My love for cooking did not come from my mom. Hell, we knew damn well to stay out of her kitchen or we’d get smacked with a wooden spoon. No, my culinary passion can be traced back to a late 80s birthday gift from many years ago. The Chef de Parti to my Apprenti was none other than a mad scientist named Dr. Dreadful.

The Dr. Dreadful Food Lab was the male answer to the Easy Bake Oven (predating Creepy Crawlers by several years.) Your kitchen table instantly became your very own laboratory, where you would orchestrate a series of dishes that “looks gross but tastes great!” These varied from bubbling brain stew eaten straight from the shrunken skull bowl, to the homegrown and edible monster skin (I’m still not sure what it was made of.) I became mad with power, a gourmet Dr. Moreau, mixing and matching the various flavored powders and ingredients to create just the right gummy tarantula.

Unfortunately, my kitchen adventures came to an abrupt end after I used up all the allotted ingredients on the toy set’s second use. I begged my parents to replenish my food stock but they just handed me my Boglin, another birthday gift of that year, and said, “play with this instead.” My fickle attention span agreed and the food lab was put up into the attic along with my dashed dreams of one day attending cooking school. Now, when I get ready to prepare my famous chicken cordon bleau or glazed brisket, it’s not Rachel Ray or Bobby Flay that I thank, but an Einstein-looking evil genius that taught me that the greatest ingredient of all was love (and slime.)