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Some people say where there's smoke, there's fire. In my house, where there's smoke, there's dinner. Try as I might, the most basic kitchen skills elude me. Even the vocabulary's confusing. "Blanch" and "julienne" are potential names for my children, not something I'd do to potatoes. A "colander" is where I pencil in my upcoming dinner dates (at restaurants, of course). A "wok" is what I take after I've eaten too much. And "blackened" chicken? That's for novices. I can blacken hot dogs, green beans, and cream-based soups without ever reaching for the fire extinguisher.

It doesn't help that I married into a family that would make Emeril envious. Taking basic ingredients and turning them into fancy French dishes such as coq au vin or vichyssoise comes as easily as breathing for my sisters-in-law. And my mother-in-law can whip up a meal comparable to what's served at any five-star restaurant without batting a spatula. Just the thought of attempting such a feat makes me need to breathe into a brown paper bag. It's intimidating, to say the least.

Early in my marriage, I decided to swallow my pride and ask my mother-in-law for some help. "I'm supposed to fix something for an office party," I told her. "Do you know of anything I can make that doesn't require me to boil, baste, broil, bake, or fry?"

"I've got an easy recipe for a congealed salad," she suggested. "Why don't you try that?"

Congealed salad. Now that sounded like a happy, non-threatening thing to make ("This year's Ms. Congealed Salad winner is … "). So pulling out pretzels, Jell-O, cream cheese, and a variety of other ingredients, I followed the recipe to a T, which apparently stood for trouble.

See, I have a fundamental problem with recipes. As a lawyer friend of mine likes to say, they assume facts not already in evidence. With the congealed salad, somehow I was supposed to know intuitively I should spread the cream cheese completely across the pretzels and seal off the edges before I poured the Jell-O over it. Lacking that one vital piece of information, my congealed salad quickly became Jell-O soup, and my congeniality waned.

Other recipes are just as vague. For example, while laboring over an intricate pasta dish—okay, I was boiling spaghetti—I came across the instructions "cook al dente." Just who is Al Dente? And why should I be cooking for him? As a studious former English major, I looked up the phrase. In its original Italian form, it means "to the tooth." I guess that means I'm supposed to cook my pasta so it won't break the teeth of those who eat it. If that's the case, then maybe I should hang a picture of good old Al prominently in my kitchen as a reminder of my main goal in cooking.

Because of incidents like this, I've come up with what I like to call my Irrefutable Recipe Rules. First, all ingredients must be able to be pronounced by anyone with a decent phonics background. Second, the number of ingredients called for can't outnumber my children or the square root of the number of Pampered Chef gadgets I currently own—whichever is less. Third, if the recipe calls for something to be parboiled, nix it. (Just exactly what is parboiling anyway? The word itself sounds inedible.) And here's one last rule of thumb: "Season to taste" means whoever wrote the recipe didn't know how to fix it. Therefore it stands to reason it's not going to taste right when I make it.

I've learned some of my cooking lessons the hard way. For example, it took me three tries to figure out that doubling the oven temperature doesn't cut your cooking time in half. Nuking yeast rolls doesn't cause them to rise faster. And if you bunch ten hamburger patties into an eight-inch skillet, they'll never get done. Fortunately, my husband has a grill, and he's not afraid to use it.

"Maybe you should try some of that once-a-month cooking," suggested a former friend. "You could cook all day Saturday and have enough meals for the entire month." Enough meals indeed, assuming my family would enjoy eating dishes they can't even identify. My regular meals are bad enough. Frozen entrees defrosted in the microwave don't stand a chance.

Fortunately, my gang is learning to adjust. The Food and Drug Administration did us a big favor by making bread and grains the biggest part of the food pyramid, since cold breakfast cereal's fair game for breakfast, lunch, and dinner around my house. My eldest daughter, on a quest to prove that man can, indeed, live by bread alone, has become an expert in warming up rolls. Just yesterday I found her in the kitchen preheating the oven.

"Whatcha doin'?" I asked.

"Oh, nothing," she replied, trying to hide the oven behind her five-foot-six, 90-pound frame. "Just heating up some rolls."

"Do you want me to do that while you finish your math?" I asked, ever the good mother.

"No, no, that's fine," she assured me quickly. "I can work a problem or two while they're cooking."

Secretly relieved I wasn't going to have to broil her Brown 'N Serves, I wandered off to find something less dangerous to do.

At least now I'm willing to admit my limitations. In the past, transferring a bucket of KFC to my own platter before taking it to potluck dinners became an art. Combining cut-up carrots with canned soup made my "homemade" chicken soup famous. My cover as a developing culinary queen was blown, though, after hosting our annual family Christmas buffet a couple years ago.

"This turtle cheesecake is delicious," commented my sister. "Did you make it?"

"Mmm hmmm," I mumbled noncommittally, feigning food in my mouth.

Then the truth reared its ugly head. "How in the world did you get all these little pieces of wax paper between the slices?" my sister asked. My charade was over.

What I lack in cooking expertise I make up for in other ways. I can wash, dry, iron, and put away clothes faster than you can say "fricassee." The faucets in my bathroom shine as brilliantly as Julia Child's copper-bottomed kettles. And my inadequacy as a cook is overshadowed by my intense desire to organize my kitchen—so if I do happen to want to, say, fry up some macaroni and cheese, I've got 12 pots and 8 Tupperware containers to do the job.

Unless God miraculously intervenes, it looks as though I'm going to be culinary challenged for the rest of my life. I could go on and on about my cooking inabilities. Or I could let my husband explain my limitations. After hearing me say I might have used a bit of literary license with this article, he read it and quietly asked, "So what part of this isn't true?" But my smoke alarm just went off, which no doubt means it's time to pull my no-bake cheesecake out of the oven. tcw

Donna Hill, a freelance writer, lives with her husband and five children in Arkansas.

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