Looking back at my history of the culinary art is like looking back over Kerry Katona's career; disastrous, humiliating and riddled with failures. However much my mother tries to drill cookery into my ears, it comes out the other side battered and bruised. It's not that I don't try, I'm just cursed! I don't even ignore instructions -- quite the contrary, I stick to instructions by the letter, but people never tell me to insert common sense in between the lines of the recipe, because they don't seem to realise that for me to produce an edible meal, I have to be given the kind of instructions you would give a five year old. Seriously.
Now you probably haven't actually comprehended how bad I am yet, so let me give you some examples. My first cooking venture was undertaken at the tender young age of about ten. My mum was busy ironing and so left me to make myself some spaghetti on toast. Not difficult, really; put bread in the toaster, pour the spaghetti out of the tin and heat it up for however long it says on the packet. Unfortunately, no-one told me the last bit, so I left the spaghetti on the hob and nipped off for the first half of Friends. Needless to say, when I returned, the spaghetti was fused to the bottom of the pan. I did a similar thing with noodles several years later.
My most infamous story is the time I put pasta in the microwave.........wait for it.............without water. Yes, really. But at no point on the instructions did it say 'Pour water onto pasta', so it really wasn't wholly my fault.......... Either way, the pasta continued to get harder and blacker, until I rang my mum at work and had a conversation at work that went a bit like this: -
"Mum, there's something wrong with this pasta....."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, it's not going soft. It's gone all....black. And hard."
"What?! How long did you put it in the microwave for?"
"Only about seven minutes, like the instructions said!"
*long pause*
"Bex, did you put water in?"
".......oh."
Amongst others, there was the time I threw uncooked rice into chilli con carne mixture (we were having guests that time -- it was particularly humiliating), the many times I have cremated bacon and pizza, having forgotten about it entirely, the time I cooked chicken for about twenty minutes and nearly poisoned my family, the time I turned the gas on, forgot to ignite it and left it running for about twenty minutes and nearly blew up the kitchen and the time I stuck an omelette to the ceiling.
Yep, I am to cooking what Cheryl Cole is to heavy metal. Just don't go there. But despite this, my parents are still determined to send me off to university as the next Nigella Lawson, however many pans I ruin (and I think we're already in double figures), or maybe they just haven't learnt their lesson yet. However, I'm thinking tonight's little venture -- frying a chorizo sausage without realising that the greaseproof paper was still wrapped around it -- may be the cilncher........
Friday, 22 January 2010
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
It doesn't matter how old you are technically; when it snows, you're seven.
Anyone who lives in England will know that the past few days have been defined by one wintery, wonderful thing; snow. The whole country is covered in the stuff, and my home in north Derbyshire is (thank God) no exception. When I set off for school yesterday there was only a gentle dusting on the ground, but it started up again as I was walking and by the time I reached my school (only about twenty minutes later) I looked like I'd been frosted.
By the time we had finished first period - an ear-bleedingly crap General Studies lessons - it had somehow made it's way around the entire school that we were being sent home. No teacher had actually confirmed this, but call it student intuition; we can smell hometime. When it was actually announced, I swear most of Chesterfield will have heard the shriek of delight. In any case, we were all kicking our merry ways home by about ten in the morning, everyone feverishly planning to go home, grab a sledge and find a decent slope before they were all 'taken'.
I, however, was making slow, nervous progress towards my friend's house, not daring to go sledgin, or even up the hill that leads to my house, due to me unhelpful footwear. New Look boots may look pretty, but made to grip they were not. I lost count of how many times I slipped somewhere around number seven, and at one point managed what I can only describe as a truly spectacular front-flip into a hedge.
I felt hugely cheated of my sledging opportunity, and so became hugely excited when school was cancelled today as well. A group of about twenty mates, including myself (obviously) found a brilliant hill that made for excellent sledging without dumping you into a river or a tree. Several of us (who are all sixteen/seventeen, incidentally) started rolling down the hill, purely for the fun of it, and the more vengeful of us began a snowball fight that included burials, face-plants and the vicious ice-down-the-pants shots and everybody threw themselves face-first down the slope with reckless, elated abandon. We were acting like five year olds, and I'm not ashamed to say it.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a sign of irreversible maturity when you look out of the window, see snow and say, "Aw, dammit -- I can't get into work!" But even if you are one of those somewhat miserable old sods, as soon as you actually get into the snow and build a snowman, go sledging, have a snowball fight or make a decent snow angel, you revert to the behaviour of a small child, and, frankly, that's exactly the way it should be.
As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of snow is to free you from school, give you a chance to have fun and to get revenge on Callum for dropping what was less of a snowball and more of a snow mountain on top of your head. So I returned cold, drenched, aching and with a bruise the size of a football blossoming beautifully on my leg, but I had a fantastic time, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
By the time we had finished first period - an ear-bleedingly crap General Studies lessons - it had somehow made it's way around the entire school that we were being sent home. No teacher had actually confirmed this, but call it student intuition; we can smell hometime. When it was actually announced, I swear most of Chesterfield will have heard the shriek of delight. In any case, we were all kicking our merry ways home by about ten in the morning, everyone feverishly planning to go home, grab a sledge and find a decent slope before they were all 'taken'.
I, however, was making slow, nervous progress towards my friend's house, not daring to go sledgin, or even up the hill that leads to my house, due to me unhelpful footwear. New Look boots may look pretty, but made to grip they were not. I lost count of how many times I slipped somewhere around number seven, and at one point managed what I can only describe as a truly spectacular front-flip into a hedge.
I felt hugely cheated of my sledging opportunity, and so became hugely excited when school was cancelled today as well. A group of about twenty mates, including myself (obviously) found a brilliant hill that made for excellent sledging without dumping you into a river or a tree. Several of us (who are all sixteen/seventeen, incidentally) started rolling down the hill, purely for the fun of it, and the more vengeful of us began a snowball fight that included burials, face-plants and the vicious ice-down-the-pants shots and everybody threw themselves face-first down the slope with reckless, elated abandon. We were acting like five year olds, and I'm not ashamed to say it.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a sign of irreversible maturity when you look out of the window, see snow and say, "Aw, dammit -- I can't get into work!" But even if you are one of those somewhat miserable old sods, as soon as you actually get into the snow and build a snowman, go sledging, have a snowball fight or make a decent snow angel, you revert to the behaviour of a small child, and, frankly, that's exactly the way it should be.
As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of snow is to free you from school, give you a chance to have fun and to get revenge on Callum for dropping what was less of a snowball and more of a snow mountain on top of your head. So I returned cold, drenched, aching and with a bruise the size of a football blossoming beautifully on my leg, but I had a fantastic time, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
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