Where there's fire... I'm probably cooking

I don't get it.

The cooking gene seems to have forgotten me. My mom can make a tasty meal when she wants, though since I was a teenager and my brothers were out of the house, she and I switched to Healthy Choice dinners. My dad makes really excellent meals full of flavor. My brothers can both make great dishes full of spices that I've never even heard of. They are both excellent chefs. My aunts, my cousins, my uncles... they all know how to make a good meal, flawlessly. And, to top it off, I believe they enjoy it.

I'm not exactly saying that I can't cook. Put a recipe in front of me and I'll likely figure it out. The only thing I've really ruined has been some sort of baked good that has ended up runny or too salty. It's just that I really despise cooking and often times, smoke and/or fire is involved. I get confused about why smoke comes about, but whatever I'm creating can still taste good. What's with the smoke?

I remember the first time I was cooking and a fire sprung about. I was maybe 18-years-old and living with my mom. I'm going to guess that I was "cooking," so I was probably heating up some pizza rolls or something. The little buzzy thing on the oven went off, so I opened the door and a fire was a'blazin' on the, uh... you know... the cookie sheet. That's it. Even though my mom had told me many times what to do in this situation, everything had fled my mind, and my reaction was to pace back and forth. My mom was in the next room, just chatting away on the phone with her best friend. So I paced over to her and said, "Fire. Oven. There's a fire in the oven." I expected her to tell her friend, "Hang on, Meghan needs me." Or, "Omigosh, the house is on fire! Let me call you back!" Or, "I HAVE TO HANG UP TO CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT!!" Or some sort of reaction.

No. She just kept on chatting to her friend, all nonchalant, probably about men and how we should throw rocks at them, while I was burning the oven down. She calmly walked to the cupboard next to the burning oven, grabbed baking soda, tossed about a cup of it on to the fire, returned the box to the cupboard and walked away, never even acknowledging my existence... or watching to make sure that the fire really went out, which it did. She just kept yakking into the phone like nothing happened. Her friend had no clue that I practically burnt the kitchen off the house.

That was the first time I started a fire in the kitchen.

The second time, I thought I was pretty sly about it. At this point, I was used to my weird cooking ways and the fact that when I cook, smoke happens. Because of that, I often set off the alarm in the first apartment that I lived in with two roommates. I took care of that by waving a pillow at the alarm while I heated up my soup.

I am a big believer in cleaning as you cook. So one evening as I was heating up my soup, one roommate was talking to me. I noticed my soup had spilled over on the stove a little, so I took my paper towel and wiped the stove clean as we chatted and the edge of the paper towel touched the stove that was on for my soup and WAM, it was on fire. But as soon as it caught fire, it was out. So I did my mom's ol' trick there and kept talking like nothing had happened and my roommate stared at me incredulously. When I looked back up at her after my sentence she looked at the stove, then back up at me and said, "You do realize that your paper towel had caught fire, right?"

I was hoping she hadn't noticed.

Now I am 26-years-old. I have been cooking for 17 years. I have a 2-year-old oven mitt and it would share many-a-stories if it could talk. My latest fire happened just in the past week or two. Again, I think I was taking Kevin's pizza rolls out of the oven and touched the heating-up-thingies at the bottom of the oven. The oven mitt, given to me as a wedding present, started blazing up, but as soon as I pulled my hand out from the oven, the fire was gone.

Somehow, having this burnt oven mitt (with melted cheese all over it) just seems more fitting to me. It just says Meghan.