If you can't stand the heat....

...don't ever ask me to cook you a meal.

Is it just me or does anyone else find cooking really stressful? Personally I would rather have a filling at the dentists than cook a meal from scratch. The thought fills me with dread. How do I know when the meat is cooked? What happens if one thing is cooked before everything else? How do I baste? What’s a tablespoon? (just kidding)

A few days ago I attempted to cook a Spicy Sausage Risotto. It was a complete and utter disaster. The recipe said to cook the sausages first and then leave them to one side until the risotto was done. I think they must have been joking because when I put them back in the pan with the cooked risotto they were as hard as nails. They looked and felt like pieces of Blackpool Rock. The risotto was tasteless and bland and to top it all the apartment looked and smelt like November 5. And what did I do when it all went wrong? I cried. That’s what I did, I cried like a big baby. Why can’t I follow a recipe? What’s wrong with me? I can read, I can measure, so why can’t I cook a decent meal?

I watched an episode of the F Word with Gordon Ramsey a few months ago. It featured a woman just like me – a complete disaster in the kitchen. She lived on microwave meals (I don’t – I can cook a few things like chicken stir fry and, er, prawn stir fry) and desperately wanted to cook a roast dinner for her husband. Ramsey went round to her house, shouted and swore at her for a few hours and before you know it, she’d cooked a roast. He even went back a few months later to make sure she was still cooking. She was.

The thought of cooking a roast makes me feel very scared. How long do you cook the meat for? How do make roast potatoes? What happens if the vegetables are done before the meat? It’s all so bloody complicated. Some people say they don’t need to measure out ingredients. It’s just a pinch of this, a pinch of that. I have to measure EVERYTHING. I mean, what happens if I put too much pepper in?

I use every utensil I own and end up covered in flour and eggs. It’s horrible. It hate it. We did have home economics classes at school and I guess that’s when I realised I really couldn’t cook. Once we made a stuffed pepper thing and I dropped mine as I pulled it out of the oven. It was probably a blessing as it probably tasted awful.

Some of my friends say that cooking helps them relax. Relax? I relax in a sauna or on the sofa with a good book and a bar of Dairy Milk. Cooking is by far the most stressful thing in my life.

So, until I have taken some cookery lessons I wouldn’t ask me to cook you a meal. I could rustle up some beans on toast or even a chicken stir fry but that’s about it. Sorry.