Shine Food
What do you hate most about cooking?
Up until last week, I hadn't cooked for a dinner party in a long while. The last one was a sweaty frenzy of spaghetti and meatballs for 14, and I had to take four months off after that. This time I just cooked for six, and found myself enjoying the hourly turn of the slow-roasting pork and even the carrot peeling (which I've begun doing right onto the counter instead of hunching over the trash since it's pretty easy to clean up and so much nicer to my back). The difference between this dinner and the other one was not only the number of servings I was responsible for, but two of the dishesâ€"the spring carrots and the main dishâ€"could be made ahead of time. Every single other task that could be completed in advance, I did, tooâ€"washed the salad greens, cut the grape tomatoes, boiled the water for the pasta. That is to say, I learned my lesson:
What I hate most about cooking is timing.
This element of dinner prep makes me a kitchen stress case. I can't talk to people very well, that includes guests coming in the door. Those pictures in Gwyneth Paltrow's cookbook of her laughing and drinking wine over a pot. None of that. The pressure of timing everything to come out warm at the same instant actually made me think I didn't like to cook for a few months there. That's the danger. If you don't identify what you hate most about cooking, you may not figure out how to work around it so that you find out what you love
What do you hate most about cooking?
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