Kitchen Tip (+ a Little Kitchen Wisdom) At a recent Cooking Get Together we were preparing to saute onions for a healthy risotto. As always, the recipe said, “heat oil until hot but not smoking.” That directive led one of the participants to ask: Q. When heating oil to saute, do you heat the pan … Read more
Maybe cooking was never meant to be an exact science, subject to one-dimensional assessment on a good/bad scale. Taking this perspective eliminates the pressure to achieve absolute “rightness” in the kitchen, replacing it with a no-pressure opportunity to just make things better.
Yesterday’s post talked about relaxing our expectations. That can be hard to do on a jam-packed schedule. One thing that can help: Limiting our exposure to things that fan the flames of panic. Seeing a whole pile of recipes clipped from the newspaper, for example, . . .
How can we avoid the pitfalls of perfectionism, complexity and audience intolerance at cooking time? Relaxing expectations is a good first step.
There’s good evidence that the food world is spiraling into the stratosphere of perfectionism and complexity: Consider the sheer amount of cooking information we’re exposed to: dozens of food shows and entire food networks, hundreds of internet sites devoted to cooking and recipes, . . .
Do you have any cooking fears that are keeping you from the pleasures and riches of the kitchen? While lack of knowledge and food costs are some obvious culprits that fuel our cooking fears, this article explores whether the Olympics have given rise to some more fundamental attitudes that are unnerving us in the kitchen.