Alas, Even Recipes Can’t Help Me Cook!

We have so many cookbooks that we must find places in the basement to put them because they clutter the kitchen. I tried to use the ones about eating healthy and losing weight, but I never had the ingredients called for or knew what they were. However, when I did, the end result looked nothing like the picture in the recipe because cooking was never an activity I was meant to accomplish.

I can do the basic scrambled eggs, but you are on your own if you want them fried, boiled, poached, or any other way. Anyone can take the spatula and move the eggs around, but timing a three-minute egg is torture for me, worse than the long minute on Jeopardy. So, if we have company, Douglas cooks the eggs.

I didn’t have a mother who cooked. My sister and I ate a lot of sandwiches, and I am a whiz with mayonnaise, bread, tomato, lettuce or spinach, and meat or no meat. Have you never had a tomato sandwich, a sugar sandwich, or a mayonnaise sandwich? Boy, you’ve led a sheltered life!

As an employed single mom who couldn’t cook, I depended on frozen foods and boxed meals like macaroni and cheese or Hamburger Helper. Today, two of my daughters are caterers. They taught themselves to cook everything from scratch, promising they would not eat any more frozen foods once they left home. I love their cooking! They always tell me just to bring myself and not try to cook anything for holiday meals.

I enjoy looking at cookbooks full of beautifully cooked meals, especially desserts that look like art, hence the number of cookbooks in the house. But they can’t help me learn to cook because I don’t know what many directions, like saute, require. I hate waiting for water to boil and simmer should never have been a word for someone who has very little patience in and out of the kitchen. The finished product always makes me run, not walk, to the nearest fast-food place for comfort food.

Thankfully, God blessed me with a man who cooks wonderfully. He loves recipes but always alters them, so he can’t make the same dish twice because he can’t remember what he changed. But, we eat well and healthy because, as a former chemist, he loves altering recipes and inventing beautiful and tasty meals. Praise be to God!