Housewives Day

This holiday is a tricky one–how to celebrate this when I have never stayed at home with children, as I have neither a house nor children? My original plan was to be handy around the apartment and take care of a couple of tasks that I’ve been meaning to get to. Namely, I was going to re-stain our kitchen table, which is a nice cherry wood, but has suffered some gauges over the years.

However, a different, but just as worthy, domestic task took place in the S & G household tonight. G has been craving cheesecake for days, and after work today on our way to Mildred’s for dinner, we stopped off to pick up cream cheese and a few other items. Once home, G pulled up a New York cheesecake recipe, and I helped him dump four 8-ounce packages of cream cheese and a cup of sugar together. He mixed them smooth with just a fork–which is a serious accomplishment, by the way–and I grabbed him a beer to support his physical labors.

The next step was mixing in four eggs, one at a time. After that, we were ready for one teaspoon of vanilla and 1/4 of a cup of flour. The only hitch was we don’t do much baking, and therefore had no flour. G took a measuring cup and knocked on almost all of the doors in our small apartment building, but the only female wasn’t home, and none of the males had any flour. So plan b kicked in, and we followed the recipe on the inside of the cream cheese packaging instead. Scrap the flour, add two teaspoons of lemon juice and call it a day.

Almost.

G had purchased two pie crusts, but we filled both quickly and had a significant amount of cake-innard left. So what did my housemate do? He whipped up a graham cracker crust from scratch. (One and 1/4 cup graham cracker crumbs, 1/4 cup sugar, one teaspoon cinnamon and 1/4 cup melted butter blended and pressed into the bottom of a pie tin.)

It took almost 2 hours, but by the end of the prepping, we had three cheesecakes ready to pop into the oven (300 degrees for an hour and 20 minutes, then turn the oven off and leave in the oven for another four hours before popping into the fridge to chill). The house is currently filled with a sweet smell, which has more than covered the remaining whiffs of deviled eggs sneaking out of the fridge.

And now as we sit, content with ourselves and watching TV as the cheesecakes firm up, I take a moment to reflect:

I. Could. Never. Have. Made. Cheesecake. Alone.

My partner, a football-loving engineer, can bust out three cheesecakes and even adapt the recipe when disaster seems imminent. My most important contribution to this whole affair was to wash the dishes afterward. And it’s in this moment that the whole idea of “housewives day” seems irrelevant, much more so than Look for Circles Day or even Deviled Egg Day. Both of us make significant household contributions in our own ways, and I anticipate both of us will continue to do so.

Can’t think of any better reason to celebrate than that.