What are your kitchen rules?

Day 29

Today, I was in the kitchen cooking a pasta dish which I think turned out pretty well. Normally, when my wife is present at home, I would shy away from cooking. The reason I shy away from cooking is because we have different cooking and cleaning approach in the kitchen. My wife likes to clean the kitchen simultaneously while she is cooking and I like to finish my cooking and then clean the kitchen. So when I am cooking in the kitchen when my wife is present, she will walk around cleaning and putting away the spices. It feels like she is in my way of cooking, and for her it feels like I am a messy cook. This leads to argument at times. There are some battles you just don't want to fight. So I normally don't cook anything when my wife is around because of the kitchen rules.

So here is my question: What are your kitchen rules?

In the household, who gets the decision to make the kitchen rules? See in a restaurant, there are hierarchy of chefs from the head chef to the line cook. The head chef makes the kitchen rules on the cooking preparation methods to the kitchen maintenance protocols. At home, how do you determine on who is the head chef? Is it based on your cooking skills? Is it based on the dominant cook? Or is it the battle of sexes?

Let me try to take the kitchen rules to another level. I have visited homes of some Brahman families that consider kitchen equivalent to a holy place. A little background on the topic of Brahman: Vedic scholars, priests, vegetarians, highest class in Hinduism. I have heard rules like you can not wear shoes in the kitchen, you cannot enter the kitchen until you shower, etc. The most hardest rule I have heard is "You can not enter the kitchen because you are not a Brahman or because you eat meat."

"The best part of cooking is bringing the different components of food together, to create that perfect bite of satisfaction."

Here are some of the pictures of my dishes I have created in the past

~Lenji Jacob