Bam! Kickin' My Life Up A Notch

I can cook like no other 18-year-old boy can. From crÐ"Ёme brule to chocolate chip chocolate peanut butter cookies, from chicken parmesan to the cheesiest macaroni and cheese you will ever taste, nothing is beyond my skill. I have been developing this unique talent for five years. For something that I have come to love so much, the events that forced me into this hobby are surprisingly tragic. It was five years ago that my father died.

I had never even heard of bacterial meningitis until it struck my father. The name sure sounded rough, but I had trouble taking in much beyond that. As it turned out it was a swelling of the meninges, a membrane that envelops the brain and the spinal cord, but this knowledge came later. For the time being all I could comprehend was the speed that this unknown disease seemed to possess. Over the course of just two days my father went from completely normal; laughing, joking, playing Frisbee with me in the front yard, while quietly accessing to himself that the grass needed to but cut, even thought it would be another week before he got around to doing it, to being in hospital bed, with only the consistent beep of a monitor to tell me he was still there. The doctors told me that that beep would not last long; there was nothing they could do. Still I refused to believe, I longed for a miracle. Sadly, that miracle did not come, and my father passed away.

Eventually almost everything would return too normal. I say almost because it was inevitable that some things had to change. With the passing of my father my mother began to take more and more hours working. Soon I found myself home alone at night scrounging for leftovers to microwave. After numerous nights of old spaghetti I decided that I would have to learn to cook, or soon I would die of boredom from eating the same reheated food every night. So I set out to accomplish my goal. Trial and error proved to be the staple of learning to cook. I started slowly. I overcooked, I undercooked, I burned, I even set a towel on fire once, but I was determined. All of a sudden everything seemed