Risky Candlelight Dinner

Cooking is probably the only art form where the faster your audience destroys (eats) your creations, the more successful you can consider yourself. I don’t have any pretensions about myself in this area. I did meddle around in the kitchen occasionally when I was married but I’ve become more adventurous in the culinary arena since my divorce a few years ago.

I had never actually tried to seduce a woman with food. I didn’t start dating again for a long time and even when I did, I didn’t feel the need to get into a long-term relationship for a while. This was until I met Alice.

Alice was different; I knew that right off – witty, charming and great fun to be around. And suddenly I felt like a gawky teenager, wanting to impress her and show her what a great guy I was. We went on a couple of dates that were enough for me to realize that this was a woman I wanted to be with for a long time.

When I asked her out for the third time, I invited her to dinner at my place. I was really excited when she accepted - I wanted to cook a meal she wasn’t going to forget for a long time.

After a lot of thought I decided to make lemongrass soup, with a main dish of Prosciutto Citrus Shrimp, topped off by chocolate fondue. Rather ambitious, you might think, and it was—but I was prepared to give it my best shot. I went to the extent of doing a “practice session” in making the shrimp dish a couple of days beforehand to ensure everything went well.

It didn’t quite turn out to be that way.

We had to have dinner in the living room because one of the candles in the dining room fell onto the tablecloth and burnt a huge hole in it, letting off some acrid smell. And though the soup went off well, it turned out Alice was allergic to shrimp, which was a definite deterrence to the main course that was supposed to be my star attraction.

I think the despondence on my face was quite obvious because she did rave and make a “big deal” about the “wonderful chocolate fondue” - which was actually wonderful.

The real saving grace was the wine that she had brought—a wonderful white Californian that seemed to skim gracefully down our throats and send a warm mellow glow through the soul.

Soon, our formal dinner forgotten, Alice and I were sitting on the back doorstep, holding hands and sipping wine while watching the stars light up the sky. Much later she confided to me that she was impressed by the amount of trouble I had gone through in preparing the meal, but was much more attracted to me when it didn’t go according to plan because it made me seem much more human. Ah, the mysterious mindset of women… still, the pride of a man wants him to think that his cooking seduced the woman, not brought out her maternal instinct or pity.

But I’m not complaining—the story has a happy ending. When I was in the middle of an apology, she turned to me and smiled “I think YOU are wonderful.” And she kissed me…

Even when the meal doesn’t turn out quite so well, there is something seductive after all, I guess, about a man who cooks… or tries to, anyway.