Chocolate milk in mac and cheese? Vernon Hills dance teacher fits right in on ‘Worst Cooks in America’

What qualifies Cathy Jacobson of Vernon Hills to be on Food Network’s “Worst Cooks in America”?

Well, her application to be on the show recounted the time she substituted chocolate milk when she was out of white milk while making macaroni and cheese for her kids.

“Chocolate mac and cheese, that sounds delicious. But not,” Jacobson said. “And that’s not even the worst.”

She ran out of milk again once when making biscuits from a box mix. That time she subbed in baby formula.

“Also a really bad idea,” she said.

The dance teacher will appear on season 27 of the competition show, where 16 home cooks from around the country get mentored at a culinary boot camp by chefs Tiffany Derry and Anne Burrell in a battle to see who will improve the most and take home a $25,000 prize.

The first episode airs at 7 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 7, with a two-hour double-episode.

“I am unusually confident in everything. I know I can do it, and I go in to cooking that same way,” Jacobson said. “Everything always starts out going right and then just goes wrong.”

Her three kids, now in their 20s, suffered from her culinary ineptitude for years.

“My children say everything I cook comes out beige,” she said. “Plus they tell me there’s a lot of hair in my food.”

The problem is, Jacobson doesn’t always taste the problem.

“I have a bad palate, so everything tastes good to me,” she said. “I kind of like my food. Just nobody else does.”

As a result, Jacobson said she’d all but given up on cooking.

“Now I just DoorDash all the time,” she said. “Why would I go to the store and buy a steak that I’m going to destroy when I can just pay a little more and get a steak that’s good?”

When she says she uses DoorDash “all the time,” she’s not exaggerating. Jacobson said she annually spends about $40,000 on food delivery.

Fittingly, this season of “Worst Cooks” is subtitled “Spoiled Rotten,” a nod to the group of competitors who usually just eat out or order in rather than make their own meals.

The first challenge for contestants on the show involved cooking their favorite takeout dish. Unfortunately for Jacobson, that’s Indian food.

“Turns out it’s really, really complicated,” she said. “It’s like 17 different spices.”

She said she learned a lot in her time on the show and loved the experience.

“It was super fun, and I think through the whole process anything I did there I was pretty proud of - the fact that I got anything on a plate, basically,” she said. “They might love it, they might not love it. I’m just proud that I did something that was completely the opposite of what I normally do.

“But it’s still tough,” she said. “I think it’s always gonna be tough.”