How to Boil Water

STEP ONE
Receive an awesome cookbook from your aunt.

STEP TWO
Choose recipes--Tuscan chicken stew, Eggplant parmesan, chocolate chip cookies

STEP THREE
Grocery shop

STEP FOUR
Cook... for a really freaking long time. (lesson learned... if the recipe says one hour, it will take at least 2)
Place what you think is a dutch oven on the stove over medium heat. Apparently though it's a casserole dish and will spontaneously combust in about 2 minutes... exploding and shattering all over the kitchen.
Skin the chicken, even though the recipe was really clear you should have bought skinless in the first place.
Cut up the eggplant. Realize you don't know what the inside of an eggplant it supposed to look like and yours might be bad. Look on wikipedia for a picture. Decide you're ok.
Pour in Italian seasoning on the "pour" side not the "sprinkle" side. Try to scrape as much out of the dish as possible, although what remains is roughly 4x what the recipe calls for.

STEP FIVE
Make a huge mess. Use a different dish for everything. Curse the day you rented an apartment without a dishwasher.

STEP SIX
Enjoy a lovely meal and the wine you didn't use in the recipe.