>When my college sweetheart proposed and we began to plan our life together, my mother asked, “Can he cook?” I shrugged. Who cares about such mundane matters when in love? “He can cook about as well as I can,” I answered. Her reply? “You’re doomed.” She predicted starvation, at least.

Over the past 24 years (as of mid-June!), Husband and I have developed our own cooking styles. I’m the basic throw-something-on-the-table each night person because I get home from work first. He is the fancier cook, the one who will take a piece of steak or chicken and make a Food Network style recipe out of it. I’ll combine basic stew ingredients with garden vegetables in the crockpot; he’ll start up the grill and whip up a marinade. I’ll bake muffins or banana bread or rhubarb upside down cake; he’ll scoop up a dish of ice cream.

There’s room for both of us in the kitchen.

Both of us have our disaster stories, too. When we moved to our current home, it was a rather drawn out process. I was teaching full time, he was working full time, and both kids were in school. I would load up the car, teach all day, drop off the boxes at the house, pick up more empty boxes, and go home. Eventually we had most of what we needed, and we picked up the furniture and drove it down the highway to the new home.

Okay, we rented a truck.

But we didn’t move everything right away. A lot of the foodstuffs, including the spices, were still at the old duplex waiting for another day and another empty box. One day I attempted to make chili in the crockpot and found myself without chili powder. Always resourceful, I picked up a pack or two of the cracked red pepper that had come with a Pizza Hut pizza a few days earlier. This would work, I thought.

It worked, all right. It nearly burned every tongue in the family. Mom, the Bland Chili Queen, had cooked up a legend.

I’m not the worst cook. Not even close, I dare say. But every cook who experiments will have a disaster now and then, and I must admit I’m one of them. Blog them? Not likely! But you can find more stories at the American Egg Board’s Worst Cook contest. Eat ’em, er, read ’em and weep — hopefully with laughter.

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a contest sponsored by the American Egg Board. Go ahead, check them out. PBN always has more stories to share!