“Wife food” is nourishment prepared by a significant other.

There comes a moment in a lucky man’s life when wife food surpasses mom meals.  This happened for me around the time my wife started making the best sandwich bread I’ve ever had.

There is a vast food gap in my life between when I left home the day after I turned eighteen and when I started regularly eating wife food, or wife to be food, at twenty six.

Eight years of bachelor kitchen.

I ate a lot of sandwiches, a lot of pasta, a lot of everything a single person eats that’s super convenient and cheap.  When I visited my parents I would almost shake with their fridge open.  Having stayed awake late, I could stand alone and peruse every shelf and drawer, every leftover container and jar.

I enjoyed visiting, getting a mom meal.  When I left I would reminisce as I sorted what I snatched from the pantry.  They stocked it well knowing what I’d do, thus giving tacit permission when it wasn’t explicit.  But I pretended it was plundering.

Food tastes better when it’s a guilty pleasure.

Raisin Nut Brand collected incognito was breakfast gold.  I’d also scavenge blocks of cheese and dry salami, the basics a twenty something needs at three am.

Staring at a refrigerator’s blinding bulb with heavy eyelids made me hungry for salt, fat, and also sugar.  So I’d grab a bag of Oreos, double stuffed if available, or some version of Fig Newtons.  I didn’t even really like Newtons, but I was a jackal an “opportunistic omnivore”.

Some people use salt.  I flavored my meal by eating with my hands.

These are of course not the manners my parents taught me, but the wilds of bachelorhood gets elbows on the table and peanut butter replacing pasta sauce.  Mom meals nourished my body and soul, but were fleeting.

For every occasional visit treated to roast lamb and sauteed mushrooms, I ate hundreds of meals prepared for myself alone to serve satisfaction quickly without great cost or particular care for flavor.

But though mom meals were rare they sustained a hunger for better value.  We are what we eat, and I was becoming cheap.  I didn’t care if something was too salty or sickly sweet.

Vegetables bought with the best intentions wilted, pushed to the side to make room for pseudo foods contained in glass or plastic with mold being the expiration date.

I wanted better.  I wanted to consistently eat better.  I wanted wife food, because I wasn’t good at feeding myself.  Not because I didn’t know how, but because I wanted to be cared for.  A little boy inside me wanted regular meals prepared by someone who loved me and wanted me healthy and strong.  I was alone, and my loneliness expressed itself with crappy food.  Or, maybe I was just lazy.

I flew as a savage to an odd collection of islands to teach my language.

I spent a little over a year in Japan on the island of Hokkaido.  I never cut my hair, and I met my future wife food maker.

Wife food means strawberry pie

This was delicious.  It was gorgeous, made with love, and tasted like the guts of angels.

Fresh mint from the garden, u-pick strawberries, and cream stuff.

Her crust doesn’t match mother’s quite yet, but wife has a chemist’s background.  I’m confident it is only a matter of time.

This cake and Mexican lasagna was the perfect birthday meal last summer.  Quintessential wife food to nourish body and soul.

She keeps the boy in me well fed.  Although now I’m addicted for better or worse and surviving from loaf to loaf.