You're doing it wrong...

A year or two ago, I was at home, attempting to bake something. Probably banana bread. I was chatting online with one of my roommates, who was a work, and who happens to be a whiz at baking (or maybe she just knows how to read a recipe). I can't find the chat in my history, but it went something like this:

me: Ugh, I don't have any baking soda. Do you have any?
her: I dunno, you can check.
me: I don't see any.
me: I'll just use baking powder.
her: what? you can't do that...

This solidified my reputation as the worst baker and cook in the house, and gave my roommates hours of entertainment. I know now that baking is chemistry, so the difference between baking soda and baking powder is a big deal. Incidentally, I'm also terrible at chemistry. I haven't really baked since.

But cooking is more of a necessity, and you can do that pretty minimally. Sometimes all it meant was making a baked sweet potato and calling it a night. I never starved or anything. But I recently got married and I have this other person who will likely starve if I don't make dinner consistently.

Unfortunately for both of us, this requires a bit of work. It means going to the store and buying a full week's worth of ingredients. I know this is, like, normal for people. But then you have to know what to do with the ingredients. And before all of this, you have to look up recipes so you know what to buy and what you're gonna cook. It's like writing an essay where you have to know what your paper is going to say before you write it! Except I like writing essays. 

Again, these are all normal things. I'm just bad at them. I have the unique talent of buying the wrong thing for the recipe, or something slightly different than what the recipe calls for (sometimes this is on purpose, because basil is sorta like parsley, right? *and all the real cooks fainted!*). So then I have these ingredients, but they don't exactly match the recipe. So I improvise. And that's where the adventure really begins.