I had an idea the other night. In particular, I had a culinary idea.

This is in no small part blamed on watching a number of kitchen shows that give me plenty of ideas, but at no time cautions me to slow down in my attempts.

Let’s get something straight right off the get-go: I’m not a bad cook. Unlike the ability to follow a lot of directions when I probably should, I pay pretty close attention to recipes. It is after all the difference between eating a good meal or going to whatever nearest fast food junk-a-thon is nearest. And believe me I’ve fallen into that trap often.

In fact, I have a pretty specific rule to cooking:When making something for the first time, I always follow the recipe to its end. I don’t care if it comes out bland, or if it conforms to the world in a way that non conformists get all bent out of shape about.

Once I’m familiar though, all bets are off. This goes one of two ways: disastrous or epic. As you may have noticed I throw the word epic around like it’s going out of style. The way I see it, if you can’t live an epic life, then you aren’t trying hard enough.

At any rate, I’ve got a healthy imagination, so there’s always that danger that whatever I’m making is going to spiral out of control. It’s happened before and it will happen again.

Part of the unhinged method behind my cooking is the fact that I really don’t care about presentation. I can make some good food, but I’m not going to take extra care and caution just to make sure my dishes look pretty. It always seems counterproductive to me. It’s kind of like making the bed. Yeah, I’m that kind of a person. A barbarian. Sue me.

So let’s just say my plates don’t always look the most appetizing, but on the plus side they are tasty. That however, is not where the real danger of my cooking lies.

It’s the experimenting. The idea of one thing could mix with another and create something tasty. Often times, much to my pride, things go well. Apparently, I have a pretty good idea of what tastes good even if I don’t have the schooling in the subject.

Of course it can certainly go the wrong way and that’s where a second danger in my cooking lies: my lack of attention.

I like watching TV while I cook or grill or even bake and that my friends is where the damage comes from. At best food comes out dry or over-cooked, at other times the seasoning gets off.

At the very least my cooking can be termed as an adventure and that’s been true from a very early age.

When I was in high school, I found I enjoyed the cooking aspect of home economics. The sewing not so much. In fact I was pretty lucky to get out of it without sewing my finger to whatever I was making.

At one point, I remember, we were making cookies. Coincidentally, it was also during this time that I discovered my ability for distraction, and my group paid for it.

Myself and classmate Matthew went to work on our chocolate-chip cookies. Matthew was a farm kid and I some sort of something. I defied labeling in high school though I suppose I tried harder than I should at being cool.

News flash — I wasn’t very cool. Either way, cooking wasn’t a strong suit of either of us at the time.

Still we were rocking the cookie making, rolling throughout the recipe as if possessed by Martha Stewart herself. Pride, I think, ran through us because we didn’t need to ask for help, which that within itself warranted some kind of good grade.

The cookies went into the oven and we sat around and joked, confident, if not a little cocky, we had aced this recipe, while everybody else toiled away.

The buzzer went off, and with blooming pride we took our cookies out of the oven … and realized immediately that something was wrong. They had the roundness of cookies and the flatness of quarters, the latter being the part we questioned.

But we shrugged, waited for them to dry off and each took a bite of what we thought was an epic cookie. It was promptly followed by our teeth falling out from the brick discs they turned out to be.

We called the teacher over and she cast us with a disparaging eye. To say that she was used to us doing things like this is probably an understatement. But we dutifully went through the recipe, checking off what we did.

We were certain nothing had gone wrong in our handling of the information. Shortening? Yes. Oven temp? Yes. Sugar? Yes — both of us. Yes.

We looked at each other, studying each other for weakness as we began the effort of figuring out which one of us was wrong.

Ultimately we were both wrong because we got distracted, as you’ve probably already figured out. It’s also the source of my rule for following the recipe exactly.

It may ensure you’re not a cool kid, but at least you get to keep all your teeth.