Innocuous things that make you irrationally angry (a list thread)

Ohhhhhh substitution reviews make me CRAZYPANTS. If it's just one or two ingredients fine, but I've seen ones where they replace everything and give it 5 stars and its like, you just gave Your own recipe 5 stars because what you made is not THIS RECIPE. I make a really good braised pork ziti I got off epicurious.com and there's a review where the chick replaced the pork with GROUND SIRLOIN and basically made a pasta and meat sauce instead of a slow braised meat dish, Aggggghh!!!!

Exactly!!! Uggghhhh. I have also seen comments where p much everything bar the tomato sauce or whatever was replaced completely, I mean wtf!?

JBR OTM also :)

That all said, I'm all for experimenting with recipes/changing out things but you're making a new dish when you do, damn yer eyes.

why would you *look up* a pasta & meat sauce recipe?

a. brown some meat (add veg if you're going the full bolognese route)
b. add to sauce
c. cook pasta
d. mix, eat

My IA thing is if you're going to review a recipe, review the recipe as it's written. If it needs substitutions, say that. But all these self-indulgent assholes just use it as a conversation piece to talk about their OCD need to not cook anything remotely similar to the recipe, it drives me crazy.

argh people referring to a 'cheeky pint' or a 'sneaky cocktail'. You're 30 years old, you can drink alcohol if you want without it being all "naughty" ffs

Yeah this is shit, and it's spreading.

The tea thing I sort of see but think cheese or cake are the same in the UK. I hate people who talk about their love for cheese like they're talking about The Goonies.

why would you *look up* a pasta & meat sauce recipe?

if i was to make pasta and meat sauce i'd have to look up a recipe?

a) i don't know what "browning" meat means. where in the oven would you do this? and how long for? i need that in exact minutes otherwise i have no idea when it's done
b) where has this sauce magically sprung from?

i can do c) and d) and really this is why i just prefer to shove pesto on the pasta and fuck making a sauce

the veg would obviously make things more complicated. what veg? how much of it? when do you add it? again, how long?

Browning, there's a clue in the title of that technique...

In fairness tho sometime even for simple recipes it's good to look up a method, some chefs have good or clever ways of improving something ostensibly basic.

paint it brown?

do i put it under the grill or in the oven or in a frying pan or in a pot or what?

if the recipe contains a hard-to-buy ingredient in a minor role and you substituted it for something easier to buy and it worked out fine, that is useful to know, because my local shop is probably not going to have the former ingredient

if, on the other hand, you substituted out 6 major ingredients just because you could, or you've come onto a recipe with the title "slow-cooked pork with fennel" to go "this was nice but I don't have a slow cooker and I don't like fennel and my husband doesn't eat pork so I ate something completely different containing none of the keywords that made you, the reader, follow this link in the first place" then get off my recipe page

though I am terrible at following recipes, I always end up looking at about 5 recipes for the same thing online and trying to average them out and improvise a bit, and I am not a good enough cook to improvise, why can't I just learn to follow 1 set of instructions

(ia at self for terribleness at cooking)

Lex, in a pot or pan. Meat turns brown as it's cooked...you may have noticed this colour difference when eating meat, it's a diff colour to when it's raw, for example in the supermarket. That meat is raw. But if you bought a burger in a restaurant that meat would not be pink as it's been "cooked".

r you've come onto a recipe with the title "slow-cooked pork with fennel" to go "this was nice but I don't have a slow cooker and I don't like fennel and my husband doesn't eat pork so I ate something completely different containing none of the keywords that made you, the reader, follow this link in the first place"

Yeah this is what I meant, its a different dish if you do that! I mean, kudos for yr flexibility but dont review a recipe (esp by saying 'it sucked until I changed everything') that way arrrgh.

lol @ ronan's explanation.

Look I understand some people just Do Not Get cooking, but it baffles me that single ppl who have to manage alone dont, how do you eat!?

yes but there are many ways of cooking meat ronan, i was asking which one. "browning" tells me nothing.

not that i can do any of those ways but nm

I know the lex hates attempts to analyse this but I'm curious about ready meals, do you use oven ones? Cooking a piece of chicken or something in an oven would be exactly the same surely? also all meat does come with cooking instructions and times, if you buy at a supermarket rather than a butchers.

xpost fair enough, there's always google I guess.

yes but i don't eat that many ready meals. new covent garden soups and their ilk, mostly.

wouldn't know where to start cooking just a lump of meat tbh, also then you have to think about sauces and other things as well and it's just too much hassle.

You really dont, tbh. Buy a bag of readymade salad from tesco and a steak. Fry the steak 3-4 mins each side in a frypan, plonk it on a plate, salt and pepper it, chuck some dressing from a bottle onto the salad, mix, put on plate, eat. :)

Mind you cooking is my equivalent of other ppl going "oh really, Reason is o easy to use I write songs every day" and me wanting to kill them so I get why its not everyone's bag.

that does actually sound nice and simple and not like "cooking" at all.

though actually, another thing I like about ready meals is how idiot proof they are - I mean, I seem to always manage to either burn or undercook them anyway, so the thought of dealing with actual food really does scare me a bit.

I mean I regularly fuck up things like toast and boiled eggs and even sodding crackers and cheese the other day, you really cannot underestimate how awful I am in the kitchen.

toast = everyone fucks this up now and then!
boiled eggs = i am an excellent cook but the combination of precision and nothing to do for quite a long time after the first bit means i have exploded many eggs and ruined several pans while surfing the internet; eggs are NOT the easiest things really
crackers and cheese = haha ok clue: DON'T TRY AND COOK THESE

i think a handy list of meats/fish you can fry v.quickly would be prob a boon to you

Good boiled or fried eggs are actually relatively tricky. I hate frying eggs. I was going to suggest steak earlier. You don't have to fear it being uncooked at all really. Just let your pan get incredibly hot first.

i have a bit of a fear of frying too. don't like the idea of spitting oil and the washing up is always worse afterwards. really, all i'm ever prepared to do is shove a thing in the oven and wait until it's done, end, no extra sauces or accompaniments or hassle.

back to IA-making:
ppl who own or deploy or otherwise approve and encourage UMBRELLAS it is the wheelie-suitcase of the sky plus WITH SPIKED BARBS TO TAKE YOUR EYE OUT -- it is only water, you won't dissolve you nesh feebs

(exception: used upside down to cross unexpected floodwaters like pooh bear and moses)

xp A non-stick pan and spray-oil should make things easier.

Mark S, do you not do much walking? People don't melt, but we do get soaked and then have to sit in soggy clothes once we reach our destination. Not to mention the ruined hair and the soaked phone in our pockets. And washed away make-up.

Crikey--I was off sick one day last week, and so put 7 hrs sick leave on my time sheet, leaving the other .6 hrs as flexi (since I had hours up). this seems to have been the end of the world as far as admin is concerned--lots of back-and-forth emailing, people explaining things to me in slow, patronising voices--even after I quickly folded and said for them to do it their way. Leave me be!

LOL that gives me horrible DFAT flashbacks, that does :) Oh my god, the red tape pedantics.

Yesterday, I saw a guy on a bus with a bag of comics...he proceeded to read one by handling the comic as if it was a common newspaper...bending the spine, holding it, eating chocolate and leaving creases!! I had to divert my eyes from such savagery :(

And I expect he threw it away afterwards. It's a comic!

It's an iconic art form!

So's a postcard with the Mona Lisa on it but that doesn't make it valuable per se! Once something's mass marketed media, the intangible genius (or whatever) of the content remains holy but the hundreds of thousands of disposable bits of paper they're printed on have effectively no value.

I guess I can expand on this by saying that I can't bear it when people are incredibly precious with books, especially paperbacks. Break the spine, fold over the pages, spill your lunch on them - I actually prefer the look of a well-worn book that's obviously been appreciated than a sterile new one that has never shared its bounty.

I loaned a brand new copy of a favourite book to a friend, she returned it a month later with a "Wow, that was great, oh no but I've had it in my handbag and now it's all battered and spine broken sorry". No, no, it's fine! Now it looks like a book I have loved and read plenty times, which I have! (She didn't quite believe me, but it was true)

Break the spine, fold over the pages, spill your lunch on them - I actually prefer the look of a well-worn book that's obviously been appreciated than a sterile new one that has never shared its bounty.

yes! as long as all the pages are there, not falling out and the words are readable who honestly cares what a book looks like or what state it's in?

savages

nah, pristine paperbacks are pretty suspicious imo. obviously take better care of beautiful hardbacks but even there there's degrees.

savages

NEVER LET A PAPERBACK GO THROUGH THE WASHING MACHINE

But mark s, how do you get the grass stains out of your football kit without using Sylvia Plath's Ariel?

use George Non-bio obv

Oh, paperbacks should be a bit battered, but principles of rockism should be applied to comics.

I dunno, I'm with Lester Bangs on this specific one: "My (mono) copy of "White Light White Heat" is well worn because I HAVE PLAYED IT SOOO MUCH!!!! (oh, Ok, it's second-hand really)...."

i wipe my ass with the mona lisa. on the bus, too.

Performance art?

more like self-publishing.

Here's something: That thing waiters are trained to do in restaurants where about 2 mins into your meal, no matter what, they interrupt the flow of any conversation to ask if everything's alright with your meal. Generally they won't leave until they've received a satisfactory answer. Very annoying, because much of the time you've barely tasted it yet.