Don't Get Too Excited...

...because this isn't a "real" post yet. Give me about another week and things should quiet down enough that I can get back to work.

However, in the meanwhile, I'm going to share some personal history that is evidence I need someone to cook for me.

Not because I'm lazy (that's beside the point) or because I don't enjoy it (also beside the point).

Because I am lucky that so far, I have not (entirely) burned down a house due to one of my cooking disasters.

Stuff burning in our kitchen is probably a weekly occurrence. I have no patience to stay in (or even near) the kitchen while waiting for something mundane to happen, like bringing the frozen pizza to an edible temperature. Plus, I figure if I can set a timer, the four-year-old can come let me know when it beeps (she's actually better about this than the Moroccan), and I can come fetch whatever it was from the oven. I am the Queen of Multitasking. (Note: I specifically did not say I was the Queen of Successful Multitasking.) So I will deposit something in the oven or on the stove, leave to use the restroom, walk by the computer on the way back and end up reading Facebook posts until the smoke detector goes off.

My mother really did try to teach me to cook, and when I have the time and patience (which is rare enough that it's safest to say "never"), I can follow basic recipes. I make fantastic French Toast and excellent grilled cheese (which is almost exclusively what I lived on while in Japan). However, I don't eat much of those any more, which means I'm either eating something raw (green peppers are a favorite), packaged (yay for string cheese), or I'm picking out the least burnt parts of whatever I tried to cook. If I'm really lucky*, the Moroccan cooks dinner early enough for me to eat AND prepares enough for me. This is rare though as he likes to eat at 9 or 10 pm at earliest--if I eat that late and close to when I go to bed, I don't feel well in the morning. Plus if I want to go work out, I have to eat a couple hours before then because running is hard enough without trying to simultaneously digest. In any case, my cooking is atrocious. I probably shouldn't even call it cooking because cavepeople had to have had more culinary skills than me or they would have starved to death since they couldn't, you know, open a new can of food when the first one ends up charcoal.

*The Moroccan has a different definition of "lucky" than I do.

The first signs that I had issues (that I remember) were in high school. I was making baked potatoes and decided to brush premelted butter on them. Unfortunately, since it was already melted, it dripped to the bottom of the oven. I was in the kitchen when I heard KKSSSHHHH.......pwooof! KKSSSHHHHH.....pwoof! When I turned around, I saw something that can only be truly described as a direct copy of the flame spurts in the fire swamp from The Princess Bride.

Yeah, Mom wasn't too happy about that one. However, since the butter that dripped onto the bottom of the oven would sizzle, then burst into flame, we kind of felt like it might not be wise to open the oven door, so we had to just wait until the potatoes were done. Except for a very few scorch marks, amazingly they turned out okay.

During the same period of my life I set the toaster on fire. In my defense, I would like to explain that all I did was put in two slices of bread and push the button. However, since I already had the fire swamp episode behind me, when the toaster burst into flames and set the cupboard above it on fire, somehow my family decided that it was my fault that this had occurred. It didn't help that I had walked out of the kitchen while the toaster was on and someone else had to deal with the problem.

Jump ahead to after college (I lived in the dorms all through college and although I complained regularly about the food, clearly I'd never had to live off of my own cooking for that long a period of time or I would have kept the whining to myself) and I moved to Japan--but I already told you about how I lived on French Toast and grilled cheese there. My problems with cooking in Japan were not so much things being burnt. I had a shoebox apartment, with a one-burner stove that was right next to my miniature sink. For reference, both the burner and the sink fit into a surface area the size of a regular cookie sheet, if that. The problem was that if so much as a drop of water got into the element of the burner, it shorted it out for several days, meaning I couldn't cook (or burn) anything, so I had a lot of convenience store food since I couldn't afford restaurants.

Come home from Japan and one of my few cooking achievements was a lasagna dish I made one night for my roommate. It was fantastic. It took me two days of planning, a week's worth of grocery money for the specialty ingredients, an hour of prep the night before, and four hours that night.

Seriously? I don't have that kind of time to cook. It's actually cheaper and faster to burn something, toss it, and go out to eat. I've never put forth that much effort on a single dish since.

Okay, yes, there are simpler recipes and cheaper ingredients. Not the point here.

I. Don't. Enjoy. Cooking.

And not enjoying it does not motivate me to learn to be better so I don't suck at it quite so much.

Instead, I am a culinary fire hazard.

My biggest catastrophe in my current home was the actually very serious grease fire that I (accidentally) set last year, resulting in a damaged (but still functional) microwave, scorch marks that go up the cupboards and onto the ceiling, third degree burns on The Moroccan's hand, and burns on the dog (we literally had to go to the doggie ER to get her treated). I escaped unscathed (physically), because I was so useless running around screaming ohmigod! whatdowedo? whatdowedo? that The Moroccan told me to just get out of the way.

Since then, the number of burned meals has not really changed, nor has my attention span or apparent ability to care enough to do something about it.

Tonight though, was probably one of my lowest moments.

I decided to make a special treat using Halloween candy: S'mores.

It turns out that you can, in fact, burn graham crackers in the microwave. And when they are burned especially badly, they get stuck to the plate (Note to self: burnt graham crackers could replace super glue, must see if we can get a patent on this).

I did manage to successfully create some unburnt S'mores afterwards, but since the kitchen and family room smelled like smoke, it was a bit hard to tell. Also I belatedly remembered that I've never really enjoyed S'mores because I don't really like marshmallows, and my daughter and husband don't really like chocolate, so the whole thing was really an exercise in futility.

Except, of course, to remind me that I need someone else to cook for me.