My best cooking disaster so far involved one of those stove-top espresso-maker things - you know, one of those things with a lower and upper compartment and a bit in the middle where you put the beans - you put water in the lower compartment, and when it boils it gets forced through the ground-up coffee and bubbles out into the upper compartment.

Anyway, one day I put the coffee grounds in my espresso pot, put it on the fire, and went off to do something else for the 3-4 minutes it would take for the thing to bubble through (check my email maybe?). Anyway, when I walked back into the kitchen, something was smelling FOUL - like burning rubber. So I turned the fire off under the coffee pot and picked it up by its plastic handle - which immediately fell off, its contact point with the metal pot totally melted. I then realized that I had forgotten to put any WATER in the pot before putting it on the stove and leaving it alone for 5 minutes. Oops.

Rubber gaskets melted onto coffee grounds are not the most appetizing thing ever.

Ah yes.

Well, if it makes anyone feel any better, I once melted a fine silver teapot on the stove. Took some work to seperate the metals afterwards.

Hey, it can happen to anyone. EVen my mom, who is a damn fine cook. Once she bought a bag of marshmallows for Thanksgiving sweet potato casserole, and was trying to think of somewhere to hide them so we wouldn't find them and eat them. We had a double oven (this was pre-microwave), so she hid them in the bottom half, which we rarely used.

Of course, then Thanksgiving morning came, and she turned on the oven to preheat, forgetting about the marhsmallows. The aroma of burnt sugar and melted plastic is still etched in my memory.

(Don't let it discourage you! All worthwhile skills take practice. Remind me sometime to tell you about the time I decided to make mustard from scratch.)

More than life-threating clumsiness in the kitchen, I can't seem to cook very well at all.

And I have little incentive to improve with so many restaurants nearby (and there are plenty of men who seem to enjoy cooking).

Ah well, nobody's perfect. I can build a computer.

the ability to build a computer more than makes up for your cooking deficiency.

have you ever thought of relocating to somewhere where a maid/cook is a cost-effective solution to almost burning your dwelling down? i hear the thai maids in egypt are quite good cooks.