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Born to Cook, NOT!
Friday, May 20, 2005

By Christina VanGinkel

Some are born to be in the kitchen, others are not. Sadly, I fall into the second category. Born and raised in a family that owned a bakery, some would assume that I at the least know how to bake. They would be wrong. I can manage a decent loaf of banana bread, but that is about how far my baking skills go. Married nearly a quarter of a century, my husband must love me for many reasons, because kitchen skills are not one of them.

I have made every proverbial mistake in the kitchen that you could think of. I have boiled water with the intent to put in eggs, and then forgot I was boiling the water until I could smell something and realized that the pan was dry and burning. My mother-in-law does have me beat on that one though and she is a good cook. She put the eggs in, and promptly forgot about them until she heard something like an explosion coming from the kitchen. The eggs had boiled right down to no water and were exploding from the heat.

Anyhow, back to me. I fried meat with water for years until my daughter, a natural born cook, one day asked me what in the world I was doing. She then showed me how to place just a small amount of butter or oleo into the pan with some seasoning. What a difference that one small step makes to the taste of the meats I cook. Pasta is also not my strong point. I can never boil it to just the right texture. It is either still nearly as hard as when I dumped it in, or it has boiled to a consistency that is close to a paste. Do not even ask me about rice. I have somehow managed to ruin the boil-in-bag kind, and regular rice is not even an option.

Many people that cannot cook typical day-to-day fare still manage to have a strong point, such as breakfast foods. I can guarantee you that my husband would disagree with that statement where I am concerned. For every year of our marriage, he has tried to teach me at least a half dozen times how to cook an egg over easy. I have succeeded probably once a year. That one small success keeps him of the mindset that someday I will learn how to flip that egg to perfection every time. I do not think so. My twelve year old has learned much quicker. He asks me which eggs in the pan are his and proceeds to poke them killing the soft yoke. He has also started to learn to cook many items that would intimidate me. He boils, fries, flips, concocts, stirs, whips, and assembles with the best of them.

Have I decided to give up trying? Not yet, as I have hopes that I can still learn to cook with the best of them. If nothing else, I can always take lessons from my two youngest children. That is if they will let me back in the kitchen after my latest attempt at baking a frozen pizza. I honestly believed the smoke was coming from something I spilled in the bottom of the oven and never got around to cleaning up. Who knew a pizza could turn that black that fast!

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