Baker's anonymous

I’ve considered starting a support group for bakers like myself.
Hi, I’m Heather, and I don’t follow recipes.
This week Robin tried to convince me that Bob (our pastor) had asked to have a talk with me about my issues with cooking (i.e. not following recipes). For a second I felt as if I had been caught with my hand in the cookie jar and then I realized, of course he’s joking. It is not a sin to improvise with recipes.
Did Christopher Columbus use a map, I ask you? He MADE the map! Recipes, as I see them, are merely guideposts that suggest one plausible method of cooking the dish amongst myriads of creative possibilities. It is the cook’s prerogative, like the artist’s, to create, to experiment, to explore uncharted territory and through the lens of adventure to create masterpieces.
A friend gave me a postcard once of a black and white photo of a woman holding a cake. It said ‘if I can bake a cake, I can build a bomb.’
The problem is, I did my time studying chemistry and yes, I learned how to build bombs, but it doesn’t appear to have helped me in the kitchen.
Kim gave me some decorative (inedible?) gourds from her garden two weeks ago. Whoever heard of a gourd that was inedible, I thought, so I cut it up, boiled it, and baked it into pumpkin pie. Or if you prefer, inedible gourd pie. We ate it and I think it was quite good.
My crockpot meatballs last night were not that great. I didn’t have all the ingredients to start with, so I had to improvise a bit, but the meatballs came out looking fine and I FOLLOWED the RECIPE instead of my instinct and put them in the crockpot for 5 hours on high in a sauce. (Well, I did have to improvise the sauce a bit by putting in apricot jam and teriyaki sauce instead of cranberry sauce and sugar).
You can imagine my shock when I came home from work and discovered 5 hours on high had evaporated all the sauce and left sticky gooey blackish meatballs covered in a sickly sweet sauce. We choked them down with rice.
I made steak for the first time last night. Robin likes it rare but I sort of forgot it was on the BBQ, so by the time I got to it, rare was the last thing you could’ve called it. He made a show of trying to chew it but I think he liked it, after all, overcooked steak is better than no steak.
I could regale you with tales of failed meals or of successful meals. I’m actually having fun learning how to cook things and planning meals, I realize it’s an art and if you wanted to classify me as a type of artist I probably wouldn’t be one of the ones who designs advertisements or paints perfect scenery or sculpts matching wax heads for museums. I would probably be more in league with the huge piece of canvas you see in a hotel lobby that looks like someone walked up, threw seven different paint cans at the wall, walked away and said, world, if you don’t like it, you can stuff it. And strangely they get paid big money for their acrylic temper tantrums and in some lights it looks beautiful and sometimes people cry over it.
Yes, some people cry over my meals, too, I’m sure. As I type I have an apple pie in the oven and I’m convinced it’s going to be amazing, especially because I made up the recipe myself.