| INSTRUCTIONS | MY THOUGHTS |
|---|---|
| Season to taste. | Give me a hint: what taste are we going for? |
| Boil until a hard ball forms. | So something hasn't gone horribly wrong if I end up making sporting equipment? |
| Grill over medium coals. | The folks at Williams-Sonoma tried to convince me there was only one size of coal. |
| Simmer, stirring occasionally. | Like "every few minutes" occasionally or "whenever I remember I'm cooking" occasionally? |
| a pound of shrimp, crab or lobster | If it doesn't make any difference, can I save eighteen bucks and use canned tuna? |
| Knead until elastic. | Take my word for it: this stuff is never going to hold up anybody's underwear. |
| Let rise in warm place. | If I'm stuck spending the winter in Brooklyn, then my dinner is too. |
| Top with buttered breadcrumbs. | I've got breadcrumbs. I've got butter. This can't possibly be right. |
| Cook in slow oven. | I have looked high and low and I'm nearly positive my oven doesn't have a speedometer. |
| until desired doneness | Buddy, I desired to be done six hours ago. |
| turning only once | If I turn it too soon and it looks disgusting can I PLEASE turn it back? |
| Bake until knife inserted in center comes out clean. | Sure. Was the knife clean to start with? |
| Turn into serving dish. | Poof! I'm a serving dish. |
| Smother with onions. | Is covering with onions good enough, or do I actually have to hold them over its mouth? |
| Chill. | I'd love to. But who'll finish cooking? |
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5 comments:
This is kind of a touchu subject for me because I'm completely incompetent when it comes to cooking ANYTHING. A while back, when you (mockingly) wrote about 101 quick recipes, I was actually taking notes. The situation is THAT bad.
Anyway, back to recipes. I'm convinced that they're just an elaborate joke that people that know how to cook play on the rest of us. They use all this insider language that no one else can decipher, but no one wants to admit to it at the risk of sounding like a complete idiot. The worst ones are the recipe books that come with a time, like "30 minute meals" or something like that. Because then, you not only have to try to decode what everything means, but you have this time bomb that keeps saying you have to be doing this in x minutes or you're a complete failure at life.
Believe it or not, I tried Rachael Ray's recipe for black bean enchiladas, in one of her "30 Minutes or Less" cookbooks, and they took me TWO HOURS to make. I felt incredibly stupid: I mean, should I even try to feed myself, since even the simplest meals took me forever?
Later I realized Rachael totally cheats: she doesn't shop, she doesn't wash her produce, she doesn't do dishes. Throwing the food in a big pot isn't where the time goes.
These days it seems like she's given up trying: "Today we're going to cover something with melty cheese for an entree, then top something else with store-bought ice cream for dessert. All in thirty minutes or less!" Color me slightly less than impressed.
The "season to taste" instruction has always bugged me too. It seems that the cooks are either giving you a useless story about the time they went to their grandmother's house in Palermo and ate her secret-recipe meatballs with the mafia, or short, indecipherable code instructions.
Love your blog!
-Jeanette
Yes Yes Yes - finally an appropriate response to those stupid instructions from recipe books!
I love it.
More than one innocent would-be cook has been done in with the buttered breadcrumbs one....don't feel bad!
First ya gotta MELT the butter in a pan on a very low heat (unless you enjoy the smell of burning scorched stuff). This takes a few minutes. THEN ya puts the tiny little pieces of bread in and turn the whole thing over and over with a spoon until the bread is fully coated with butter.
Then your problem will be not eating the fully buttered breadcrumbs before putting them in the casserole dish or whatever else you planned on doing with them. Because they're very addictive if you start grabbing the wet breadcrumbs out of the pan and try to taste just one. You can't. You must always go back for more. This is a good way to frustrate yourself even further. So maybe you should make extra butter and extra breadcrumbs just to be safe like I do.
You can also melt the butter in the microwave and then throw your breadcrumbs in after. This still creates tasty breadcrumbs that you should be putting on your casserole but will probably still want to eat with your fingers right out of the bowl.
TOodles
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