What is your relationship to your mom? The way you describe it, it sounds like she is putting you down which is sad and not ok. Shouldn’t she help you learn if she feels you don’t know? What is the point of giving you one day to prove yourself? But maybe there is context I am missing.

As others have said, you develop your ability to cook through repeated use, trial and error, and ideally knowledge passed down from your family. If you want to become someone who can cook, it won’t happen after one try or ten. Just keep trying out recipes that sound good to you, and treat each one as a learning experience. Overtime you will build up recipes that you have memorized and can riff on confidently.

You must like to cook, since you want to prove you can. Whatever you make, take your time, trust your gut, and do it to feed yourself something you like. Cooking is a personal thing, just because not everyone likes what you make doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

Looks like all that studying paid off

Well said, thanks for that little bit of measured realistic optimism I needed it today.

I want to hear that lecture!

I like e-reader for a camping setup since it is lightweight. You can also do a little cyber deck build and load up all of wikipedia.

In a situation where you don’t have constant access to abundant electricity, you would naturally reduce your use of electronics quite a bit. An e-reader battery lasts a long time, so load it up with a bunch of good and useful books and that panel will be able to power it indefinitely. Winter is tricky, still it would probably be enough to keep it going with sparse use. Or you could rig up a bike-alternator-car battery set up. But you need to think about how much power you can reasonably generate and base your planned consumption off of that. This makes me sound like a big prepper, I’m not, but I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Wonder why…

Same, I didn’t know why but it’s actually working as a journal better than any other app I’ve tried for me. Maybe just feeling like it’s not going to try to sell me something or steal my data.

Won’t be destroyed, definitely very out of tune though. Wouldn’t be great to play on but cold is not as bad as heat can be. Luckily he didn’t take it in with him.

Shh don’t tell them… Ignorance is bliss