Confessions of a Terrible Cook + Giveaway Winner

I completely admit that the word chef or cook (or anything related to knowing what one is doing in the kitchen) would NEVER apply to me. I do LOVE to eat. I just prefer when someone else does the cooking. I wasn’t always this way. When my kids were young and my husband was not traveling much for work I would have dinner on the table every night at 6:30 p.m. That was a very long time ago.

My kids are now teenagers. My oldest is in college. Everyone does something different at a different time from the rest of the family most nights. Therefore I find it nearly impossible to cook a meal for everyone to enjoy. I do make it a point to cook at least 3 nights during the school year.

Lately though, I seem to have a bit of trouble in the kitchen. One morning I was heating biscuits in the microwave for a mere 20 seconds when I started a fire! It extinguished itself leaving a charred mess in the microwave and a smokey mess in the entire house for days. It turned out that the microwave had some sort of a short in it and it sparked a fire. I was sort of embarrassed, but I managed to move on.

A few weeks later I turned on the oven to preheat while I gathered the things I would be making for dinner. I smelled something funny in the kitchen so I rushed in to see what smelled. I was greeted by a kitchen full of smoke and a terrible odor. It turns out that I had turned on the top oven that houses all of my cooking trays, including some brand new ones still wrapped in plastic. That was one BIG smelly mess to clean up once again.

This past week my daughter and I decided to bake cookies from scratch. I have obviously been visiting the Six Sister’s Stuff blog and other Pinterest sites too much because it is not like me to want to bake anything from scratch. What can I say? I am inspired! I turned on the lower over to preheat once again. And again, I smelled something funny. Could this really be happening again?! Yes, it turns out, it could! This time someone (probably the housekeeper) decided to put a metal baking pan with plastic lid into the oven for storage. Here is the result after it cooled off:

I should have known better, but I never store anything in the lower oven so I never thought to look there. Lesson learned once again! We got the baking dish out just in time before the melted plastic hit the bottom of the oven. And the cookies that we made turned out GREAT! So I will continue to visit the Six Sisters and others to see what I can come up with next. I might just need to start with the “no bake” recipes!