Funny New Years Resolution, Cooking!

by Jenn
(San Antonio, Texas)

My New Year’s resolution last year was to learn how to cook. I had been working for a major coffee company for many years and was good at making drinks.

But at home, I couldn’t boil water. Eating out was getting boring and expensive....I thought cooking could be a way to save money, too.

I learned a lot about myself and my family members when I started cooking. I discovered immediately that one member of my family had been using the oven for storage. I planned to make a frozen pizza (starting off with baby steps) and preheated the oven. In a few minutes I smelled burning plastic!

I opened the oven and found a smoky lump of neon green plastic melted to the oven grille. I think it was the cheese grater but it was hard to tell, and no one confessed to putting it there. Removing melted plastic from the grille required some muscle and patience. Finally, I took it outside and whacked it against the bricks of the house to remove the last of it.

I learned also that I was not as good at reading directions as I thought. For example, when I missed the step about draining macaroni before mixing in the cheese, what I ended up with was macaroni soup.

I found that even my poor handwriting was a handicap. I scribbled down a grocery list of ingredients for a recipe I wanted to try, then could no longer read my own handwriting at the store a few days later.

Cooking has taught me patience and precision. I now store grocery lists on my phone, which has spell-check. I burnt myself a lot, I burnt the food a lot, and I had to clean blender splatter off the ceiling a few times.

But I ended the year with a decent number of edible recipes under my belt, including one really good one for split-pea soup, a tasty and still kind-of-good-for-you pumpkin pie, and a cookie so good people have tried to pay me for it.

My dilemna now is finding a resolution for this year that will be as much fun and useful :)