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I’ve mentioned before I’m not very good at cooking. I go through spurts of trying to get better at it. Like after watching Julie & Julia or reading some terrifying article about Americans slowly killing ourselves because of our high fat diets. Or seeing some consumer alert about sneezing restaurant workers and the disturbing amounts of E coli on spatulas.

It doesn’t make me proud to admit that the only good thing about my cooking is that I know I washed my hands. But I have gotten a lot better at baking. And the holiday season has always seemed like the perfect time to bake some unhealthy food.

He's a closet Paula Deen fan

I’m not too bad at baking some things. I can make a mean vanilla cupcake so by default I’m not too bad at cakes. Really I should stick with those. But every year I find these recipes and I think to myself, “Oh, that would be really good. I like cranberries and pumpkin, I’m sure they would taste great together in a cookie!”


That’s when things start going wrong. I don’t have the culinary skills to pick a recipe by just looking at the ingredients. And unfortunately I don’t have a taste tester to warn me before I take a bunch of weird cookies to school to feed some potential new friends.

That’s the thing about moving to a new town, you don’t have a special friend to taste test your experiments... ahem, cooking. A friend is going to be honest but still nice about it. They’re not going to spit it out in front of your face while making loud, theatrical, gagging noises. A kind taste tester is a true friend.

This is also a good opportunity to see how long your current relationship is going to last. For example, you’ve just spent hours trying to find the perfect recipe online. You’ve found all the ingredients at the grocery store and just spent the rest of the afternoon mixing, measuring, and stirring. You're hovering in the lava hot kitchen because it’s been preheating for the last two hours as you debated how lumpy a batter should really look.

Enter your new boyfriend. You have high hopes for this one. He’s got a great personality, clever sense of humor, and to top it all off a lush head of hair. He  tastes the food of your laborious day and remarks unenthusiastically, “Well, it’s not bad.” I give that relationship two weeks.

Since it is the holiday season, I already did a little baking. Some of it turned out good and some not so good.

Cranberry- pear crisp. Not bad.

With my apartment being so small, it makes sense to have a small kitchen. But small doesn’t even begin to describe it. My kitchen is only about 17 square feet. It has a beverage refrigerator. Yeah, just like the one you had in your freshman dorm.

So damn cozy

It’s hard to cook much of anything in such a tiny space, let alone try to mix and stir baking batter but it seemed to work out OK.

The vast counter space

Well, the pumpkin- cranberry cookies didn’t really work out but that’s not my kitchen’s fault. The cranberry- pear crisp turned out really well. However, it should have come with a warning that you’ll attract older divorced men.

So I’m not much of a cooker.

Single girl, living alone, I don’t need a lot of leftovers in the refrigerator judging me. But being single isn’t the only reason why I don’t do a lot of cooking. I have a pretty short attention span so I tend to forget about whatever is on or in the stove (smoke alarms are horrible cooking timers). As you can guess, I haven't always had the best luck at cooking.

My earliest cooking experience was in high school. I was cooking bacon and was getting really impatient.  Impatience seems to the key factor with most of my poor choices. So I turned the heat up to high (bad decision) and walked away, probably to do something important like watching reruns of Boy Meets World.

Shawn Hunter, what a dream boat

When I returned to the kitchen the bacon was a smoking pan of fire.

As one bad decision usually leads to another, I went screaming out of the kitchen. The only way I can explain this is by my overzealous Fight or Flight response, which for me is 90% flight and a pitiful 10% fight. But on a positive note, it’s the main reason why I’ve lived to the prime age of 24 and escaped natural selection so far (fingers crossed for another 24 years).

Anyway, my brother put out the fire while my mother fanned the smoke alarms. From then on I was banned from the kitchen.

My next cooking experiences came when I moved out of my parent’s house. As I’ve mentioned, I was living off campus in an apartment with a pretty nice kitchen. Oh yeah, and it had a really old gas stove. Welcome to irrational fear #2: Gas Stove.

Terrifying

I still remember my mom showing me how to light the burners. You just turn the knob over to light and then adjust the temperature. “It’s just that easy,” she said.

Just that easy? Oh really.

The first time lighting the burner I almost caught my eyebrows on fire. I kept turning the knob to light, but it never started. So giving it the ol’ college try, I kept turning the gas knob over and over and over, until finally the burner did light. The spark ignited the 2 minutes of gas I had been releasing and exploded with a giant burst flame. To make matters worse I had a pan on the burner which deflected the fire directly to my face. That demonic burner almost got me. 

From that day on, it seemed as though the stove was toying me. Lighting easily some days and stubbornly not lighting others. Then there were the days where it would light so quickly that the flame sparked 12- inches above the burner.

Even the ticking sound as it tried to light sounded demented, mocking me and my pathetic culinary skills, waiting for it’s chance to melt my face off. This stove was playing a deranged game of cat and mouse, and I was terrified of the day when I was bound to get caught. It looked a little something like this:

This is offensive to anyone who has a mustache

Fast forward to August 2010. I’m moving into my new apartment and as I looked around, to my horror, there stood a gas stove.

Unlike the old stove this one is shiny and relatively new. It’s also about half the size of my old gas stove. But it's size seems strange to me, almost child- like. And by child- like I mean the Satan child, Damien from The Omen.

That's not fruit punch

I really shouldn’t be so hard on this stove. It hasn’t once tried to catch my eyebrows on fire. And it lights within seconds, never toying with me but calmly sizzling to a low flame.

Got any weird birthmarks?

But I just can’t seem to get over my fear of it burning my face off.
I guess like all relationships, it'll take time.

     You may not know this but I have several irrational fears. Some of these fears stem from childhood events and others have been acquired more recently. No matter where these fears started they all have one thing in common... they are irrational.

    For example, during my undergrad in St. Louis, MO I lived in a really nice two bedroom apartment. One of the rooms was used as my bedroom and the other I used only for storage. The thing is, I was terrified of this spare bedroom. It had a creepy closet and the floors were really old so they were always groaning and creaking. Of course during the day time I never really thought about the spare bedroom, but at night? Well, at night was a different story. I swore to all of my friends that it was haunted. During this time I was watching a lot of Lifetime movies. Big mistake, it only contributed to my fear and allowed my very vivid imagination to run amok. In my mind something was lurking in the spare bedroom. Something along the lines of this:

 or this:
Why yes, that is the giant sand worm from the movie Tremors. (And yes, it does make me start thinking about Kevin Bacon.) I’m hoping I will soon outgrow my this fear because I don’t have room for a nanny come live with me. But for now... check out the Oracle of Bacon.

This is a view from the front door. In the bottom left corner of the picture is my bed and then the doorway to the bathroom. Next is a book shelf and the freezer/microwave/coffee maker/toaster area. The kitchen is pretty tiny so all the appliances don't fit. You'll see in a minute. In the meantime, welcome to the dining area! I found this small dining room table at a local antique mall and thought it was really cute. The chair is one I've had for a little while but I put new fabric on it. It's kind of like greenish, blueish, pinkish, impressionistic print.

These pictures I found at a couple of different antique malls (they're hanging above the the small bookshelf). I love old fashion pictures and was thrilled when I found these. The one in the gold frame I found in a collection in Jefferson City, MO and it's by Clarence F. Underwood.  The frame I found here in Madison. Isn't it cool?