I was the new guy at the job, the lowest reporter on the totem pole.

I’m not going to name the newspaper where this happened (but it was the Richmond News Leader). All I will say is that at least they had a desk for me, and a phone, and even a chair. I guess I should have been grateful.

What they did not have was a computer. So that meant I had to go from desk to desk each day, looking for an available spot. If someone was on vacation or was off that day, that was where I would sit.

Of course, this was before laptop computers. It may even have been before laps.

There was only day of the week when I knew for certain where I would be. Our assistant city editor, Jane — a native St. Louisan, by the way — worked Tuesdays through Saturdays. That means her desk was open on Mondays.

This may not seem like a big deal to you. But like a tribe that has been wandering in the desert for hundreds of years, I longed for a homeland. On Mondays, Jane’s desk was my homeland.

Stick with me. This is a food column. I’m actually going to talk about food soon. Sort of.

As it happened, Jane’s desk was next to the desk of the state editor. The state editor was the person in charge of 14 bureaus around Virginia, from Virginia Beach to Williamsburg to the Shenandoah Valley, plus Washington, D.C.

The state editor was from Chicago, and I had lived in Chicago. She was a Cubs fan, too, and although I was not exactly a fan I would literally take the El past what was then Comiskey Field to watch the Cubs play on the North Side.

So we had things to talk about even before one of us mentioned food.

Perhaps it was she who first said that she had made some stuffed shells, for instance, over the weekend. I might have responded that I had made kung pao chicken.

The next week, I might have said that I had broiled chicken thighs with lime juice and garlic. She may have said that she had braised chicken in wine and rosemary.

At some point, we were no longer just cooking dinner for ourselves. We were cooking to impress the other person.

Don’t talk to me about how hard those televised cooking contests can be. I have been in a cooking competition with a state editor. That’s infinitely harder.

Without ever saying it, or even acknowledging it, we tried to outdo each other.

I might come in on a Monday and boast that I had made steak au poivre over the weekend.

“Oh, yeah?” she would say. “Well, I made my Italian mother’s recipe for homemade lasagna. Top that!”

She wouldn’t actually say the “oh, yeah?” or the “top that,” but they were definitely implied.

The next week I would come in and announce that I had spent hours making a chana masala. She would riposte that she had spent even more hours cooking a perfect French onion soup.

We would glare at each other, teeth bared, beads of perspiration breaking out on our foreheads.

“I made beef wellington,” I would snarl.

“I made lobster thermidor.”

In September, we will have been married for 30 years.

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