Eddie’s Food Grievances: Needing 30 Pans for 1 Recipe
Adeline loves food, lots of it and often, both at home and out. Usually that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the Eddie’s Food Grievances series, she shares her bewilderment. This week, a bunch of pans had her getting a little hot under the collar.
There’s a reason I never cook from cookbooks. (My) experience has taught me that it always means extra work. And that starts with the ingredients you need. I don’t have three-quarters of the required products at home, which means trips to the supermarket for a pinch of something I’ll never use again afterwards. If I’m unlucky, I also have to go to the toko, OR it’s some left-wing product that they only sell at Marqt with a q.
And once you have everything at home, that’s when the real hassle begins.
A Bunch of Chives
This week I cooked something complicated. Not that I knew this, because otherwise I obviously never would have started it in the first place. Actually, I should have known when I saw that I first had to pour boiling water over the bunch of chives and then cool them with cold water.
But at that point I genuinely still thought I’d be done within 30 minutes, as it said at the top of the recipe.
Shortage of Pans
To get ahead of any unexpected twists in a recipe, I lay everything out on the counter beforehand. Because you always suddenly need a pinch of nutmeg while stirring four pans at once. Speaking of those pans. I have never had to juggle so many saucepans, small pans, medium-sized pans and frying pans.
For this one recipe, I needed, and I am not exaggerating, six pans. It’s only because I’ve unnecessarily kept so many pans over the years, otherwise there would have been a spontaneous pan shortage.
Getting Hot Under the Collar
I tried to outsmart the recipe by cooking one thing first and then using the same pan for the next, but that didn’t quite work. The recipe maker (what do you call someone like that?) apparently thought it was necessary for me to make a sauce to blend first (in the frying pan), and then I had to bring everything to the boil at the same time. And that frying pan also had to be reused.
At least one thing nearly boiled over, and that was me.
Only Four Burners
I thought it was rather a lot of pans and, above all, a lot that had to happen at once—it practically felt like work—but that wasn’t even my biggest problem. That only arose on my stove. I have one of those hyper-modern induction things, whose makers (rightly) assume that people only use four burners. Honestly, only aspiring chefs order one of those fancy central burners on a stove, or a six-burner. Nobody ever uses it either, by the way; it just looks very impressive.
Meanwhile, I was completely stuck with my recipe, leaving me overheated as I hovered over all my pans. So here’s a plea to chefs, recipe makers and kitchen tinkerers: just stick to three pans, it’ll make all of us much happier (and we’ll get a little less hot under the collar).
For Those Interested, the Pans I Used:
A small pan (for pouring boiling water over and cooling the chives). A frying pan (for the shallot with some sauce). A saucepan (for the eggs). A large pan (for the asparagus). A small pan (for the pasta, but of course it was too small for the pasta). That frying pan again (for another shallot and stir-frying the spinach).
The upside of this abundance of pans is that the recipe is worth making again. Although I don’t know when I’ll dare to make it again.
Read also:
- When Your Waiter Turns Out to Be a Bender
- The Grossest Dining Scene in a Restaurant Ever
- Confession: I’m Buying My House Based on thuisbezorgd.nl
