Sunday, April 30
Five Things Kat Hates About Cooking:
- Supermarket Recipes. Yes, I realize that 99% of the English-speaking world gets its veggies and meats at the store in nice plastic wrappers, but some of us don't. This leads to me thumbing through recipes muttering, "Yes, yes, yes, beef tenderloin and chicken breasts, and what is it you expect me to do with twenty pounds of stew beef and all these drumsticks?"
Seriously. I have half a cow in my freezer and several books of recipes for the prime cuts, which, believe it or not, make up a very small percentage of half a beef. I substitute, of course, but it gets old.
- Fire Alarms. I never had to deal with these things when I lived at home, because my mother's first act upon moving into a house was to gut them. I'm starting to see her point. It doesn't matter if I turn the fan on, open the back door, and do the Dance Of Smoke Ousting, the damned fire alarm is still going to go off every time I cook. And it's got this shrill, piercing, I'm-saving-your-life-pay-attention thing going that reminds me of nothing so much as right-wing Christians, radical Libertarians, and all the members of the middle class who told me my tattoo would Ruin Me For The Job Market. I don't take that kind of attitude from people: damned if I'm taking it from the inanimate.
It's not like I'm even burning anything. It's food, for God's sake. It's supposed to smoke like that.
- It's Not Clean, It's Not Dirty, WTF? I swear my cutlery has it in for me. I must have spent twenty minutes wandering around looking for stuff that was neither put away nor in the (massive) stack of dishes nor in the dishwasher. I know I own this stuff. I can see it in my head. Why must I spend twenty minutes wandering around looking for the scissors or French chef knife or colander making vague snipping, cutting, or pouring-away-pasta-water motions with my hands before I can actually FIND it?
It doesn't help that when I do find the damn thing it is invariably a) somewhere stupid that leads to a fight over who put it there, b) in the fridge full of food, meaning I can't use it, or c) right in front of me, where it has been the whole time. Unless it really just vanished into a nether dimension for long enough to drive me batshit crazy. I have my suspicions.
The contents of the pantry are in on the thing too, but their trick is to vanish until I buy a replacement.
- Doing Things NOW. I should make it clear at this point that I love cooking. I love chopping and kneading and stirring and smelling all the lovely food smells, and I will putter around quite happily doing all of this. What I hate is that point -- and there's one in every recipe -- where the writer of said recipe has dropped a tab of acid and is imagining that you have four more hands than is the usual. I mean, one minute I'm wandering about doing my chop-knead-stir routine, and the next it's OMG the noodles are done and I have to pour them in while stirring slowly and the butter is burning and I haven't chopped the onion ohshitohshitohSHIT!
What is with this? Either the master cooks who write these kind of recipes are super-organized, or they've learned to balance pots in either hand while working the whisk with their teeth, or (as I suspect) they've had little peons running around doing the menial crap for so long they've forgotten about chopping things themselves. But I do not react well to pressure, and I wish they'd stop.
- Dishes. Yup. You've just finished your masterpiece. You're looking around the kitchen, experiencing that warm glow of accomplishment and anticipated gustatory satifaction, when your eye falls on the one fly in the ointment, the one cloud in your sky:
THE DISHES.
Maybe there are people out there who can cook a meal without creating an ungodly pile of dishes in the process. I am not one of them. In fact, the downstairs sink is creaking under the load as we speak. And I hate doing dishes. It's not like cooking. It's dull, it's icky, you get strange stuff under your nails, and when you're done do you have a delectable meal for your trouble? No! You simply have a lack of dishes. My Zen is not strong enough for me to appreciate an absence of something.
My first boyfriend and I had an agreement: I cooked, he did the dishes. We were happy with this agreement. I got to make a mess and have it cleaned up, and he got food that didn't come out of a can or say "Kraft" anywhere on it. Sadly the rest of the relationship did not achieve the same happy balance, and Dan, while a dear in most ways, has shown resistance to the I-cook-you-clean plan, on the grounds that he likes cooking and dislikes cleaning as much as I do. So, until that glorious day when my Robot Friend arrives pre-equipped with a soap dispenser and a towel, I am doing my own dishes.
Bugger.
On the other hand, I have cooked, and now I have food. Mmm. Food. Food makes everything better. Even dishes.
- Supermarket Recipes. Yes, I realize that 99% of the English-speaking world gets its veggies and meats at the store in nice plastic wrappers, but some of us don't. This leads to me thumbing through recipes muttering, "Yes, yes, yes, beef tenderloin and chicken breasts, and what is it you expect me to do with twenty pounds of stew beef and all these drumsticks?"
Seriously. I have half a cow in my freezer and several books of recipes for the prime cuts, which, believe it or not, make up a very small percentage of half a beef. I substitute, of course, but it gets old.
- Fire Alarms. I never had to deal with these things when I lived at home, because my mother's first act upon moving into a house was to gut them. I'm starting to see her point. It doesn't matter if I turn the fan on, open the back door, and do the Dance Of Smoke Ousting, the damned fire alarm is still going to go off every time I cook. And it's got this shrill, piercing, I'm-saving-your-life-pay-attention thing going that reminds me of nothing so much as right-wing Christians, radical Libertarians, and all the members of the middle class who told me my tattoo would Ruin Me For The Job Market. I don't take that kind of attitude from people: damned if I'm taking it from the inanimate.
It's not like I'm even burning anything. It's food, for God's sake. It's supposed to smoke like that.
- It's Not Clean, It's Not Dirty, WTF? I swear my cutlery has it in for me. I must have spent twenty minutes wandering around looking for stuff that was neither put away nor in the (massive) stack of dishes nor in the dishwasher. I know I own this stuff. I can see it in my head. Why must I spend twenty minutes wandering around looking for the scissors or French chef knife or colander making vague snipping, cutting, or pouring-away-pasta-water motions with my hands before I can actually FIND it?
It doesn't help that when I do find the damn thing it is invariably a) somewhere stupid that leads to a fight over who put it there, b) in the fridge full of food, meaning I can't use it, or c) right in front of me, where it has been the whole time. Unless it really just vanished into a nether dimension for long enough to drive me batshit crazy. I have my suspicions.
The contents of the pantry are in on the thing too, but their trick is to vanish until I buy a replacement.
- Doing Things NOW. I should make it clear at this point that I love cooking. I love chopping and kneading and stirring and smelling all the lovely food smells, and I will putter around quite happily doing all of this. What I hate is that point -- and there's one in every recipe -- where the writer of said recipe has dropped a tab of acid and is imagining that you have four more hands than is the usual. I mean, one minute I'm wandering about doing my chop-knead-stir routine, and the next it's OMG the noodles are done and I have to pour them in while stirring slowly and the butter is burning and I haven't chopped the onion ohshitohshitohSHIT!
What is with this? Either the master cooks who write these kind of recipes are super-organized, or they've learned to balance pots in either hand while working the whisk with their teeth, or (as I suspect) they've had little peons running around doing the menial crap for so long they've forgotten about chopping things themselves. But I do not react well to pressure, and I wish they'd stop.
- Dishes. Yup. You've just finished your masterpiece. You're looking around the kitchen, experiencing that warm glow of accomplishment and anticipated gustatory satifaction, when your eye falls on the one fly in the ointment, the one cloud in your sky:
THE DISHES.
Maybe there are people out there who can cook a meal without creating an ungodly pile of dishes in the process. I am not one of them. In fact, the downstairs sink is creaking under the load as we speak. And I hate doing dishes. It's not like cooking. It's dull, it's icky, you get strange stuff under your nails, and when you're done do you have a delectable meal for your trouble? No! You simply have a lack of dishes. My Zen is not strong enough for me to appreciate an absence of something.
My first boyfriend and I had an agreement: I cooked, he did the dishes. We were happy with this agreement. I got to make a mess and have it cleaned up, and he got food that didn't come out of a can or say "Kraft" anywhere on it. Sadly the rest of the relationship did not achieve the same happy balance, and Dan, while a dear in most ways, has shown resistance to the I-cook-you-clean plan, on the grounds that he likes cooking and dislikes cleaning as much as I do. So, until that glorious day when my Robot Friend arrives pre-equipped with a soap dispenser and a towel, I am doing my own dishes.
Bugger.
On the other hand, I have cooked, and now I have food. Mmm. Food. Food makes everything better. Even dishes.
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