Nobody’s Perfect

I’ve come a long way in the kitchen since I started this blog almost 2 years ago.  Much of that progress that come since I got married and started doing the bulk of the food shopping and cooking for Brian and I.  I cook so often and feel so comfortable in the kitchen that, sometimes, I like to pretend I’m perfect.  Luckily, I have about a million things happen to me during the course of cooking dinner each night which to remind me that’s not the case.  Here are some of the silly things one might expect me to be able to do in my kitchen, but I’m still working on them.

6 [Kitchen Related] Things I’m Currently Working On:

1. Making side dishes.  Planning main dishes is something I like to think I’m pretty good at (hopefully there’s a post about that in the near future).  I love looking at recipes, I like menu planning.  But usually, about the time I’m getting ready to put dinner on the table, Brian wanders in and asks what we’re having as a side.  Oh, just lasagna isn’t enough for a meal?  We need a vegetable too?  There’s broccoli in the lasagna, I’m pretty sure that counts.  Many a meal has been temporarily postponed while I defrost vegetables or find a carb.

2.  Reading recipes all the way through.  Twice.  Before I do anything else. I usually do a good job of reading the ingredients list thoroughly before heading to the store, and we’re usually decent at coming up with last minute substitutions as needed (yogurt for sour cream, etc).  The issue is that I often fail to read the parts where it says ingredients need to rise for an hour or boil for 45 minutes.  8:00 dinner that was started at 5:00 is not unheard of.

3.  Not making a huge mess. Last Thursday, Brian and I turned 10 pounds of apples into 9 jars of spiced apple rings.  In the course of that project, I also covered every surface in the kitchen with sticky syrup.  We’re still working on getting the outsides of the jars to not feel sticky.  Last night I made cupcakes.  Most of the dry ingredients actually made it into the mixing bowl, but the counter still needed a bit of a wipe down.

4.  Turning on the correct burner. I’m most guilty of this first thing in the morning, when I’ve just stumbled out of bed and into the kitchen to make my tea.  Water takes a really long time to boil if it’s not sitting on a lit burner.  Just letting you know.

5.  Turning off the burner. In the event that I do manage to turn on the correct burner to cook something, it is equally difficult for me to remember to turn said burner off.  This (dangerous, stupid) error usually occurs when I’m cooking recipes that involve multiple pots on the stove and combining of those pots at some point.  Tonight, for example, I picked up the saucepan of tomato topping for my casserole to pour into my casserole dish and never got around to turning off the burner.  It’s a really good thing I have a husband.

6.  Cooking dried beans. We consume a good number of beans in our home.  But they come out mushy in the Crockpot, take forever on the stove and both those options assume I’ve remembered that I need beans awhile before I actually need them.  I tried cooking them in a dutch oven once and that seemed to work pretty well, but it needs additional trials for confirmation.  Things like this make reducing waste and saving money less desirable to me than saving time.

Clearly, this isn’t a complete list, but it’s a start.  The kitchen is still one of my favorite places to be, despite my mistakes (and probably a good place for me to be, seeing as there’s probably a burner that needs to be turned off)

What seemingly simple kitchen skills are you still working on?