How to make really awful food

1. Ensure that there are no witnesses. This is of paramount importance.

2. Decide what to cook. If this involves glancing into your fridge to evaluate the contents, vaguely remembering your grandmother doing something with some of them once when you were little, and therefore electing to throw all of them into a pan with some olive oil, so much the better. For example's sake, let's say you have chosen potatoes, leeks, onion, and pancetta. (Your grandmother makes something delicious with onions, pancetta, and potatoes. Potatoes and leeks go together in soups or something, as far as you recall. Ergo, should be good. Never mind the fact that roasting - like with the grandmother's dish - is not the same as making soup, and neither of those involves a pan anyway.)

3. Cut up the onion into very small pieces. This will ensure that it cooks before the rest of the ingredients are finished and will permeate your apartment with a nice burnt smell.

4. Cut the potatoes into small cubes and throw them into the pan. Google "sauteed potatoes" and note that all the recipes call for boiling them first. Abort mission and prepare to try again.

5. Remove the eyes of the potatoes in a somewhat haphazard fashion, since you cannot remember exactly how to find the eyes, or how to remove them correctly anyway. Cut large, vaguely spiral-shaped chunks of potato out. Wonder if perhaps you're meant to boil them before you peel them, remove the eyes, etc. and decide that it can't possibly matter. Throw them in. Be proud that you didn't get boiling water on yourself. (Small mercies, you know.)

6. Chop up the leeks, noting that it is extremely difficult to make the stalks stay together. Put them in the pan with the onions and some olive oil. Admire your handiwork while the potatoes cool so that you can cut them. Briefly wonder if, like potatoes, leeks should be boiled before sauteeing them. Or if you're really supposed to sautee leeks at all. Decide you're too lazy to start over and watch the leeks for signs of intense distress.

7. They look fine. Cut up the (boiled) potatoes, noticing that, once again, you have removed them before they were done (okay, so, mostly boiled). Not a problem, though: just cut around the still-raw part in the center and use the rest.

8. As advertised, the too-small onion bits are beginning to give off a bit of a burnt smell. Toss in the potatoes (the cooked parts) and hope that that will absorb some of the problem.

9. Mix it all around, feeling important. Things are not really cooking at the same rate and everything is making spluttery sounds. Decide that you're not really feeling up to adding the pancetta today, and shove it back in the fridge. Good thing it's vacuum sealed or something, and apparently good for another month.

10. Turn off the gas before things get out of hand. Fleetingly wonder if they have smoke alarms in Italy. Open the window just in case. Tentatively shove some of the mixture onto a plate, hoping to taste it and dispose of the evidence before anyone gets home.

11. Taste. If you've followed the instructions correctly, you will be able to enjoy the texture of not-quite-done potatoes coated in a slimy layer of olive oil. You will note that a mouthful of leek is similar to a mouthful of onion, and about as pleasant. You will wonder what the appropriate way to cook leek is, anyway. Despite the overabundance of taste-filled things, like onions and leeks, in the dish, the whole thing will taste a bit bland.

Note that, usually, things that are full of fat and onion taste delicious, so how you have managed to create such a not-particularly-balanced and truly unappetizing dish out of such innocent ingredients is really quite remarkable.

12. Clean up the kitchen meticulously, pour the rest of the stuff into the garbage, and wash the dishes carefully. If the chilly breeze coming in from the open window is being cooperative, no one will ever know.