Cooking Disasters

During the summer, my older sister and I would be left alone all day while our parents were away at work. Most summers, we lived off cheap frozen pizzas, TV dinners, and Macaroni and Cheese. We watched the 5 VHS movies we had over and over and over...

That's what my sister cooked. She still can't cook to this day. When she moved out, I had to learn the cooking bit. There was a lot of trial and error but eventually I learned. My husband, Shawn, is another story.
His mother is a great cook. I don't think she's Italian, but she's the perfect stereotype of an Italian mother. She cooks all this great fatty food and crams it into now matter how many helpings you've had or how full you might be.

"Eat!" she'll bark from across the table. "There's enough for everyone! If you don't eat, it'll just go into the garbage!!"

So you feel kinda obligated. Sure, she spent all day cooking this massive meal and you don't want to see any of go into the garbage. We have spent many a gathering leaving with our pants' top button undone.

Shawn never learned to cook because his mom always did it. He once decided to make cookies and I, the unassuming wife, decided that he was quite capable of following a simple cookie recipe.

How wrong I was.

He called me into the kitchen and asked me what he did wrong. "The cookies taste salty!" he said.
"Did you follow the directions?" I asked.
He answered yes and I tasted the raw dough. It was purely disgusting. It tasted like chocolate chips and salt.
"Um," I started. "Did you use a teaspoon of salt, or a tablespoon?"
"Tablespoon," he says.
"Right. There's your problem!"

When we lived in our first apartment, Shawn often took it upon himself to try out this cooking thing. He once messed up pasta from a box. I'm not sure what he did to it but we never could get it above the consistency of water.

He also applied child-like principals to cooking such as the common Turn Up The Heat, Cook It Faster method. I once returned home to find black smoke pouring out our front door. The smoke alarm was screeching and in a panic, I flung open the front door and ran inside.

It quickly became apparent that Shawn had attempted to cook bacon. I would've thought that grease exploding from the pan might be a signal to turn down the burner.

Oh, I haven't been without my own disasters. Ever try to make gravy from scratch? I once had my mom talk me through it over the phone. 'Nuff said.

At our first rental house, I learned to cook with virtually nothing. 2 burners on the stove worked; the oven itself did not. We had a small conventional oven that took up all of our 2 square feet of counter space. Ah, first homes. Gotta love 'em.

Since I only had like, one pan I grabbed a large glass bowl to use on the stove top. The kitchen was small stuffy so I opened the back door whenever I cooked and it was warm enough to do so. I filled the bowl with water and set it to boil. If you've ever attempted this yourself, you probably know what's coming.
Beyond our teeny backyard was an alley way that had medium traffic. We'd lived there for 2 weeks after coming out of a really bad neighborhood. Shawn was already apprehensive about what neighborhood this might be.
Back to the bowl of boiling water. I was going to make gravy from a package. I poured in the gravy mix and a bit of cold water--as per package instructions.
What do you suppose happens when you add cold water to boiling water in a bowl that is not made for the stove top?

As soon as the cold water hit the bowl, the bowl popped! It EXPLODED! It made a noise like a gunshot and I screamed and jumped back. Glass bits went flying in every direction. Shawn comes running into the kitchen hollering, "Were you shot?!" (yeah, that's the kind of neighborhood we had lived in before)

Shawn grabbed me with both his arms and starting looking me up and down. "What happened?" he shrieked. He looked at me all over for glass and cuts or any sign of blood. "Get offa me, I'm fine!" I said.

I looked around. Almost-Gravy was sliding down the wall with little bits of glass clinging to it. The floor was covered, COVERED, in tiny crumbs of glass. There was Almost-Gravy on the microwave, the fridge; it seeped its way down into the burners.

I wasn't so much upset about having to clean the mess, or having a late dinner. I was upset because we had to eat home cooked chicken fried steak without gravy!
It was definitely an I Love Lucy moment.
Whaaaah!