The first time I dared to step into the kitchen without anyone to guide me will forever be etched in my mind. I wish I could brag about how ”cool I was” or ”how I aced it the first time” but that would be a big lie. I flopped hard.
Here's my story
I was twelve years old then. I remember that I had wanted to surprise my family by preparing the okra soup that we would all eat for dinner. My parents were not at home and that was perfect for me.
I went to my uncle and collected five hundred naira (#500) from him. He was kind enough not to ask me what I wanted the money for because I knew if I had told him, he would have laughed his butt off and not give me the money. You guys need to know that I was a daddy's girl. No one dared ask me to cook.
I decided on my own to venture into the world of cooking after my home economics teacher taught us in school that as girls of that age bracket, we should already know how to cook. I saw many of my friends stating all the foods that they could prepare while I was just smiling like SpongeBob SquarePants. I had no clue what they were talking about. I could not even boil water talk more of cooking.
I went to the market with a list prepared by one of my friends from School, whom I had tricked into writing it. She thought that I wanted to learn her style of cooking okra soup….silly her.
I bought all the right ingredients from the market. I got home, went into the kitchen and locked the door. No one was to know what I was doing until I was done. My people, my people that was how the cooking show began.
I placed the recipe in front of me and began to cook after I was done washing all the ingredients. I began with placing palm oil into a pot but the paper did not tell me how long I would allow the palm oil to heat up before I started putting other ingredients into the pot and so I used my medulla oblongata.
I added all the ingredients like that into the pot, stirred it before leaving it to boil. In my mind, I was a cooking star, hehe. Count down to ten minutes later and I went to check on my pot. Uh lah lah I thought but what I saw was like a sacrifice to Sango.
The palm oil refused to mix with the rest of the soup. It went towards angle 90, Ike a goal keeper afraid to join a match. The fishes that I thought were dead were swimming freely in the pot. The okra cooperated with the palm oil and also went its way, separating from the soup. To put it bluntly, I had just prepared a map of an African country rather okra soup or maybe it was erosion , I can't even tell.
My uncle came to the kitchen just then to see what I was doing and the way he screamed after seeing my soup, drove the point home. He asked me to throw it away before my parents came back and saw the abomination.
I didn't give up. I kept on inquiring stylishly from different people until I was able to get it right but that was many months later. My first attempt at cookking will forever be in my mind.
Hope you had a good laugh. Thank you for reading. This is my entry to the #ComContest prompt #1.
Images used are mine.