Editor's Column
by Alyssa Brown
My brother stood giggling by the cutting board, licking the mixing bowl.
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This Editor Was Born to Eat, not Cook
This summer I decided to end my culinary incompetence. I told my mom I would cook dinner on Tuesday and Friday evenings until I went back to Multnomah.
My debut as a cook happened to be on my mother's birthday. Wanting to make her a nice dinner, I planned to serve homemade bread, pork roast, spinach salad and carrot cake.
I mixed the bread and started the machine. Next I began the cake. Stephen chopped vegetables for the salad while I ran the grater, feeding it carrots and apples.
Never give a 10-year-old a bag of baby carrots. What looked like vegetables to me were missiles to him. He fired as many carrots at me as he chopped and dropped into the pot.
At 3:30 p.m. I slid the cake into the oven. By now flour stuck to the countertops, floor, cupboards and ceiling. Carrots lay around like shells after a gunfight. My brother stood giggling by the cutting board, licking the mixing bowl.
The next hour flew by faster than Stephen's flour-coated carrot projectiles. When I checked the cake at the end of the hour, it was still soupy. Shrugging, I pushed it back into the oven and gave it another half hour. I dumped the bread out of the machine. The loaf smelled delicious but was only about five inches long and close to the density of a rock.
Telling Stephen to leave the bread hidden in the cupboard and pull out the cake when the timer went off, I left to pick up my sister from karate. Apparently he mixed up my directions because when I returned, he and my dad had eaten the bread and left the cake baking in the oven. Something had gone wrong, and the top of the cake had exploded.
The icing will hide it, I thought and set the cake on a rack to cool.
At 4:30 p.m., right after pulling out the cake, I slid the roast into the oven. Cooking a roast is easy. Plop it into the pan, and let the oven do the rest.
Of course, the oven has to be turned on before it will do anything, and some unhelpful person had thoughtfully turned off the oven. When I checked the roast an hour later, it looked much the same as it had an hour before. Exactly the same.
Thinking this odd, I shoved the roast back into the oven, not noticing how cool it was inside.
While the roast was sitting cold in the oven, I scooped up the raisins scattered on the countertops. I asked Stephen to set the table. Instead he found a bread knife and cut the cake into chunks.
Using toothpicks to hold it together, we arranged the cake into an "M" shape for "mom." We then coated it with icing and set it aside. I would like to have forgotten about it entirely.
At 6 p.m., half an hour after dinner was supposed to have started, I discovered the oven was off and turned it on.
An hour later, when the roast was finally done, I called my family together, and we sat down to eat. We passed around chopped carrots in a pot and the roast, which was actually cooked. The cake was a much bigger hit than I had expected until Mom bit a toothpick.
On Friday I made pizza, which turned out decently, except that I ruined my mom's pan and gave myself a third-degree burn taking it out of the oven.
After several more unsuccessful attempts, I realized I cannot cook. At first I was upset, but my mom reminded me that we are all good at different things. Some of us cook, and some of us eat. God made teachers, healers, administrators and those who find joy in service. He has given us each individual gifts to develop and enjoy. She reminded me to focus on my gifts rather than on the things I cannot do.
As right as she was, I think she was afraid I would burn her last pan.
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