A little background: I love cookbooks; I read them like novels.

I have a guilty secret. Well, it’s not that big of a secret. We have cleaning ladies; they aren’t particularly good. Now, you probably know that money’s pretty tight around here, so you may rightly ask, “Why do you have cleaning ladies, Janice? Particularly ones that don’t do a very good job?”

We have cleaning ladies because we are wimps and our son reminds us on a regular basis. The head cleaning lady has worked for us more than 17 years. She is old, she is sad, her health is poor, her daughter has cancer. Neither my husband nor I can bring ourselves to fire her.

Occasionally, I will decide I am a heartless beast and our family budget is more important. Invariably, that will be the day she tells me her daughter has had a relapse, or she herself has diabetes, or her granddaughter–who has no health insurance–has been passing the same gall stone for 11 months.*

Still, our son insists she must be fired. His latest gambit is that we, the family, can do a better job than she does. He is right, of course.

“But,” I said, “when you say ‘we can do a better job’, you are actually saying ‘Mom can do a better job’.”

“We can clean the house,” he insisted.

“You won’t do a good job,” I countered.

“So, you’ll supervise,” he said. “You can sit there on the couch with your tea and read Fifty Shades of Cooking while we do all the work.”

* These are all true. . .I think.