Cooking Time

A humor piece written about the struggles of cooking.


Cooking has never been my strong suit. Throw me in a den of lions, fine. Make me do five hours of math homework, whoop-de-doo. Throw me in a kitchen and tell me to make dinner, you might as well start calling the firefighters, poison control, police, SWAT, and the army because whatever comes out of my oven could be classified as the next terrorist attack.

No matter how simple the instructions, how perfectly everything is laid out, something always goes wrong. Who ever thought that it would be a good idea to make sugar, flour, salt, and powdered sugar all the same color? I distinctly remember one morning I had the crazy idea that I would be capable enough to make sunday breakfast for everyone: biscuits and gravy. The dough took a record of three times to be remade; the first time I mistook the sugar for the flour. The second go, I made sure not to put sugar in place of the flour, but instead powdered sugar. Finally, my mom stepped in, and sent me off so I would stop causing harm to the biscuits.

Instructions are also hard things to pay attention to, even if their are less than three steps. Being Chinese, it is my duty to be the best rice cooker in the neighborhood. I will truly dishonor my family if this story ever gets out. No matter how hard I try to make rice perfectly, something always gets in the way. Whether it’s me forgetting to add water–which has happened more than once–or me putting too much water, causing it to turn into white nush. Rice is not my zhuānyè (specialty).

Cooking is like me trying to learn spanish in my spanish classes over the last couple years. No matter how hard I try, I’m still just as bad, with no foreseeable improvement.