Least Favorite Cooking Things

2. Slippery onion skins.

3. Tears from chopping onions.

4. Non-heat-proof handles on pots, pans.

5. Having to wash your hands every thirty seconds sometimes.

6. Grating yr knuckles when grating cheese, etc.

7. Bad knives.

8. Other people all up in my kitchen.

9. Too many things cooking at once and THE PANIC.

8 otm. i'm such a control freak.

10. kneading bread dough.

11. seeding tomatoes

(lauren, too bad we are on opposite coasts!)

This is why I don't seed tomatoes. (Also see no. 1)

The first time I tried to make tomato paste, I didn't seed them and spent HOURS picking out the seeds with a spoon. I got very obsessive about it - do not want seeds!

how to seed or juice a thing (lemons tomatoes etc.)

1. cheesecloth surrounds it
2. you SKVUSHHIT with your hands
3. remove seeds from cheesecloth/much less juicy flesh or in the case of lemons/etc just toss them and prepare another one
4. note that after doing this with many fruits the cheesecloth will begin to get slippery and gross but it is OK I promise

12. sticky garlic peels all over fingers arrgh fuckoff

13. Rolling out pastry. It's my arch-nemesis.

14. Sticking hands in sink full of murky, cold, greasy water where crusty pots/pans/cutlery were left soaking overnight. Ew.

(ps. I don't think the SKVUSHHIT with your hands method would work so good with tomatoes for making tomato paste. It's nice to have the juice, but the seedless flesh is what I'm after mostly.)

15. Cleaning the pasta goo out of the wire mesh strainer

arrrgh! 14. OTM! that would be an effective method of torture.

16. white sauce arm ache

17. Why do my counters have raised metal edges that make it extra-difficult to wipe off all the debris that falls from my cutting board?

18. chicken parts grossness when first coming out of the tray

19. DISHES

19a. Trying to remove 2-day-old scrambled egg remains from a non-stick pan.

I like doing the washing up, but I may be a freak on this. It's very satisfying getting it all done and squared away. You start out with a clean kitchen you get all the stuff going on and then you end up with a clean kitchen. Sigh.

20. I hate (HATE!) baked beans but Mrs T and the boy don't so I end up cooking them but the whole everything about them is yukky for me. The smell when you open them, the fact that there's always a few stuck in the tin after you've dumped them in the pan, they way they stick to the bottom of the pan if you don't watch them like a hawk. Everything about them really.

21. Cooking in other peoples' kitchens, particularly my parents'. I can't find anything when I need to (shouting downstairs to my dad: "WHERE'S THE SPATULA???"), and the staples are always unfamiliar and/or not what I'm used to--like my mom will assure me there's curry powder in the house, and I'll find some ancient, tasteless stuff.