He who begins many things finishes but few

You know that thing women are always telling blokes about how men can only do one thing at a time while women can multi-task? Well I think I now know why. Women are taught to cook and men aren't.

In the past few years I have taken over all the cooking in my household. Unless there is something very special needed on a very special occasion, I do it all; breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all snacks in between. It's not so bad, really and beats just about every other kind of housework I can think of hands down.

The greatest challenge that I faced as someone who didn't do a lot of cooking before, is synchronising everything. Even fairly simple meals need a great deal of planning to esure that every sauce, side and vegetable is ready at the same time so they can be served together. This means their cooking times and methods need to be planned and synchronised and, before that, the preparation of each item has to be started at the appropriate time. (And, before all that, you have to make sure the meals are all planned and the shopping is all done!)

And, this is the part that really caused me trouble, you often have to look after several parts of the meal, each at a different stage of its process, all at the same time.

At first, this seems like a wild juggling act, but, with practice (I don't know how many thousands of hours of cooking time I now have under my belt - as it were) it gets easier and better co-ordinated. If any of this multi-tasking skill rubs off onto other areas of my life, I suppose I must be getting better at all kinds of things.

But if (the vast majority of) women are expected to master cookery and practice it every day of their lives and (the vast majority of) men are not, it is easy to see where a real difference in multi-tasking ability might emerge.

Picture by nataliedee.com