Cooking Fool

A swirling ring of smoke making its way to the ceiling could only mean one thing. My mom was working late, and my older sister Tasha was in the kitchen standing in front of the stove, feverishly stirring, baking, or frying away the smell, taste, and look of what would be our dinner.

If this had been our first and only encounter with her reckless disregard for our health, then I might have been able to get through it. But this was just another attempt by her to try and replace the foul memory of a ghastly creation with one of something sweet and succulent.

How she thought she would do it was far beyond my ability to comprehend, especially when I think back to the time my brother Kevin, stood in the hallway shouting at her bedroom door accusing her of murdering his taste buds, with a concoction that has yet to be identified.

It completely escapes me how she can turn the simplest things into a complete disaster, like the time that she made something that looked like Chocolate pudding but tasted like Italian salad dressing, and then there was the Vanilla pudding that would have been great, had she not added in that pack of Cherry Kool-aid!

One of her most awful creations was born on the day of my brother Jason’s 14th birthday. My mom wasn't feeling well, so she asked Liz to bake the birthday cake. To our dismay she said yes, to our delight she added the three eggs, without the shells and the ½ cup of water, all that was needed to produce two fluffy circle yellow clouds of moist and delicious golden brown cake, which was to be draped with rich thick milk chocolate frosting, was 1/3 cup of Vegetable oil. Too bad we were all out. So she decided to substitute the 1/3 cup of oil with two sticks of butter, sure it looked and smelled like a piece of heaven, but it tasted like dirt!.

As bad as that was it is still not enough to contend with the dinner that she made on her own birthday. It consisted of red roasted cement mashed potatoes, bland buttered mushy diced carrots and a bleeding flabby pink chicken with a chemical burn. I guess she figured if she couldn't kill us with a cake, then she would use a chicken.

For some reason, when my mom worked late it was like some sort of celebration for my sister. She would go into the kitchen, put on her imaginary chef's hat, fire up the oven, turn on the burners, and let her imagination run wild. Although her imagination was involved, the business of creating a proper meal was no game to her. She used so much care when slicing and dicing the hue of green, yellow, red, and orange vegetables, which were regular staples in whatever she made, and the way she looked around, eyes squinted, back hunched over as she stood in front of the stove, as if someone was hiding in the corner with a note pad trying to capture the precise combination of spices that she carefully folded into the strange concoctions that lived inside her tall pots and pans.

Sometimes when I watched her bustling about the kitchen, I wondered where in the world she thought she was, and who did she think she was cooking for? We were children, who needed to be able to recognize our food, or at least believe that it was edible

The sad part about it all was that , no matter how long she took in the kitchen, and regardless of the preparation or what delicious and delicate smells came floating through the air, you could never get your hopes up, because the outcome was always , always going to be the same. Pink and still bleeding or burnt to a crisp. On this day it would be the latter. A handful of black crayons, served alongside a lump of coal placed upon a hamburger bun that introduced a new shade of black. If my teeth had been a jack hammer I still could not have penetrated her murder burger and suicide fries. As I stared down at my plate, I decided that all the small fires that often flared up, as the pots and pans that held her witches brew boiled over, and oozed their juices onto the burners, had singed her nose hairs, and made her sense of smell null and void. The question of why she could never see what she had created, has yet to be answered