A Cooking Career

By Matthew Bulliner

Dear Charles Smith,

My name is “Unknown To You”, and I would like to submit some of my funniest cooking stories for your new book. I started to cook at the age of five and my first food was mud patties. They looked somewhat like pancakes except for the fact that they were brownish red with a few leave stems sticking up out of them and were as hard as rock once dry. The funny thing is that I tried eating one once, and ended up on the hospital with severe pain in my stomach. Nothing serious was wrong, and I left the hospital later that day, but I decided not to try that experiment again.

The first real thing that I cooked was a steak for my dog at the age of eight. I put it in the pan and turned it on high and then got a bunch of my mom’s seasonings, and some salt, and some jalapeno peppers, and some lemon juice, and some sugar all of which I promptly dumped on to the stake. I then let it cook for an hour and a half on high. After that a put some old orange juice on it that my mom had thrown away and then gave it to my dog. He was quite hungry at the time and ate in just a few bites, and I could see that it was nice and black all the way through. Later that day he was acting rather oddly, it almost looked like he was delirious. Unfortunately the dog died that night to my great grief and I never got try to repeat the experiment. When the vet came over and examined him, he explained that although he could not tell exactly what had killed him, he could definitely say that it was some type of food poisoning. Because of this incident I was no longer allowed to cook, because my parents had no desire for such an untimely death. This obviously meant that my parents thought me extremely rotten chef.

When I was twenty-two I had some friends over to my house and tried cooking again. We ordered pizza for dinner but I made a vanilla cake for dessert. I really like sugar, so I tried substituting powdered sugar for the flour. I also decided that I should put a cup and half of vanilla in the cake as it was called “vanilla cake.” On first trying it, one of my friends said to me with a worried look on his face, “What did you put into this cake?” I replied by telling him what I had put into it, and immediately I saw a relieved look on his face. On asking them if they liked it they all replied with a definite yes. I rather doubt that it was true though, because on the following day a found several pieces of the cake under the couch and in various other small hiding places. My opinion is that they did not want to hurt my feelings because I had just given them $2,000 dollars each as a Christmas present. The reason I could afford to do this is because my dad is a millionaire and therefore I have plenty of money to go around.

I am now thirty-four and have given up cooking, because I have discovered that I am not meant to be a cook. I am thinking about trying to be a doctor. Well, thank-you for your time, and I hope that you will put my stories in to your new book called: “The saddest things that have happened on Earth.”

-Anonymous