Reply #65: My mother was, without a doubt, the world's worst cook.

[Kutjara]

She tried awfully hard, but just seemed to lack that indefinable quality that separates the edible from the risible. She was also mortally afraid of food poisoning, so everything was charred, boiled and roasted to the edge of oblivion. Until I was 18, I thought vegetables were a sort of greenish soup and that meat was black. Things didn't get any better at dessert: there's only so much you can do with white-label canned fruit and generic pie crust, and none of it is good. Yet, somehow, my dear mom could surpass even these unpromising ingredients to produce something so repellant, so indefinably awful that it was almost a work of art.

The plus side of all this is that I learned to cook pretty early in life.