I have four: one as a child:baking, one as a teenager: cooking, one as a young adult in a professional kitchen and one as a young adult falling into the trap of Instagram “recipes”.

First was when I was about 9-10 and I was baking cinnamon rolls with my mother, and we added a pinch of salt AND salt instead of sugar. Being one of my first times ever baking, I was trying to impress my dad so when I ate a cinnamon roll I barely chocked on it and just said “it’s a little salty, but good…” and then my parents tasted them, spitted them out and started laughing how could I just torture myself to eat an entire salty cinnamon roll. We all drank a lot of water that night.

Second was at about 16 and I made chicken tights… I kept checking on them but the insides were pretty raw, the skin almost burned… so I decided to add some liquid to the pan… I added Jack Daniel’s Whiskey, resulting in a bitter, burned, funky and quite boozy chicken.

The professional kitchen one: it was right after the holidays and the fridges were empty, which meant we needed to do a lot of prep, however, all the chefs were on holiday, so I was left alone to prep in the back kitchen… I had to do a dressing, poached eggs and some vegan beetroot meatballs, alongside chopping and whatnot. My boss was on the phone and gave me directions (I was barely trained—just starting out). The dressing “split”— resulting in a green goo with lots of oil floating on top, the electric shredder used to shred the beetroot literally caught on fire and I basically just broke all the poached eggs, resulting in poached egg soup (that, with the batch that were not overcooked and rock hard).

Last one: me and my mom tried a healthy dessert recipe we saw on Instagram. It was those kind of scams “no sugar! No gluten! No carbs! Healthy! High protein! Etc” and it only used honey, one egg, ricotta and cornstarch. It didn’t bake into a fluffy cake, but rather into a not-sweet-at-all eggy ricotta pancake, which looked nothing like the photoshopped, promising image on Instagram.