​Cooking and I are not good friends. But I’ve tried to not ruin my children’s enjoyment of cooking (or eating, considering the many failures I’ve tried to make them eat). I knew they had the potential to make a party of cooking one day when they were two. They had a Betty Crocker mini-set of kitchen appliances which kept them concocting dishes long before it was safe for them to use real appliances. It included a toaster that really popped fake toast, a blender that when you pressed the button whizzed around whatever little toy you could fit into the pitcher, and a hand mixer that spun the beaters back and forth with every push of the sprocket-driven button. I knew they were ready to have their first cooking lesson when I came back into the bathroom one day when we were potty training and they had the hand mixer in the little bowls of the potty chairs and were whipping up what they’d put in there. (And it wasn’t water from the faucet.)
 
Our first cooking lesson: You don’t cook in the bathroom. And certainly not with what you find in the potty.

​You may think I was cute at two, but look at that tea party next to me. It’s a harbinger of things to come. Clearly, from the very beginning I wasn’t cut out for a career in the kitchen. I couldn’t even set up a simple child’s tea party. No wonder I’ve set the kitchen on fire.

We had angel food cake again this week. Jason's favorite cake, and we have it once a year, every year. Sometimes we buy it already made, sometimes I attempt to make it. I'm a terrible cook and I ruin most everything. Mostly it's because I won't stay in the kitchen long enough to see something through. So I've burned a lot of things—including three stoves/ovens. (See Burning Cookies for the Kids.) ​