One More Reason I’m Thankful for the Feminists

I should not be allowed in the kitchen if I am not making or serving coffee. It has to be some sort of civil code that once you fail miserably at something after a certain number of attempts, you are legally required to abandon the activity. It’s true with things like weapon carrying or child rearing — if you suck at it, they don’t let you do it anymore. Why is this not the case with cooking? I. Suck. At. Cooking. I cannot make a meal without leaving a line of casualties in my wake. The other night I got really ambitious. A few nights before a friend had invited me over for dinner because Clayton would be working all night. She had decided, on a whim, to whip up homemade eggplant parmesan. It was delicious, and I was inspired. But I know myself, and I thought I knew my limits. I didn’t shoot for the eggplant parmesan; I aimed much lower and decided to make my own spaghetti sauce. And then I positioned that bar even lower and googled “EASY spaghetti sauce recipes.” There’s like four ingredients in spaghetti sauce. Is there even a way to screw up a recipe with four ingredients? Answer: yes, if your name is me. I’m confident that one of these days I will find a way to make cereal inedible. Somehow, after reading and rereading and triple checking the directions, I burnt the sauce. Yes, the burner was on low-medium. Yes, I was stirring regularly. No, I did not leave for the weekend while the sauce was cooking. The stuff just burned. Like, scorched, tasting-the-hellfire-in-every-bite burned. Like, I had to buy a replacement pot for the 4-piece multi-use set we’d been given for our wedding because the bottom of the sauce had morphed into a charred, black film that no de-greaser or highway cleaner was going to remove. Our house smelled like smoke and Southern Baptist condemnation for a week. I’m pretty sure I made it through all four five years of college so I would not be fanning the smoke detectors with oven mitts every night. And if that didn’t cut it, looks like mama’s going for her Master’s.