I just made the most disgusting thing in my entire life. My daughter is now trying to find a scented candle to kill the horrible smell.

After I made Emma Kelly her requested chicken nuggets, corn on the cob and frozen grapes for supper, I thought I’d wing it when it came to mine.

I found a bag of fresh spinach in the vegetable drawer with a Best If Used By date of April 22. I rinsed that off and threw it in the salad spinner. I think this makes the fourth time I’ve used it since I received it as a wedding gift in 2003. I remembered that I like ordering spinach sauteed in garlic and olive oil at the big fancy restaurant, so I thought I’d use some flavored olive oil and cook it up. After I poured a little over the spinach in the pan, I realized it reeked. The bottle says it just expired in March, so it really couldn’t be “bad.” No, it was just BAD — some awful flavored garlic and parmesan combination — so I tossed the practically full bottle in the trash. Since there was only minimal damage done to the spinach and I couldn’t bear to throw the whole batch out, I decided to doctor it up.

Then I remembered that hot, shirtless guy on the TV commercial who cooked with Italian salad dressing. I checked and didn’t have any of that, but I did have some creamy garlic vinaigrette. Close enough, right? I poured it in. Maybe I poured too much because as I was stirring it around in the frying pan, it started to look like salad soup. Then I remembered that when I used to watch Mama cook and she wanted to thicken up her gravy, she’d add flour. So I dug around in the pantry until I found a bag of all-purpose that had been opened who-knows-when but had been thoughtfully stored in an air-tight plastic container. It said it expired in January 2012, but does flour ever expire, really? So I pinched up some with my fingers and sprinkled it in the pan with the same flair that I’ve seen Rachael Ray use a time or two. It wasn’t thickening up to my liking, so I pinched up and sprinkled a little more.

That’s when the flour started clumping up in little moist balls that didn’t exactly scream “tasty.” That’s when I remembered that time I tried to wing making homemade fried rice with nothing but leftover white rice, some cooking oil and an egg. I remembered it being pretty darned greasy, but I also remembered that I ate it. So I cracked an egg in there and started stirring.

And that’s when I realized this was a bad situation…A bad situation made worse when it started to burn.

So now it’s cooled off and I can’t bring myself to even take a bite. It’s going in the trash with the expired olive oil and expired flour.

I pray that it’s not true what they say — The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach! If that’s true, I’m going to be single for a long, long time.