Many of the family and friends I know are very good when it comes to cooking and baking in the kitchen. My mom, however, is not so good. I have witnessed many attempts and fails that my mom has accomplished. My mom is the kind of person that goes on Pinterest a lot so that she can save recipes that she would like to make with me. Most of the time, we never actually end up making the food, even though you can tell she really wants to because she points out one recipe, along with seven additional recipes that we should make. She will also save it to one of her four Pinterest folders entitled something like, “Food to make this month” or “Easy and fun baking recipes.”

There was one time when we really did attempt a recently-seen-on-Pinterest recipe. It was on Earth Day a few years ago, and my mom was very excited to make what she described as “Earth Day cookies with green and blue swirls to make them look like mini earth.” Let’s just say that it ended up being one BIG earth that was thin as paper and scorched on the sides. Luckily, my mom is a good enough person to admit that she knows she is a horrible cook, so she ended up posting it on facebook and laughing.

Another one of her kitchen incidents is not so much a fail as it is something that makes her unique. Even I still can’t decide if it is the weird unique or the good unique. It is the “Rubberdilla,” which is her version of a quesadilla. When I was living in Wisconsin my friends helped me come up with that name for the food dish after seeing her make it for lunch. We noticed my mom simply put two tortillas and a slab of sliced cheese together, put it on a plate, and microwaved it for a few seconds. That is what she called a cheese quesadilla. I tried a bite and noticed that due to the fact that all she did was move it from the fridge to the microwave and then heat it up, it had a similar feeling to that of rubber.

She had one more fail that was not so much a cooking fail, but rather recognizing what it was. My mom is not a sushi fan, but I absolutely love it. One night, I persuaded my mom to let us go out to eat at Temaki and Tea. I think their sushi is phenomenal. I ordered a smoked salmon roll that had salmon, some veggies, and a dollop of sriracha on top. That is another thing on which my mom’s opinion and mine differ: I think that spicy food is delicious and my mom thinks that anything spicy is too spicy and also is disgusting. My mom got cashew chicken. I made her promise she would try at least one piece of sushi, because who knows? Her taste buds might have changed and maybe she will at least like this kind of sushi now. Anyone who has any knowledge of sushi and the way it is served, or what it is served with, will know that sushi comes with pickled ginger and wasabi. My mom, apparently, did not know this. So when the sushi came, my mom stopped our waiter before he could turn to another customer. She stopped him because she needed to ask, “What is the green stuff? Is it avocado? And is the thin stuff fish?” The waiter and I explained to her that the “green stuff” is actually wasabi, and the “thin stuff” was pickled ginger. Luckily, my mom was smart enough to know what those things were.

Now that you have learned about just a few of my mom’s cooking fails, I hope that you and the other readers choose not to make the mistakes she has when it comes to having knowledge about the food you eat and make.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Anja McBride, 14, is an eighth-grader at North Star Academy. She is an avid reader and loves to volunteer at the Upper Peninsula Children’s Museum.