I can grill burgers, hot dogs, and steaks on our backyard grill. I can “cook” virtually anything frozen that has very specific directions on the package explaining how to prepare it by sticking it in a microwave or an over.

I can fry and scramble eggs, bake potatoes, saute onions and mushrooms, cook pasta, heat up bottled pasta sauces on the stove, and prepare Shake ‘n Bake pork chops.

But when it comes to preparing anything that requires following a recipe, that’s my wife’s department. She often refers to a well-worn, close-to-falling-apart cookbook from Joan Lunden, and a few other cookbooks, or a bunch of loose-leaf recipes that she got out of magazines or has downloaded and printed off the intetnet that she keeps in accordion file divided into various food-type sections. Fortunately for me, she is a really good cook.

But there’s an alternate use of the word recipe that I have used in an expression throughout my life and all too frequently these days and it has nothing to do with preparing or cooking meals. That expression is “recipe for disaster,” and it refers to something — an activity, behavior, or method of doing something — that is very likely to cause a negative or detrimental outcome.

Take, for example, a 75-year-old man getting up on a ladder to clean out the clogged gutters just after a rainstorm without asking his wife to be his spotter turned out to be a personal recipe for disaster.

Or if Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November and returns to the White House, that will be a recipe for disaster for around 340 million Americans.

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Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, where Linda has given us the word, “recipe” and use it anyway we want.