 |
| How did mum make it look so easy? |
1. First take out the cookbook someone bought for you as a Christmas present many years ago. You know, the one you circled everything you wanted to make, but have never in the five years of owning it have got round to doing.
2. Check the fridge and cupboards to see if you have all the ingredients.
3. After discovering several of the ingredients are out of date, smell them. If you can last five seconds without screwing your face up into a ball, they're still good. If not, grab anything from the cupboard that looks remotely similar and use it in their place. No-one will ever know.
4. Start by dicing an onion and sautéing until golden brown. Every good recipe starts by sautéing some onions. Even if you are making a Victoria sponge, it will still have onions. It adds to the flavour, apparently.
5. Once the onions are golden brown, weigh out all your ingredients to the nearest milligram, and place them all in tiny little bowls like they do in Master Chef because it makes you feel like a real chef.
6. Once everything is weighed, add each ingredient one by one. The first, you'll accidentally spill all over the counter instead of getting it into the saucepan. Grab extra of this ingredient. Don't bother weighing, just pour more in bit by bit till you think you have enough. Still not enough. Just a tad more. Oh shit, too much. TOO MUCH.
7. Panic and return to the fridge. Get extra of every other ingredient to make sure your mix is still all in proportions. Add as required. At this point, there will probably be flour everywhere.
8. Let your dish simmer for fifteen minutes. Forget to set the timer on the cooker and to look at the time.
9. Time to make the sauce. Refer back to the cookbook for all the ingredients you forgot to check you had.
10. Discover that one of the vital ingredients you need you apparently don't have. But you swear you did? You remember buying it! Oh, wait... yeah, that's right. You used it to make an omelette last Tuesday. Buggar it.
11. Glance at your watch to see if you have enough time to dash to the Co-op and back before the fifteen minutes are up.
12. Wait. What fifteen minutes? How long has your dish been simmering? You forgot to set the timer didn't you, you absolute moron. Okay, well it took roughly 4 minutes to check your fridge and snapchat a picture to your friends ('LOOK AT ME COOKING, TROLOLOL'), so you have..... let's say, ten minutes left? Plenty of time. Turn the hob to low heat immediately, and make a mad dash for the door.
13. Once you've returned, getting stuck at the self-service machines for several minutes (" MY ITEMS ARE IN THE BAGGING AREA! WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?") you'll find your dish to be bubbling over the edge of the pan. Take a minute to shout at the nearest available person for not watching your food like you asked. Feel free to use any of the following words too to help relieve stress: 'knob', 'codswallop', 'flipping', 'shitbuggar'.
14. Proceed to make the sauce. Check the cookbook at the measurements you'll need, before deciding that actually, you can't be bothered to weight them out. The scales are dirty anyway. Just bung it all in. It can't go much worse, right? ...Right?!
15. Turn the hob off. Find an oven-proof dish and layer it with a sheet of greaseproof paper. Pour in the mix as directed by the cookbook. It doesn't go in the dish, but instead dribbles all down the side of the saucepan and onto the floor. Don't worry, it happens to the best of us. Just try to clean it up quickly before your cat/dog/children/husband starts licking it off the floor.
16. Open the oven door and put the dish on the middle tray, placing a baking tray on the shelf below to catch any spillages. Close the door. Swear very loud when you realise you never turned the oven on (see list of words above for suggestions).
17. Turn it on with the dish still inside, adding an extra ten minutes to the cooking time to rectify this little problem.
18. After forty-five minutes, and having a bowl of cereal because you were too hungry to wait, take the dish out of the oven, where it should be crisp and golden brown. Yours will be crunchy, and more of a golden black.
19. Place it on the side and allow it to cool for ten minutes. Check back after just 3 minutes and burn the inside of your mouth when you try some.
20. Take a knife and try to slice off the burnt bits. Insist to everyone it'll be ' just fine' underneath.
21. You'll discover that it is in fact not fine underneath. Proceed to blame the oven. ("It circulates the hot air wrong!", "The timer is buggered!")
22. Scrape the contents of the dish into the bin and reach for the nearest take away menu.
23. Wash up everything immediately so no one will ever find out about this little catastrophe.
24. Repeat process in one week’s time when you decide this all happened because you were, obviously, just having an 'off day'.
25. Repeat the 24 steps above. You'll discover you weren't having an off day. You’re just a shit cook.
0 comments:
Post a Comment