What foods do you refuse to cook because they are too much trouble?
Cakes, pies, cookies...I hate working with flour, sugar and the like. Unruly and unforgiving, boring, monochromatic uninteresting.......I could go on and on. And so I have LOL
Likewise here. Even though I have been a good and exacting baker, I just don't *like* doing it. I joke often that the best thing about celiac disease is being retired from baking, yet I will do some GF baked desserts if in the mood (son's birthday this week and the need for a cake qualifies...sigh). Still, it is an aspect of cooking that I just find too much bother. I say this as a relative non-sweets eater, so there's that.
I love to bake but I'm trying to lose a few pounds so I don't bake much. Its more fun to bake than to eat so the few times that I do bake I tend to take it to work to assemble a care package for my daughter.
OK, I will probably *never* do that, so put that on my list, too.
Definitely this and phyllo dough. I will also never make the Filipino dish rellenong bangus even though I loved it. http://www.pinoyrecipe.net/rellenong-...
My SIL is insane. She and my brother host large, casual get-togethers and she cooks up a storm. Last year she made I don't know how many kinds of baked goods, but to serve with the three kinds of soup made from scratch she served cheese straws. Not the easy kind using flour, butter, cheese, salt and cayenne - but the other easy kind that uses puff pastry. Only she did not buy the puff pastry. Oh, no - she folded and folded and puffed it herself. They were delicious, of course.
I'm sure next time I visit she'll have made her own chocolate from beans she carefully roasted. And it'll be the best damned chocolate ever. And I'll say something silly and spill something down my front, as usual.
Anything fried. I hate having the oil smell in my house forever.
Most asian dishes. I can get better for cheaper with more variety AND less time by going out.
Oh come on...
....no liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti???
Fava beans are a pain to first shuck and then peel (though easier if you blanch and then chill). But you can eat them if young without the peeling step.
I occasionally use young fava beans jarred for some salads, and if using fresh I only use young that do not need to be peeled after they are shelled/shucked. In fact, some of the young tender pods go whole into the dish as well, being that they are that young and tender and super delicious and easy to make.
The large dried beans are a bit more labor intensive.
Trader joes has frozen ones! Fresh are a serious PITA but the frozen ones were awesome with a very delicate edible outer "skin" that i didnt bother to peel off.
Deep-fried anything
Galantine/ballotine of chicken
DIY puff pastry or phyllo
DIY curry powder or garam masala
Macarons
Nothing so far is too much trouble, I love a complicated recipe, but am depressed for a day if it isn't a success.
I'd encourage you to try pasta again! Once you get the hang if it, it's second nature
I'll echo that. An hour after I decide to make it, it's drying on floured towels. And I'm sweeping the kitchen floor.
Honestly, I don't like it enough, and can't eat it often enough to justify the time and expense and mess of making it. I have access to perfectly serviceable fresh pasta, and I'd rather put my time and energy into making the sauce, salad, and dessert. To each their own. :)
After being diagnosed with Celiac in September I use a spiralizer (Veggetti) and make long *spaghetti* noodles from zucchini.SO scrumptious my B/F and grown son love them .....say they will never go back to regular pasta. That little tool is fast fun and it looks like I might be able to crank out some curly fries with it to boot!
Most of the time, when I make it, it's for lasagna. I can get it "thin enough to read print through it," to paraphrase a cookbook I've got, and therefore it's an entirely different result -- five, or even six, layers of ingredients instead of three. More delicate, nuanced. Less "stodgy," to use a word from some British cookbooks.
Freezing the head of cabbage then thawing it in a bowl of cold water makes it very easy to remove the leaves. Just run some water between the leaves and they separate nicely.
I have always used steaming of the leaves for my cabbage rolls, but am interested in the freezing method, as it may compel me to make more PITA cabbage rolls for the cabbage-roll-loving family. (I have fallen down on this family favorite lately because, well, too much bother, y'know?) So: freeze the cabbage hard, and then soak? Do you core first?
Yes, I freeze overnight. If you have the time, you can thaw the cabbage in the refrigerator, but I'm usually too impatient to wait another day, so I soak in water. I try to core the head, but sometimes that's impossible to do until it softens a bit. Make sure to dry the leaves well after you separate them.
I just core, then nuke the entire head of cabbage for 5 minutes. Lift off the softened leaves, and nuke the rest of the head.
No prep, no planning ahead.
I see you've gotten many replies about easier ways to peel off intact cabbage leaves, but if you really want to be a minimalist, deconstruct your stuffed cabbage recipe. Layer the meat mixture with a layer of sliced onions with a layer of cabbage leaves interspersing the sweet-sour sauce every couple of layers. (Save enough sauce to top the assembled dish before backing.) Serve by digging down to the bottom of the casserole to get a portion with all the components.
Basically all baking. My husband eats pretty gluten free so I can't see the point of making a cake for myself. I'll occasionally do a tray of brownies and take them to the rescue squad on days I volunteer but it's not a regular thing at all.
Anythinng deep fried I do not do! Not because I do not love it but I hate the splatter and the smell (after)
This is how I do artichokes Njchicaa...I bang on the edge of the jar lid with a knife and pop the big jar open.....voila magic!!!!!! Seriously I bought and steamed some huge healthy on sale artichokes last summer and the color was so grey...big food turn off:( I know there are frozen and plain canned too which I want to get to try an artichoke gratin/casserole type dish.
put a little lemon in a bowl of water, and dip your artichokes in the acidulated water before steaming. Helps keep them from going grey.
You're in CA with fresh artichokes?!? Gah, please at least get frozen hearts not the canned or jarred mush.
You can prob find "baby" artichokes fresh which will cook much faster and have more tender leaves, no discernable central "choke", don't take so long to cook and therefore won't turn grey.
If I were a product development person for, say, Kraft Foods, I'd be actively taking notes on this thread.
For me:
Fish like sardines and small squid that often require cleaning.
Fava beans (as mentioned)
Things that involve a lot of mess (frying)
Things that require too much planning ahead (do this or that and let sit overnight, e.g.)
Not that I never bother with these things, just much less frequently than I'd like --though I guess a good thing w.r.t. frying.
I'll try almost anything once, but just reading the procedure for getting at those fava beans told me that if I were going to try them they'd be canned or in a restaurant. I don't mind taking pains for a good dish, but I'm definitely of the "Life's too short to peel tomatoes" school. And after several botched tries I've decided it's too short to peel chiles too!
That, however, brings up the deep-frying thing I'm seeing a lot of on this thread: I don't mind pan-frying, including frying chicken, but deep-frying on a stovetop is not something I want to do. However, a girlfriend who worked in the kitchen of a Bay Area fern bar told me of their trick of using the deep fryer to get pepper skins ready to slide off … so if I can find a good electric fryer to use out on the patio I'll have plenty to use it for.
Fortunately, Trader Joe's has favas in their freezer section --peeled and peeled. You're welcome.
Peeling tomatoes is easy. Put them in a saucepan of water, turn on the heat, and after a minute or so fish them out, slit the skin with a serrated paring knife, and the skin will slip right off. Maybe you were thinking of "Life's too short to peel grapes".
Tamales. Double if I'm doing them myself.
Made buckets of them from scratch for my ex's big-number birthday -- it took me DAYS. The Texas-born folks said they were awesome and as good as anything they'd eaten in Texas (yay, me), but I swore I'd never make another fucking tamale as long as I live.
Chicken Kiev!!! I made it when I was trying to impress my future husband (it worked, 10 years so far!!) However, I detest making it, if you don't get a perfect seal all the butter oozes out & then then the bottom is a soggy mess & you don't get that burst of butter when you cut into it! Make it maybe once a year now! Poor guy, he loves it!
Chiles Relleno - I can and have made them, but they are too much trouble, and we have a decent Mexican restaurant nearby.
Crispy peking style duck
Roasted bone marrow. My house smelled like crematory for days. Never again. Also Thai and Vietnamese food. As much I love them they just require too many ingredients.
And oh, the cronuts!
Pho. I've been curious about making it, and I've read some recipes. It just seems too involved. First you have to make the broth, then cook the noodles, then slice the meat, then get all of the side additives together. It's so much easier to just go to my local pho place and spend $7.25 on a bowl.
I have considered making the broth and freezing most of it to use in a less authentic (but still tasty version) - heat up some broth, add some beef and cooked noodles and eat it with some hoison sauce and sriracha.
Have you read the ingredients on any of those many bottles???
have you read the ingredients on any bottle?
Water is a chemical.
Salt is a chemical.
Vinegar is a chemical.
You should rethink this. Three parts concentrated cooking tamarind (ingredients: tamarind and water) and one part 'sweetener of your choice,' lightly applied and charred onto your food is high quality and very natural.
Here's one I've never tried: spun sugar. The recipes always have you setting up two towel-covered chairs back-to-back three feet apart and then throwing hot sugar syrup back and forth between them from the tines of a fork, and magically it turns into cotton candy. Yeah, sure it does: even when I was young and foolish I never believed that one, AKA "How to get sugar syrup all over your floor".
None, at least absolutely. But I certainly think twice (or thrice) about a few things:
--deep frying, because of smells and the volume of oil likely to go to waste;
--sushi rolls, because the ingredient set is wide of what I normally have around;
--pho, for the same reason as sushi rolls, plus the lengthy, specific stock process
I agree with deep frying. What we usually end up doing is a week of deep fried. LOL so unhealthy but then you just get to enjoy some homemade deep fried foods for a week, and then air out the house.
I've thought about taking the deep frying and hooking it up outside to the outside outlet. That way the house won't get smelly.
Just tried making home made tator tots yesterday and the house still smells. :( lol
Eating-wise, I have to go with crab. I don't like it enough to do all that messy cracking and picking through, so it's not worth the effort.
I enjoy long hassle type food projects. Although there is a Orange Chocolate Cheese cake I make where zesting the oranges in so tedious.
As much as I love whole fresh caught fish just NO.It has to be cleaned and filleted(sp?) for me.I will cook it any way they want it (my B/F and grown son) BUT NO cleaning.Fortunately there are three great cooks and shoppers residing here (my B/F and my grown son).I was diagnosed with Celiac in Sept 2014 so the menus here are all gluten free.I refuse to bake or eat ANY specific item marketed as gluten free.Way too many junk ingredients and six million steps to bake a dozen damned cookies that are so dense and hard they could be used as weapons:)
maryland steamed crabs…go out and get the live crabs…get home and check to make sure all crabs are still alive…get pinched by several crabs…set dead crabs aside…place crabs in pot…grab crab escaping over side of pot…get pinched by crab…finally, get all crabs in pot with spices poured over them…place lid on pot, weigh it down and turn on flames…hear crab claws “clicking” as the crabs attempt to crawl out of the pot…take dead carcasses outside to the trash without noticing that one is missing…smell of vinegar and pungent spices lingering in the house for days…realize a couple of days later, via rank, decaying odor, that one of the previously “dead” crabs was only playing ‘possum and had made a run for it…search for and find said crab…confirm, that, yes, it is dead (bugs, smell, decay)…take dead crab out to trash…open all windows in house, spray with febreeze, cuss…live with stench of “unfresh” seafood smell for several days.
no more, no thank you. i now purchase my crabs already steamed.
Careful, Vidute -they might revoke your Maryland citizenship ;~)
lol! i'll steam 'em if it's really necessary, but it's become so much more convenient to just call up and get the crabs steamed to order, especially since the place i go to uses just about the same seasonings and liquids as i do. best part is, i don't have to worry if a crab has escaped and is "fermenting" somewhere in the house!
OMG, thanks for the laugh! I remember catching and cooking crabs as a kid. I would never do it now, so much easy to get them to go.
I have to confess, or my palate does, that I'm much more inclined to the near-ice-cold containers of pure crab meat that you can get at Lexington or Cross St. markets -I swear I could eat one of them a day for the rest of my life and die a happy man, if prematurely.
I'm in awe of the manual labor that goes into producing that quantity of crabmeat, and so my post is relevant to the OP's point; that, and I had to express my Free State bona fides.
make sure to read the labels for the origin of the crabmeat. it's more likely than not that the meat's from asia.
yeah, the picking can get to be a chore, but it's well worth it for the flavor combination of sweet chesapeake bay blues and the salty-hot spices. and then there's the primal pleasure of eating with a knife and spitting and cracking through hard shells. fun!
" it's more likely than not that the meat's from asia."
Not to my eye, in those markets, vidute.
And I know the deal with deriving the meat from a steamed crab; I was just taking you at your word from the post above, and responding to it.
my sister and I were lucky enough to learn from the ladies down in the fishmarket on the dock in Annapolis back in the 80s when we were living aboard our boat. A lot of it is understanding the anatomy of the crab and where the break points are to get at the big chunks of meat.
I'm nowhere near as fast as I used to be, but given a paring knife and a couple of minutes, I can still outshell pretty much anybody at the table.
Hammer, yes; paring knife, no -unless you're competing in a food-eating race.
Maybe it's an Annapolis thing.
i have a dedicated crab knife. only used for picking crabs. :) no hammer/mallet, ever.
Wow, in all my years in Maryland I never saw a "crab knife." Even now, it sounds like an affectation to me.
(And you enter the claws how, v; with your molars?)
Oh well; live & learn.
P.S. "you'd definitely beat me" -how is that not indicative of a race? The antithesis of what should obtain in "the land of pleasant living."
maybe it is -- but it's fast, clean, and efficient.
you'd definitely beat me. i'm the slowest of the slow with blue crabs. give me snow crabs or king crabs, though, and i can tear through those puppies!
Ha! Too funny. Remind me of the story about why we had to hunt for the hard boiled easter eggs outside after That Year the Egg Was Not Found.
My sister reduced me to helpless tears of giggling one year when she called and said that the hunt was on for the 12th egg (hidden inside because of nasty weather) because the Menopausal Easter Bunny couldn't remember where she hid it.
The cat found it a few days later and it was found much worse for the wear after having been batted off every hard surface in the house.
Usually it gets found by the lawnmower along about July.
My nephews, aged 7 and 10 at the time, found my shortcut (not hollowed out) marguciai (Lithuanian easter eggs) that I had put away after easter. Well, we have this tradition of “battling easter eggs” where each person knocks their eggs together with the person next to them. The person whose egg doesn’t crack continues with the next person until there is only one uncracked egg. Well, my nephews decided to have a battle with those marguciai and left the two cracked eggs in the buffet drawer. Needless to say, a stench arose. At first we couldn’t figure out what it was or where it was coming from, but, then I opened the drawer and, whoa!! The cracked eggs had leaked through the basket, through paperwork and photos underneath the basket and soaked into the wooden drawer. The stench was embedded into the wood. Tried bleach, sanding, febreeze, nothing worked, so I cut out the section that was stained. The stench finally dissipated after a few weeks.
We did a similar cutting-away of affected material vis-a-vis my response on a clam-pet outing disaster. The carpeting in my son's room at the time was a very, very shag 70s carpeting, and cleaning was hopeless. We cut out the affected area and slapped down an area rug, realizing that our kid was naughty enough to not have this be an isolated incident.
Kid is 27 now, lives away, and the room has Pergo. Maybe we still don't trust. <grin>
My then four-year old son was fascinated by the live clams I had for some Portiguese pork and clams for a dinner party. He somehow managed to liberate a few as "pets" and stored them in a "Barrel of Monkeys" toy container. This container went to live under an easy chair in his room. The liberation of the clams happened on New Year's Eve.
In April (gäh!), a heretofore unimagined stench rolled through the house. The young mister had been rearranging in his room and knocked over the long-forgotten pet clams, which had produced some sort of crust over a vile petrified clam liquid that had somehow gone up disturbed for four months (gäh!). It. Was. Awful.
Live *anything* was a hassle with that kid for awhile. He loved crayfish, but I had to watch him like a hawk during the prep.
ugh. I can only imagine.
I grew up in the countryside, with much poop, many slaughterings, and a lot of fermenting of things. I never smelled anything LIKE THAT. Truly awful. But the kid lived in a room that was slowly off-gassing clam-ick for awhile, and didn't seem to mind it. (?)
The thing is: that hassle of a kid grew up to be my favorite food-buddy ever. Just. So. Curious.
Anything deep fried. If we are craving something AND it is nice enough to set the fryer up outside, I will go to town and fry but never indoors anymore.
Homemade pasta. Too much work, too many failed attempts. The good fresh stuff at the grocery store is good enough for me.
Baking, especially bread. I spent the better part of the summer trying my hardest to produce the type of bread we like.
Homemade ice cream. The summer following the bread disappointment I bought an ice cream maker with grand ideas of delicious homemade ice cream. It was fine but after months of weekly experimentation, I decided the super premium stuff from the store was as good, cost less and less frustrating.
Schmaltz, manapuas/dim sum, and homemade butter chicken.
I'll just go and buys these.
after watching this week's Great British Baking Show, I'm putting that ridiculous Swedish Princess Cake and the Dobos Torte right at the top of the list of Dishes That Are Just Too Big a Pain to Ever Try.
Any baking recipe with yeast in the ingredient list
Any recipe with a very long ingredient list
Pie crust or puff pastry from scratch
I love to bake, though!
Well, I always make them because my kids love 'em but Yorkshire pudding. Easy to mix...but what a mess it makes of my oven...even with cookie sheets lining the bottom of it.
Donuts and croissants. I have tried making croissants at home after making them while working in a bakery-so much easier with a dough roller! I don't do anything deep fried, really. I can get good croissants and amazing donuts from nearby bakeries, that is fine for me. Plus, then I can eat only one and leave the scene, instead of having several dozen calling to me from the kitchen.
Cheese. I will leave that one to the pros. I dearly love cheese, but there are so many wonderful ones to buy that I've never felt the need to make my own.
cheese is a different category for me -- I like fiddling with things like that to get an appreciation for how they're made (I've made salt-fermented pickles, liqueurs, and love making bread, for example)-- but with a few notable exceptions, cheese takes such an investment upfront that I just can't afford to fiddle with something I'm not going to take on as a serious hobby. (I've yet to try ricotta or mozzarella, but those at least are fairly low-cost forays)
I like fiddling with croissants, but just rarely have the time to make them.
A non-crispy tender white egg with a nice runny yolk. Too much culinary skill involved. Basting an egg in the morning is only for chefs.
Even over easy / over light is a culinary masterpiece best left to the pro chefs.
Much easier to just over heat a pan with some oleo and just drop an egg. Much easier.
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