The chronicles of a crappy cook.

Image: Gemma Askham, novice chef.

I’m a 31-year-old woman and this sentence alone sums up my cooking talent: I am the only person I know who’s given themselves food poisoning.

When a bunch of ingredients end up in a pan with me attached to it, their final resting place will be tastelessness, sadness, and almost always blackness. If food had a mouth, it would pull the scream emoji face when it saw my shopping basket coming.

Being useless in the kitchen used to be a badge of honour. In my early twenties, colleagues would competitively boast of kitchen fails. There was a correlation that the worse the cooking, the more awesome a career woman.

Wine and chips constituted a perfectly acceptable two-course meal.

But then things changed. People had dinner parties, and the indication that dinner was ready was no longer the ping of the microwave. People baked. People ate clean. People started "spiralising". I was still eating pasta and tomato sauce.

How to order takeaway and not put on weight

So at the start of this year I made a pact to myself: get some skills, girl. Armed with a copy of Jamie Oliver’s 15 Minute Meals – chosen because the title had the lowest time commitment I could find – I began my journey from kitchen exile to, hopefully, acceptance.

Hurdle 1. Deciphering the language.

Generally, I am good at languages: I have a Spanish degree and can even read basic Swedish. But I am not fluent in Chef. Which presents problems.

My first recipe was ‘Spicy Cajun Chicken with Smashed Sweet Potato & Fresh Corn Salsa,’ chosen because three sweet potatoes had been sitting in my kitchen for so long they were practically an art installation.

But the recipe also required ‘okra’. Okra? I could work out from Jamie’s picture that it was a long green vegetable. However, unable to locate it in Coles, and unable to bring myself to ask, "Excuse me, could you possibly direct me to your okra section?", I bought broccoli instead (hey, it’s also green).

How to quickly make meals that are actually good for you

Then came ‘polenta’. All I could think of was placenta. Placenta, placenta, placenta. Unlikely that any childbirth leftovers would be required, I text a friend who informed me that, duh, it’s a grain – and told me exactly where to find grains.

Hurdle 2. Knowing your enemy.

For a long time, my cooking nemesis was motivation; now I’m fuelled by desperation, which overrides all other emotions. But, as I recently learned, the real obstacle to virgin chefs lies not in your head, but about 1.5 metres above your head – the fire alarm.

I’ve lived in my apartment for about three months, and remember on signing the lease a vague warning about residents being fined if the smoke alarm went off. But as my time in the kitchen mainly involves the corkscrew, I never gave it much concern. Besides, in my last house the smoke alarm went off practically daily and it was nothing a vigorous waft of a tea towel couldn’t fix.

How to avoid food poisoning at picnics this summer.

So it’s fair to say that as I grilled corn on the cob my thoughts were, ‘Get me! I’m grilling! I’m a griller!’ rather than ‘You are about to end up in a situation requiring the emergency services.’

The fire alarm went off.

F**k, it was loud. Really, really loud. So I start wafting. Really, really wafting. And nothing is happening to the noise.

So now I’m panicking. I’m wafting and I’m panicking and I’m sweating, because actually it is really hot in the kitchen, and actually this may be why this deafening noise is not letting up.

This dinner looks far too delicious to be healthy. But it actually is

And then it gets so much worse. Instead of just the siren blaring out, a new voice bellows out in the evil, robotic pitch of a sci-fi baddie: EVACUATE. EVACUATE. EVACUATE.

Oh, shit. Shit. Shittidity shit. Now, if I lived in a standalone house this would be fine: the evacuation would involve the sum total of one. However, I live in a huge wharf complex that contains a hotel, eight restaurants, and hundreds of apartments – including Russell Crowe’s.

All of which were currently being told to evacuate. Because of my corn.

It wasn’t a high point of my life. To cut the horror-story short, as I began to evacuate I was intercepted by a gasping-for-breath security officer who’d sprinted over, then called off the alarm and told me I was twenty seconds away from the fire brigade coming and the sprinklers going off. Twenty seconds. Apparently a new building record in cutting it fine.

So my first recipe was already record-breaking – in a very bad way.

Not one to be completely defeated, mainly because by now I was absolutely starving, I continued. With the interruption, the meal took an hour and 15 minutes longer than the 15 minutes it should have.

Jamie’s Spicy Cajun Chicken. Or, as it’s known in my house, Gemma’s Fire Alarm Chicken.

Have you had any cooking disasters?