’t have more important things to do.
    It’s not like Adam and I literally never ate a meal at home. We had cereal for breakfast, and I was fantastic at boiling up ramen noodles. But once I crossed the threshold of three or more ingredients, once the directions weren’t written on the outside of a package, I sort of tossed the idea of preparing the meal back on the figurative shelf.
    Through most of our marriage, I didn’t think Adam cared. He liked my mother’s spirit and complimented her when she ordered Thanksgiving dinner from his favorite caterer. And he certainly wasn’t doing any cooking since he rarely got home before
11 p.m.
But it was a throwaway thought he spat out during one of our final conversations while we waited for our lawyers to divvy up our possessions that gave me pause.
    “You’ve