Nana cooked all the family meals having once cooked in a boarding house. Nana loved to cook, making every meal from scratch. Every Saturday, each kitchen chair would be filled with pans of raising dough as Nana made her own bread.

But on her passing, I became the family cook and I quickly gained cooking expertise. Each night I would cook either turkey, beef or chicken for my dad and brother. In cooking those frozen dinners, I quickly became an experienced cook.

When I became a bride, I wanted to expand my cooking mastery and use the cookbook I received from my aunt. This book rated recipes by difficulty either easy or average so it could not have been simpler.

A Master baker

My first attempt was to bake a chocolate cake for our one-month wedding anniversary. The recipe called for a tube pan. I went and asked a clerk for a French tube pan. I thought it was kind of strange that the pan was open ended at both ends, but the recipe did call for a tube pan.
I expected that the mixture baking would stop as it reached the open ends of the pan. It was not until the kitchen filled with smoke that I looked in the oven. The cake mixture was oozing out of both ends of the open ended tube pan and burning as it hit the oven floor. Now if the recipe had been more specific and called for a Bundt pan it would not have happened.

The Italian Chef

My next venture was lasagna. My cookbook had no recipe, but I had watched my older married sister make it and I figured it would be simple enough. I put the noodles on the bottom of the pan, a full layer of ricotta cheese, a layer of noodles on top and then a pool of sauce on top. The noodles did not quite fit the pan, so I let them hang over the side.
The hanging noodles burnt and curled up; the lasagna was so hard that I would need a chisel to cut through it. I tossed the whole pan in the garbage. I expect that somewhere there were rats with their front teeth broken as they tried to chew through the lasagna.

The Chicken chef

I invited a friend over for dinner when we bought a new charcoal grill. My recipe was for beer chicken.
You put a can of beer inside the chicken to roast on the grill.
My friend enjoyed her chicken dinner I bought her when I took her to a local restaurant.

I had left the chicken on the grill and went inside the house and answered a telephone call. Ten minutes later, still on the phone, I looked out the window and the whole grill was on fire. The chicken suddenly shot up in the air and landed six feet away.
Apparently, I forgot to open the can of beer before I placed it inside the chicken and the heat exploded the can.

When we sold our condo, I covered the kitchen floor with scatter rugs. One time, while taking a chicken from the oven I dropped it. The chicken skidded across the floor burning and melting the acrylic flooring covering and leaving a long burning skid mark across the floor.

The Mexican Chef.

I finally got it right! I mastered the cookbook.
My first success was the Hot Tamale Pie. It came out perfect with rice, corn, beef, chile and peppers.
The issue with the pie was that it was for 12 people and I did not cut the recipe. Harvey ate that pie every night for the next week with a lot of water and Alka Seltzer.

I learned that Harvey would eat almost anything if it were not moving. However, in those experimental cooking years, I learned Harvey gave me food signals for me not to repeat a recipe.
He would call the food "interesting" or my favorite signal was: "I really do not want to put you to a lot of work; I will just have a sandwich."

Twenty-five years later, I have really become an accomplished cook thanks to a new cookbook and exploring the Internet for new recipes and ideas. Harvey no longer gives me the food signal.

And Harvey's digestive system is still intact.