Would you like something edible with that?

For those cooks who would like to be a little more adventurous in the kitchen but need some assistance to do so, there are websites that guide you, step by step, in creating your own version of a number of different dishes. With these tools, it is remarkably easy to create a dish that tastes remarkably bad. 

But this is an important step to being adventurous! All your major chefs have had at least one majorly bad culinary experience; it is called "meatloaf." So learn to view failure as your friend. It may be the only one you will have left after serving your real friends your meatloaf.

On these websites, once you pick the dish you want to make, you are prompted to make a selection among many choices for each ingredient. For example, for a grain salad, you are asked to first choose one type of grain from several types like farro and quinoa*, then vegetables (here you can be a little creative and choose more then one, but you are strongly recommended to limit your choice to three), then dressing ingredients. 

The dressing ingredients could be a minefield if you, like me, did not pay much attention in chemistry class when acids and bases were explained, or if you were like some other individuals in chemistry class, mainly male, who were more intent on simply causing explosions.

Then it is on to herbs and other aromatics (meaning, in cooking, "things that taste horrible on their own but somehow make other things taste better, unless, due to advanced age, you cannot taste anything at all"). At the end of the process, a recipe magically appears with all the ingredients you chose, along with the proper quantities. 

While there are some safeguards in place to keep you from making a horrible mistake, we think more could be done. If you make a particularly bad choice, for example, it could prompt you to make another, more suitable choice, like so:

Are you SURE you want to do this? Just askin'.

This may not be a good idea. 

You don't much care for your friends and family, do you?

Warning: This combination may spontaneously combust.

We will not be held liable for unfortunate or unwise combinations resulting in illness, disembowelment, or just plain disgust on the part of those eating it.

Well, we warned you. Don't blame us.

This may help other would-be cooks avoid the situation I found myself in, wondering idly as I mixed the grain salad ingredients, What idiot called for both red onions and chives in the same dish?

 Ohhhh, THIS idiot....

My idiotness was confirmed sometime later, after I was feeling proud of the success of my first try at cooking farro. Then I found out why it had been so easy.

"Farro is an idiot-proof grain to cook," a website declared. 

Which explains EVERYTHING.

*It is regrettable that everyone, even some top culinary folk, has been referring to quinoa as a grain, when in fact it is actually a seed closely related to the mustard seed, the sesame seed, the ketchup seed, birdseed, etc. Seriously, it IS a seed, and the fact that it is being mislabeled and misrepresented is the REAL reason the Aztecs forecast the end of the world recently. "Someday," they told each other, "this great seed which has nourished our people for generations will be sold in large bags at Costco and be called a grain...and then will come the end." Fortunately, of course, this was not the case, and there are likely to be no permanent effects from our misguided conceptions concerning quinoa.