It’s that time again. This Sunday we will all sit down and be inspired for another season of fantastic cooking, combined with ample kitchen and food porn. Every year, I think to myself:

I can do that. I can make yummy food. I’ll just do what they do.

All I need is a blow torch.

Then I spend hours in the kitchen producing something that is completely inedible and looks nothing like the Masterchef contestants’ creations and quite possibly resulted in a small fire. Just a little one.

It’s okay, I have a fire extinguisher within cooking reach, a fire blanket, and 6 smoke alarms with fresh batteries throughout the house.

I’m prepared, not paranoid.

Mostly I just make things taste bad, and nobody knows why. Seriously, it is a complete mystery.

Let’s recap.

Rissoles: My parents stayed with me recently and I decided to make Dad’s Famous Rissoles. He is the rissole go to guy. So I got to do the messy mixing, and he just added ingredients. Some of this, and that, and this too. Now mix. Add some of this. Mix it in. Mix it in more than that, c’mon! Quite literally, all I did was wave a fork around, mix meat, then form into balls and place in the pan. He made them with my hands. Dad’s Famous Rissoles are always awesome. Always.

Mine were awful.

Bubba refused to eat hers, “that not meat”.

Bolognaise: The night before that, I’d decided to make spaghetti bolognaise in the slow cooker. I followed a recipe that everyone said was simply a-may-zing. I measured things. I even weighed them on a digital scale.

Mine was awful.

Everyone tasted it to be polite, but mostly we had crumpets for dinner instead.

Meat Pie: I knew this was bad. It looked a bit dark and tasted like pure gravy powder. Being desperate a creative chef type person, I decided to save it but putting in a can of tomatoes. Gravy and tomatoes go together don’t they? No. No, they don’t. It was irredeemable. I could taste the too strong gravy as well as the tang of tomatoes and they were playing ping pong on my tongue until it made me cry and spit it out.

You might be reading this thinking I have a problem with meat and should turn to vegetables instead. Well sit back and let me regale you on how I suck in a more hippie sense too.

Curry Puffs: Oh so finely chopped onion, potatoes, pumpkin, carrots…no not that carrot it smells woody. Ew, tastes like it too. Ok, here’s a carrot that wasn’t harvested 10 years ago. Chop, chop, choppity chop. Hmm, no peas. No worries, chopped up green beans are green enough. La la la, add 1 tablespoon of curry and mix. Not great, but really, I just made super oniony and hot (frozen) puff pastry with mashed potato. The kind of food you can’t eat without a 5:1 tomato sauce ratio.

Roast Vegetables: Yeah, so you know how carrot cooks faster than pumpkin and doesn’t stop cooking just because it’s done? That. Would you like some mystery char with your (completely coincidentally raw-after-5-hours-cooking) roast beef?

That’s not even getting into dessert and miscellaneous. That birthday cake above was not an isolated incidence.

Some people just can’t cook. We just cannot cook. There’s something about the way we move our hands that makes food taste bad. We buy the kitchen gadgets, the shiny this, the fancy that, expensive ingredients too. We follow recipes like an obsessive person.

Then we order pizza.

Damn you Masterchef. Damn you and your delicious food. Damn you to tasting all my cooking.

Now accepting challenges! Nominate a dish and I’ll make one as a vlog. I’ll even taste it. Just for you.