How can I describe Vangie, my cook and beloved wife?  She is the descendant of cannibals and conquistadors, a tenderhearted killer in the kitchen, and a hardheaded, frugal, mistress of the house.  She is the tallest short woman you could ever hope to meet, with the spirit of an amazon and diamond sparks in her dark eyes.  She's older than she looks, but her heart is as young as this morning's sunrise.  She has a flair for clothes and wears them well, but she hates to spend money on them.  She takes great care with her makeup, and she is quite expert at it, having been trained by drag queens back in the Philippine Islands, where I met her in 1976.  
          When we met and fell into a state of mad love (pretty much from hour one), her cooking ability hardly entered my thoughts.  During our early time together we ate out a lot, and she mostly cooked fishy-scented Filipino specialties.  I figured that I could teach her a few recipes later.  Little did I suspect that I was marrying a food obsessed gourmet cucinera with the ability to instantly make any style cuisine her own, and to create endless new variations of every sort. 
           When I say that Vangie is food obsessed, I mean this: if we eat in a restaurant, and something we order doesn't satisfy her incredibly refined taste buds, she will not send it back to the chef: no, she will order more to take home, where she will "fix" it, to her satisfaction.
           Evangeline has a cook's knowledge of anatomy and botany so vast that I call her a culinary biologist.  Name any animal and she will tell you how she would cook it.  Recently, we had a very entertaining conversation in which she speculated on how to butcher and cook a T. Rex. (she proposed using a helicopter to lower the huge slabs of meat into a volcano).  She even knows how to prepare the poisonous fugu fish.
           Do you remember the scene in "Forest Gump" where Bubba is describing all the ways one can prepare shrimp?  Watching this scene intently, Vangie listened carefully to every recipe that Bubba named, and when he had finished, she immediately informed me that he had missed several more ways to cook shrimp, and she named them all.
           Dare I tell this?  I think I shall:  very early on in our relationship, after making love one evening, I asked my beloved a question.  We had reached the heights of passion and both orgasmed at the same time, with Vangie screaming out loud.  Holding her afterward, floating with happiness, I asked her what she was thinking of at the moment of climax.  I was dumbfounded by her answer; she was thinking of what she would eat the next day, making up a menu.  It seems that her sex drive and her love of food are bound together (and I am the beneficiary of that fortunate situation). 
           Vangie likes to watch cooking shows on television, and I like to watch with her and listen to her talk about food.  Over the years she has picked up so much from these shows that she is simply amazing in the kitchen.  She loves to cook, and she cooks with love.
           I  love Evangeline absolutely, she holds my heart, warms my bed and makes me smile.  Sometimes she says she wishes she was a man, so she could be my boyfriend.  I say man, woman, what's the dif?  I mean, nobody's perfect..... just so long as she (or he ) can cook!