WHY can't my mother accept that I will NEVER be a good cook?

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........