Black pepper is not found in the produce aisle.

It was my turn to make family dinner for my roommates, so I decided I would go all out and make my mom's super secret, award-winning Cincinnati chili recipe.

A quick side note about Cincinnati chili for those who have never had it before: It's unlike any chili you've ever eaten. There are no beans in it and you eat it on noodles. When I announced to my roommates I would be making chili, the response was along the lines of, 'I don't like chili.' Except everyone loved it.

Anyway, this was the first time I'd ever made this chili and I'd never watched my mom make it so all I really had was the recipe to follow. And my phone to call my mom. I'm at the grocery store buying all the ingredients, which include ground beef, red pepper, black pepper and a bunch of spices. Using my superior grocery store knowledge, I walk into the produce section and find myself a red pepper. Then I start looking everywhere for a black pepper.

I have this fear of asking stupid questions in the grocery store (completely justifiable, too), so after getting all the other ingredients and still missing this black pepper, I call up my mom. I tell her I found a red pepper, but WHERE are the black peppers?? She just laughs at me and explains that black pepper is a spice (like, the pepper that's in a pepper shaker) and that the red pepper is also a spice, so put that bell pepper back.

Whooooooops! So I put the bell pepper back, grab the right peppers and go home and make the chili. Which turned out delicious. Then, months later, as I'm visiting home for the holidays, my mom brings up this whole situation again. I try to defend myself with a, "how was I supposed to know?!" My mom's argument is that she has failed as a mother because I never watched her cook or went to the store with her to know that black pepper is a spice.

Then she started saying something about a Home Ec class or something... sorry mom, too busy taking math and science classes for that!

Pouring an entire bottle of mint extract in something will make it taste like toothpaste.

My roommate and I decided to have a baking night one night, so I turned to Pinterest to find a delicious recipe. One of the very first pins on my feed was for these chocolate peppermint patty cupcakes. YUM. So I made them.

The recipe was simple and pretty easy to follow, and I would recommend it! The cupcake part was super easy, but where I ran into problems was when I had to make the icing.

The recipe said to just use Cool Whip for icing and mix in a little bit of mint extract to make it taste minty and a little bit of green food coloring to make it look minty. I did that and I thought it needed to be more green, so I reached for the green food coloring to add more in.

Turns out I actually grabbed the bottle of mint extract and poured nearly the entire thing into the icing mix. The bottles are very similar in that they are both small, have green on them, and have the same twisty top. Easy mistake to make, really.

The icing ended up tasting like toothpaste and whole kitchen smelled like mint. I still put it on the cupcakes, though, because it was really pretty. The actual cupcake part turned out great, so you just have to scrape off all of the icing before you eat it. My current theory, though, is if you do eat the icing it's actually good for your teeth, since it tastes like toothpaste.

Cookie cutters work better when sprayed with nonstick spray.

One day I was on Pinterest just wasting some time when I stumbled across this pin for hot pink chocolate chip cookies. Hot pink! It's basically just chocolate chip cookies with food coloring added to the cookie dough. Genius! How have I never thought of this before?! I decided to try out the recipe, except one up it and make my cookies orange.

The recipe from the original website was excellent! What it doesn't say, though, is that this is for a serving of about 50 regular sized cookies. Also it doesn't tell you how long to bake for, so for those of you who are like me and aren't super cooking experts, try approximately 16 minutes at 375 degrees (definitely burnt my first batch, oops).

As if orange cookies aren't already magical enough, I decided to add to the magic with this really cool cookie cutter I bought on Amazon. I was online shopping shortly after Christmas, spending my Christmas money, and I was going to buy a bunch of really cool stuff, like a Lazy Susan for the kitchen, an orange case and keyboard cover for my laptop, an orange case for my phone, and screen protector for my phone (long overdue). While I was at it, I decided to just throw in a unicorn cookie cutter.

It was probably one of the best purchases I've ever made. My cookies became orange unicorns and 100% magical. The only problem was the horn (corn?), legs and tail of this cookie cutter were pretty small and the cookie dough kept getting stuck and making deformed unicorns. I busted out the nonstick cooking spray and the problem was solved!

Unfortunately, all the unicorns got really fat in the oven and in the end I made 40 delicious, orange unicorns (that resembled rhinoceroses).

Always keep a pair of gloves in the car.

I woke up one normal winter day, went to the gym, ate breakfastlunch and then headed off to work. The sun was shining and the temperature was pretty average for the season (somewhere around 35-40 degrees). The extent of my outside time was pretty much 20 steps from home to car and then 20 more steps from car to work, so I only wore my light heavy jacket.

Heaviness of my jacket depends on the season. I have a light jacket for temperatures in the 60-range, a heavy light jacket for temperatures a little cooler in the 50-range, a light heavy jacket for temperatures falling into the 40-range, a heavy jacket for temperatures falling to freezing, and anything below that usually calls for two or more jackets. It's a science.

Anyway, I went to work and did my job. During my shift, though, some snow storm just rolls through. It started out as ice then turned into snow and it got super cold. After my shift, I went out to my car and this is what awaited me:

It was pretty cool because no one had left yet so it was all freshly fallen snow. This would have been totally fine except under all this snow was a layer of ice.

My car was completely frozen. Literally. I couldn't even open it because it was frozen. I had to ask one of the guys I was working with to come help me pry open my door. Once I got it open I had to figure out where my ice scraper was. Usually I keep it in my backseat but it wasn't there. For a minute I thought I had lost it, but it was just in the trunk. The next challenge was scraping off the ice. It's already pretty much the worst thing ever, but it's even worse when you're not bundled up and you have no gloves.

It took a really long time to get all the ice off. The whole time snow was falling all over my hands so when it was finally clear enough to drive my hands were basically frozen and I couldn't really hold the steering wheel. The next day I put a pair of gloves in the glove box (haha, punny!) so I will always be prepared to scrape ice off my car.