Goodness Gracious Great Balls of . . .

I have never boasted of being a good cook. I hate deciding what to eat, and I'm not very experienced in different modes of cooking. I feed myself and my husband tolerably well--I try to use some variety, but I also play it safe and use my go-to recipes and dishes. Being married to an older man has enabled me to learn from him and expand my cooking skills a bit, and he has exposed me to a couple of foods I didn't eat growing up. The kitchen is probably my least favorite room in the house--it's saving grace is that my ice cream lives in the kitchen. But I still do not enjoy cooking and don't ever see that changing.

As pessimistic as that sounds, yesterday was proof.  On Saturday night, I was brave. I attempted to make monkey bread, but being not so brave, I used a recipe that involved those biscuits from a can. Bunt-less, I used a normal casserole dish and underestimated how much the bread would rise. Spillage everywhere. It being Saturday night, I decided to wait to clean the bottom of my oven until Monday.

Yesterday, I was making cookies (easy, right?) for our church choir, and smoke emerged from the stove burners. My oven had caught on fire. Although the flame was not big at all (probably the circumference of a cantaloupe), I yelled for Tracy to help me put out the fire and get rid of the smoke before the smoke alarms went off. As we rushed about to fetch fans and open windows, the timer for the cookies (which by the way sounds a lot like the smoke alarm) went off, and Tracy looked at me and said, "The cookies are done!" with his child-like happy grin on his face. I laughed, but I also secretly cursed the kitchen in my head.