I'll admit it--I never really learned how to cook.  When my mother said she was going to throw something together, we started talking about going out to eat.  Then I joined the army and ate in a mess hall three times a day, every day, except when I went to Burger King.  One day, my first sergeant volunteered me to help make potato salad for a company organizational day.  I told her I didn't know how to cook, and she poo-pooed it.  At least until she handed me a potato and a chef's knife and said to start peeling.  I didn't know how, so I sliced off the sides and the ends.  It only took three potatoes.

When I got out of the army, I was rudderless with food.  I was single and trying to either make recipes with huge quantities of food, often leaving 3-5 servings of botched food, or cut them in half, end up with the same result.  I ended up eating at the local fast food restaurant.  If I wasn't eating out, my typical meal was either macaroni and cheese or a burrito.  Just slap some refried beans on a tortilla and nuke it.  Nothing tasted good, except the fast food restaurant.  Moreover, I didn't enjoy cooking.  It wasn't fun.

I gained twenty pounds and truly thought food wasn't good.  One day, I heard on the radio an advertisement about catered food.  I didn’t want to end up diabetic, so I signed up--and was surprised at how good the food was.  I lost the weight, but eventually I got bored with eating the same meal every four weeks (that plus it was expensive!).  But now I was seeing something new--cooking shows on Food Network.  Iron Chef America made me want to try cooking again.

So I ventured back into the world of cooking.  I had two initial goals: Try new things and to have fun.  I quickly ran into the same problem that had plagued me before--family recipes with too many servings and difficult to pare down.  I tried looking for 1-2 serving recipes, but there just isn't much out there.  So I added a new and even more frightening goal:  Cooking from scratch. 

It was tough at the beginning.  I took a family-sized recipe and used the ingredients list, but didn't follow the measurements.  Yes, I was followed by a trail of botched meals, and macaroni and cheese was still a staple.  But after about five months of persistence, I started to realize that I was able to create my own recipes--and they tasted good (well most of the time)!  I learned how even texture and color makes a difference.  Now I'm trying out the idea of garnishes to make the food look pretty.

Knife skills?  Still got to work on that.  Still dangerous with potatoes.