Feed me!

See, I'd be happy even if it didn't have flavor.

I have a problem. I can't cook. And when I say, "I can't cook," I mean it in the same sense as, "I can't shoot laser beams out of my hands," in that I've never really tried it, but I'm fairly confident it wouldn't work.

(Okay, that's not true. I do try to shoot laser beams out of my hands. I have since I was 8 and read my first Firestorm comic, and periodically since then, and I swear to God, I've come so close a few times it isn't even funny. I'll point my hands at something and I can actually feel heat building up after a few seconds and...well, I've probably said too much. But when I finally pull it off? It'll be so cool.)

Last night, I tried making ramen. Now, I'm not a poor college student, nor am I unemployed and trying to pinch pennies. I just had a hankerin' for some ramen. (Which, at 17¢ a package, would be the perfect recession food, if it wasn't so damn unhealthy.) So I ran over to the nearby 7-11, picked some up, and...failed.

I failed at making ramen. That's only marginally worse than failing at chewing gum.

The water seemed hot enough. But when I poured it over the noodles, they didn't get all soft the way they were supposed to. I mean, after a few minutes, they got softer. But they were still kind of crunchy. I let them soak for a while longer, but all that did was turn the semi-crunchy noodles into cold semi-crunchy noodles. I probably could have fixed this by adding hotter water, but frankly, I was tired of the whole process by that point. So I ate the half of the ramen that wasn't crunchy, and went downstairs to get a cinnamon roll out of the vending machine in my building.

It was not, needless to say, the proudest evening of my adult life. And so now, I basically have four options.

1) Learn how to cook. (This is the option I'm least crazy about.)

2) Convince my parents to let me move back home. Cooking seemed so much simpler when my mom did it. I swear, it was like I didn't have to lift a finger, and food just appeared on the table. Alternatively, I could try and convince them to send me $5,000 a month for a private chef.

3) Ask Corporate America to come to the rescue. Specifically, someone needs to make a real life version of Bachelor Chow, that product that appeared in the opening credits of Futurama. Here's what I envision it as: Big clumps of either meat or a meat-like substance that requires no preparation whatsoever and can be eaten straight from the bag. (Or can. I'm not too proud to eat food from a can.) I'd want it to be healthy, too. Maybe mix in some vitamins or fiber or pieces of carrot along with the meat. So basically, I'm looking for a big bag of reasonably priced, low-fat meat, that I can just open up, stick my hand into, and enjoy. Taste would be nice, but not a priority.

4) Get married to someone who knows how to cook. I won't just limit it to women, either. If you're a dude and you know how to make a good chicken Parmesan, I want to talk to you. But for the record, ladies, aside from the geek stuff and delusions involving laser beams, I'm quite a catch. In addition to having been described as "average looking," I enjoy flea markets, romantic comedies, and writing poetry by candlelight. Okay, I made that last one up. But the others are true. So if you're not looking for a husband, I'd apparently at least make a decent girlfriend for you to hang out with. Which I'm totally willing to do, so long as there's some exchange of food involved.

Honestly, though, I suspect this is going to end with my biting the bullet and learning how to cook. And like most of the interests I've had over the years, I'll get really into it for a brief while, and then I'll completely lose interest, and go back to ramen and microwavable stuff. But before that happens, I'll probably attempt to do something bold, like create the world's best pizza or burger or something. I mean...how hard could that be? Has anyone actually tried before?