There are some things I don't know how to cook.

I think most of you know that I really like to cook--and that I'm pretty good at it. But apparently, there are a few gaps in my culinary knowledge:

Just this week, I had to look up how to boil eggs.

They didn't turn out very well.

On the other hand, I made a delicious lasagna using ingredients leftover from other meals and no actual recipe. I also made a great stir-fry, no recipe. When I made Arroz Caldo (a Filipino chicken and rice porridge) last week, I combined and modified the ingredients and instructions from three different recipes to create the dish I actually I wanted.

I can make great cheese and broccoli sauce for baked potatoes from scratch, off the top of my head. But in order to bake the actual potatoes, I have to ask my mom how long they bake and at what temperature.

There is a very simple explanation for this: I never bake the potatoes--other people do. I also never boil the eggs--other people do that, too. I make the hard parts of the meal. Every year at Thanksgiving I volunteer for like five different dishes, and none of them are the relish tray. I can't make a decent-looking relish tray to save my life.

I would also like to state that I cannot successfully make brownies from a mix, but I can make them from scratch. And I only recently mastered the skill of rice crispy treats (recipe needed), the magic of which eluded me for many years, despite my skills at other seemingly more difficult desserts like pies and cakes and crisps.

There are probably loads of other basic cooking skills that I should have and don't--I don't know what they are, but when I find them, they will probably be just as confusing to me as boiling an egg.