This month I have mostly been learning to cook food. This sounds ludicrous, mainly because cooking food is extremely easy, but rest assured I started from a position of total and complete ignorance, and with good reason. Allow me to detail my previous culinary experience.

When I was 9 I was home from school sick, and decided I wanted a boiled egg. I took two eggs from the fridge, filled a saucepan full of water, put the eggs in, turned on the heat, and then went and read a book. For an hour. I realized my error when the pages of the book become a little hard to see and I realized that the room I was in was full of smoke. The smoke alarm went off, a saucepan was completely ruined, the eggs were blackened husks of death, and in a slight panic I pulled the saucepan off the cooker and plonked it down on the countertop, which it proceeded to brand with a large black circle.

My mother was naturally not delighted by this episode, and extracted from me a promise that I would never try to bloody well cook anything ever again because I was a scatterbrained idiot who would end up setting the house on fire. I really cannot fault her logic on any point. Since it cost me very little to remain faithful to this particular guarantee it never gave me any trouble, and since my mother was a sucker for making people food and then I discovered Chinese and pizza, I remained disinclined to cook anything for pretty much the rest of time, that is until a month ago.

For reasons I will not go into I decided that I would finally have to learn to make a meal that did not consist mainly of either pasta or toast (my two most prevalent staples). This has been a marvelous, delicious, and expensive adventure. Not everything has gone brilliantly, but I can truthfully say that I have not made anything that I could not subsequently eat. Though I suppose after the occasional experiment with penne and mayonnaise one could say I am not fussy.

Things I have learned:

• Sautee just means fry in butter
• Steaming does not require a steamer. Americans are wrong.
• Basic cookery can be summarised by “sure fuck it all into a frying pan and see how it goes”
• The above seems to work approximately 85% of the time
• Though rib-eye and filet mignon look very similar raw, blue filet mignon barely requires chewing, and blue rib-eye requires a fucking hacksaw.
• If you look up how long it takes to hard boil an egg on the internet, you will find pages of detailed instructions on the perfect boiled-egg preparation techniques, all of which will be entirely unnecessary.
• Chicken tastes a lot better than I remember.
• The hard part is always the bloody sauce
• 17 years later, I am still capable of forgetting about the goddamn eggs