Recipes for the Cooking Failures

This is rather sad, and I know it, but- I'm 28 years old, and I can't cook. Please take this post as the self deprecating humor that I mean for it to be, and feel free to laugh at me.

I never had to help with the cooking growing up, something I'm not happy about now. The most I did was hover nearby to steal the prongs off the mixer to lick the raw cookie dough off it. Or sift the flour (honest to god, I still have no idea why I sifted that flour, not like there was anything to be sifted out of it). So when I got out on my own, I resorted to things that I could eat straight from the cupboard or from a microwave, or fast food. It's been that way a long, long time; the few times I've tried something more complicated, I get lost. To put a point to it, I literally messed up making toast in a toaster once. (Nobody ever told me that you butter the toast AFTER you toast it. Yes, yes, go ahead, please laugh.) My family and friends have called me the ultimate female bachelor, chugging fruit juice straight from the carton and messing up the simplest of cooking tasks.

I'm not afraid of trying new things; it's just that even when I look up simple recipes, I get to things like 'season to taste' and 'you'll know when it looks done', and I'm like....no, I won't know, because I have literally never done this! There's a list of like 16 ingredients, sauces and seasoning and if you mess up the meat you die of not-cooked-meat, and I tend to go back to what's easy. When it comes to possibly dying of raw fish poisoning because of my inept cooking vs. dropping by Wendy's on the way home, well, obviously one is more attractive of an option for me. Hint: it's the one that doesn't end in the headline "Girl tries to cook salmon, dies of salmonella because she shouldn't be allowed near a stove!"

Really, I want to eat more diverse stuff. I've traveled all over the world and eaten so much weird crap- I ate fried silkworms in Korea, I LOVE Thai and Indian food, in China I didn't know what I was eating most of the time but it usually still had a head and tail attached, and Japanese food is my true love. I had Edamame recently at a restaurant and now I'm craving that, but can you even buy that at a store? Does it need to be cooked a certain way or not at all to be that delicious? Heck if I know. If I google it I'll probably end up with 52 million edamame recipes that all call for the blood of my first born, seasoned to taste. I'm scared to look.

What I really want is simple recipes that are easily portioned out for a week of dinners/lunches. Chicken, veggies, fruits, fish, that kind of stuff, but I need to start from the bottom, and every recipe place online seems to think all their readers actually understand the language they're speaking on Master Chef rather than sitting at a desk eating mac and cheese and thinking "hot darn, that looks yummy and I'll probably never eat it because I don't have a clue what they just said it is". I have so many beginner cookbooks and somehow I'm beginning to think I need pre-beginner cookbooks. Like, life size Barbie 'My First Stove!' style cookbooks.

I hope this has at least been entertaining. I also hope that someone can point me in the right direction. Please go easy on me, my ego is already so crushed in the cooking department that I don't think it could be flatter if I was sitting at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

(Though I have eliminated all soda from my home, and now drink mostly fruit juices and green tea- and in the past year I've lost 30 pounds, despite my crappy diet. Take that, unhealthy lifestyle!)