What's Cookin', Good Lookin'?

mageirocophobia (ma·'je·ro·ko·'fO·bE·a) noun. fear of cooking.

I can fry eggs, or poach them, or make omelettes. I can do beef -- steaks, stirfry, grilled, all that. I can do chicken breasts. I can steam fish, fry it in light batter, or make dim sum. And I can marinade all those things in a variety of flavours. I can (now) make crepes with toppings, sweet or savoury. I can whip up a wrap for a quick meal.

But I'm afraid to try cooking some things. Some just scare me.

Pork roast, for instance. All those horror stories of pork chops and pork roasts gone awry, dry and cardboard-like -- I don't want to mess mine up! Roasting chicken. Have to deal with cooking the whole thing at once and making sure it doesn't dry out is more than I think I can handle right now. Or heck, fried chicken -- I've never deepfried anything before, and never really panfried anything except potstickers! And definitely, rack of lamb -- I would love to learn this one, but I don't know how to deal with lamb meat at all. I love to eat it, but cooking is a whole other matter. (Never mind that after making all this food, I could never finish it and it would largely go to waste.)

And I have a fear of baking. Muffins, cakes, bread, all that. Pretty much anything to do with the mixture of flour, eggs, milk, and yeast, I guess. It's the dealing with proteins and gluten and yeast that I'm not comfortable with, though I would like to. I guess I started out with crepes, and I'll graduate to buttermilk pancakes.

One day, I'll overcome these fears. One day, I'll master the kitchen. One day, I shall be free from mageirocophobia. And get really, really fat. Like the average American.