Mom was, of course, expecting the call, though I don't think she was prepared for my questions. They seemed perfectly normal to me. "Mom, is green fuzz on bread ok? How about on chicken?" And, "about that use-by date on the milk -are they really serious or is it plus/minus a month or so?" Mom patiently explained the secrets of the trade, like how long pork chops can stay in the freezer and why it's important to eat fruit before it ferments. Mom was patient, I think, because she knows the truth about me-I can't cook. There are basically three things I don't understand which make cooking my own personal Kryptonite; the kitchen, grocery stores, and recipes.

As a child, I never gave the kitchen any thought. It was the room in the house I was most often told to get out of, and I only vaguely understood what happened inside. I knew that two or three times a day someone would produce from this magical room a meal. My job was to eat it. Even when I got older and tried my hand at baking cookies, cakes, etc., I never understood the kitchen. I simply mixed the flour, sugar, salt, vanilla, pans, pots, and cookie sheets, and heated them until an edible product resulted. When I got my own apartment I discovered a horrible secret no one had prepared me for. Contrary to my idealistic expectations, flour, sugar, pans and pots do not occur naturally in the kitchen. They do not multiply to replace used portions.

Well, this meant that before I could cook anything, I had to go to the grocery store. This building houses the world's largest supply of confusion. I think it's on aisle 8. The primary fault with grocery stores is that they make a bold assumption that everyone who enters knows what they're doing. I asked a clerk the difference between olive oil and vegetable oil, for example. She called a couple other ladies over to listen and made me ask again. They had a good laugh. I'm still not completely sure, but I think one is manufactured by the Mafia.

Grocery stores are meticulously laid out by systems engineers to minimize efficiency. They offer a guarantee that a person will make the most trips from one end of the store to the other before finding their way to the cashier. I think I qualified as a success in this regard, futilely trying to gather all the ingredients for a recipe.

Recipes are strange things. They tell you exactly what proportions of ingredients you'll need to make a dish. Sort of. What no one ever says is that these exact proportions are merely suggestions. You can leave out the paprika if you want to, unless it's essential to the formula. Truth is, you don't know. Cooking becomes a guessing game to determine what's REALLY necessary and how much of it you REALLY need. And most important, how long it REALLY has to cook. After strictly following a recipe, I was the proud eater of a scrambled ham and cheese omelette.

My friends, trying to be helpful, all bought me cookbooks for graduation when I really wanted a chef. Time to order some pizza.