Surviving the Holidays as a Bad Cook

By DeMornay Harper
Blog Content Contributor

The holidays are coming up and we all know what that means… food, food and more food. We eat some our most cherished dishes over the holidays. I know I’m looking forward to my grandma’s food (it’s always a little burned because she’s a forgetful woman but somehow that makes it even better). However, in order to celebrate with our friends before we hit up our grandma’s, we often attend Friendsgivings and Secret Santa parties. No one’s mamas and aunties are slaving away in the kitchen all day for those, and I’ll say it, buying food for a bunch of people can get pretty pricy. Oftentimes for these events, everyone will bring a dish to take some of the responsibility off the host.

As an Aries (a.k.a. a natural competitor) I want whatever dish I bring to be a hit. This totally contradicts with how terrible of a cook I am. Oh man. Guys, I am so incredibly bad. Honestly, I have no idea how I’ve been feeding myself for so long now and haven’t died.

No fear, awful cooks of the world, the Internet will save us! The Internet has saved my food more times than I can count. You really don’t want to know how many times I’ve Googled how to boil an egg. Because of all of my experience, I’ve got some great tips for navigating the recipes of the web.

• Pinterest (obviously)

Pinterest is a gold mine for the inexperienced chef. There are recipes on everything from how to roast a turkey to baking the perfect chocolate cake. Some of them are total gems but you definitely have to shift through some that aren’t, which brings me to my next point…

• Read the comments

Make sure when your checking out a recipe you read the comments that follow it. Most of the time these processes are written on blogs and the comments give lots of great feedback. Maybe the recipe calls for two cups of milk and there are tons of comments saying that’s too much and you only need one. That is valuable info that you can use. Sometimes comments will even tell you that the dish is just a dud and in that case you can just move on to the next Pin.

• Test it out

If you have time, try and make the dish a week or so beforehand. You can make it just for yourself or your roommates so you can check the taste and see if you want to adjust any parts of the recipe. This way you’re not in a bind the day of if you don’t like how it turns out.

My biggest piece of advice is just to believe in yourself. Cooking doesn’t have to be stressful! I always just turn on my favorite jams and pretend like I’m on Food Network. We can conquer this holiday season together. Besides, if our cooking doesn’t work out we can just hit up HEB, wrap it in some foil and no one will be the wiser.

Featured image by DeMornay Harper.