sauerkraut

On Sunday night, my parents left me home alone. As they were walking out the door, Mom said, "Ashlyn, do you think do you think that you can cook this while we are gone?" There are two very bad ideas here:
1. Ashlyn cooking.
2. Ashlyn cooking when there is no one else at home.

It is not that I do not like to cook. I love to cook. But I'm terrible at it. No matter how hard I try to follow the directions, something always goes wrong. Always. Even with microwave popcorn. I will follow the directions on the bag and it still messes up. I will open the bag, and instead of being enveloped in warm, buttery steam, I choke on clouds of black smoke.

The fact that I cannot cook is only made even more terrible by the fact that the rest of my family can. And they're really good at it, too. Sometimes, I will get up, and there is my brother, standing over the stove making breakfast. Pancakes, eggs, and sausage. And it's not like Grant says, "Hey, want some pancakes?" and then reaches into the freezer and grabs out some frozen stuff and jams it in the toaster. Grant makes pancakes from scratch. Good pancakes. The fact that my brother can cook and I cannot bothers me.

So, here's how the whole 'cooking' thing turned out...

1. I preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
2. I try and measure out 1/2 a cup of mayonnaise. How in the world are you supposed to measure mayonnaise? I tried shaking the jar upside down. I tried scooping it out with various utensils. I tried sticking the measuring cup in the jar. Nothing works. And when I finally got it all in the measure, it wouldn't dump out into the bowl. It just stayed there. Someone please invent something special with which to measure mayonnaise...
3. I mix Thousand Island dressing and something else in a bowl. This goes incredibly well (meaning no one gets hurt, and I don't spill anything). I am thrilled.
4. The oven is preheating irksomely slow. I open it. Black smoke pours out. Inside is a smoking paper box, and several other things that shouldn't be in the oven. But they are. I panic and start looking for potholders. My family has taken all the potholders with them (they went to a potluck. They don't just do this). I settle for dishtowels. After I grab everything out of the oven, I throw open the door to let the smoke out. 4 cats run out. I don't care. We have 12, who's going to miss about, oh, a third of them?
5. I preheat the oven. Again.
6. The recipe calls for grated Swiss cheese. We only have a block of Swiss cheese. I look for the cheese grater. And look. And look some more.
7. I find the cheese grater. This was a small miracle, so I thought it deserved its own number.
8. Do you move the cheese or the grater when grating cheese?
9. I hate Switzerland. And its cheese.
10. The recipe calls for Sauerkraut that is "rinsed and drained". What is Sauerkraut and who knew you had to rinse and drain it?
11. The oven is finally preheated.
12. Sauerkraut feels like paper mache. I was really bad at paper mache.
13. I assemble everything in a pan and shove it in the oven.
14. 25 minutes later, I take out the pan. Whatever is inside it has become something that no rational being would touch, much less, put into its mouth. I seriously consider tossing it into the garbage and telling Mom I didn't make it.
15. Mom comes home to pick up the dish and take it with her to Bible study. I wonder if all those nice people will be mad at her if they get food poisoning...

I guess I'll never know.

Maybe I should just take a cooking class.