please pack your knives and go

I've always said I can bake a mean cookie, but if you want a real meal before it you'll have to go someplace else. I like baking because it's an exact science; you learn the rules and your cupcakes will be awesome every time. If you mess with the amount of baking powder in a recipe, the cake won't come out right. Aren't precise when measuring the flour and you'll end up with a dense brick of a cake.

Cooking, however, is a beast that I can't quite tame. There's no science involved, no rules for me to learn. You're working on a recipe and find that you don't have an ingredient? No problem, just substitute something else for it! Cooking is a process that's much more fluid and free form than baking and I just suck at that. sucksucksuck.

Not only do I lack the ability to know how to substitute ingredients, but I also lack the ability to be able to read a recipe and see that the end product will be inedible. Which is why, last night jparks and I ended up with stuffed bell peppers that resembled vomit on a plate. (trust me, I know vomit). A normal person would recognize that bell peppers cooked in a crock pot would be horrible, but not me, I soldiered ahead wasting ground beef, rice, bell peppers, and my sanity.

The only good thing to come out of this string of cooking failures is that I've learned that jparks is willing to eat whatever I put in front of him, without complaining, and will only say something negative if I say something negative first. Who in the hell knew he was capable of this?!?

This is the boy that sometimes can't help but blurt something, anything out right as I'm falling asleep for no reason other than he couldn't stop himself. This is the boy that makes 'your mom' jokes to his brother, while his mother is standing next to him, because he doesn't realize they might hurt her feelings. This is the boy that doesn't understand that telling a girl she might not want to eat dessert could seem like he's hinting that she might want to watch her weight. Yeah, he can be a bit blunt. And dumb.

I may not be able to make a decent meal, but my crappy meals are making jparks into a thinking-before-he-speaks adult, so maybe it's a fair trade. And really, who wants to be known for her meatloaf and mashed potatoes? Not me, I'll take cupcake fame over that any day.