Marilyn Haggerty's amazing Olive Garden review and the subsequent viral shitstorm

I have a soft spot in my heart for Ruby Tuesday's because their first restaurant was in my hometown. Either it used to be better or I was a kid or both, but I really do think it used to be better. Pretty sure they still do the olde timey stuff on the walls.

I thought Friday's used to do this too...?

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, March 15, 2012 2:46 PM

Cracker Barrel, too, right? More rural/farm oriented stuff.

shameful admission: when I was younger, I thought that the name "Cracker Barrel" was a subversive inversion of the phrase "barrel full of monkeys"

ha!

i didn't know carl agatha was jenny. hi!

i'm pretty heartened to know other people approach food like i do, the cooking evangelists and their guilt trips can be overwhelming a lot of the time.

I defy anyone to be unable to make this amazing meal - http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/24/sausage-recipes-hugh-fearnley-whittingstall

right...this isn't about being stubborn but this is just outlining my reaction to that recipe, the bits i'd stumble over, and why there's no way i'm going to attempt it.

- i don't know how to peel parsnips. i mean, i know "how" to in a theoretical way but i don't know how to actually do it right, without making a hash of it and peeling off half the parsnip
- what is a "medium" onion? i don't know what a large or a small onion is. at this point i'm standing in front of the onions in the supermarket and i am paralysed by indecision
- what kind of sausages? there are many many many types of sausage in the supermarket. you need to tell me the EXACT PRODUCT TO BUY otherwise i just don't know. i hate ingredient shopping so so so fucking much
- "coarsely chopped flat leaf parsley" - is this a thing you can buy? pre-coarsely chopped? what is "flat leaf" parsley, is it different to normal parsley? how do you chop it coarsely as opposed to non-coarsely? basically how do i translate the stuff on the supermarket shelf into this ingredient? PANIC

- "quartering" a parsnip? see peeling it for how well quartering it is likely to go. i value my fingers
- i genuinely have no idea what "trimming" a "coarse, woody core" even means or how to do it
- i've tried to chop onions before. it didn't end well. HOW do you get the bits even remotely the same size/shape?
- i don't know what a roasting tin is or if i have one

- what happens when i roast these things for the specified length of time but it DOESN'T COME OUT RIGHT? so many recipes i try to follow but the food just doesn't cook like it says it will - like it's obviously not done yet or it's totally burnt. at which point i PANIC again (and often just halt the recipe completely because i'm too stressed)

second recipe falls at the "set aside to rest for two hours" bit. i don't have two hours, i want to eat NOW. i have never once in my life known what, or even whether, i want to eat two hours in advance.

third recipe...slicing potatoes ughhhhh. wtf is "sweating" an onion? how do i tell when an egg is "two thirds" set? what am i looking out for?

doesn't playing dumb get boring after a while

This is beautiful, lex

doesn't BEING dumb get boring after a while?

says the person 'confused by onions'

yeah lol at giving lex a hugh fearnley-whittingstall recipe as his first baby step, the guy's recipe for making tea is infamous, check this out. i swear to god this is real:

Now, to make my tea, I need two good-sized mugs. I boil the kettle. The hot water goes into one mug first, stays for a few seconds so the mug is heated, then goes into the second mug. The tea bag goes into the first, hot, mug, boiling water is poured in, to within a couple of millimetres of the top, and the two mugs, one containing brewing tea, and the other containing hot water, are left to stand. After about five minutes, the mug of brewed tea is placed in the sink, where some new hot water (freshly re-boiled) from the kettle, is sloshed into it, so it overflows by about half a mug. This is to stop the well-brewed tea being too strong. The full-to-overflowing mug is now tilted a little bit, so it spills out enough tea to allow room for some milk.

Remember the second mug, full of the hot (now not so hot, but still quite hot) water that was used to warm the first mug? That is now emptied. The tea bag is fished out from the first ‘brewing’ mug, and placed in the bottom of the empty ‘warm’ mug, where a small splash of milk is poured over it. The effect of the hot tea bag, and still-warm mug, is to take the chill off the milk – and impregnate it with a mild tea flavour. To encourage both these objectives, the mug is picked up and swirled, put down for a few seconds, picked up and swirled again, and left to stand for a short while longer. The tea-coloured, warm milk is now poured from tea-bag mug to brew mug, which is given a stir.

The resulting colour is observed. A little more milk may be necessary, in which case it will go via the still-warm tea bag mug, into the brew mug. When the colour is exactly right, I will stir in exactly one rounded teaspoonful of golden caster sugar. The tea, which at this point is still far too hot to drink, will now be left to stand for at least five minutes, before a sip is attempted.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2005/may/15/foodanddrink.features

lex, c'mon, if the meal isn't obviously done, continue cooking.

what if a bit of it is obviously not done but another bit of it is burnt? that always happens and recipes never tell you what to do at that point

the "burnt" bit usually doesn't matter

also that might be a hint that your oven is a little too hot and you should consider turning it down a few degrees from the temperature given in the recipe

chop off the done/overdone bit and keep cooking the rest. arguably what's necessary here is a book/article on how to save f'd up meals, which is like 80% of the real art of home cooking. i think good eats does a nice job with this stuff actually.

There are devices that can help with the intimidation factor for a cooking newb, such as a rice cooker or a George Foreman grill. With those two items it would be possible to make many variations on Chicken Breast w/Rice with very little chance of ruin.

All of the issues you raise are just you stressing yourself out for the sake of it. Grab whatever sausage catches your eye (I like Chorizo, or Hot Italian). Buy an onion - neither a tiny one nor a gigantic one. There'll be a bunch there - look at the options. Is there a regular sized one? Buy that! :)
I know not of these parsnips. Use a potato peeler, cut it in half, cut those pieces in half, boom, quartered.
Coarsely chopped means chop it up without too much fussing, whatever, if the pieces don't match it'll be okay. Ditto for the onions, you're not having the Queen nor Oprah over right? It's okay if some are a bit bigger.

Maybe your oven runs hot or cold judging by things being under/over done. Eyeball it. Peek at it five minutes before it should be done, leave it in if it isn't. Baking is a science, but cooking is like an orgy or some other, more appropriate metaphor.

many xps as I type slow I guess

Just saying. Maybe you weren't actually asking these questions. Thought it might help to get some advice from a hippie. It's alllll goood, man!

speaking as a guy who was nicknamed 'all thumbs' in one of the kitchens i worked in, its great to know that there's a lex out there to make me feel like jacques pepin

- i don't know how to peel parsnips. i mean, i know "how" to in a theoretical way but i don't know how to actually do it right, without making a hash of it and peeling off half the parsnip

use a peeler. get off all the darker skin until there's none left. it's ok if you take off a little too much, you'll still have some parsnip.

what is a "medium" onion? i don't know what a large or a small onion is. at this point i'm standing in front of the onions in the supermarket and i am paralysed by indecision

one that just looks sort of normal. not GIGANTIC and not TEENY.

- what kind of sausages? there are many many many types of sausage in the supermarket. you need to tell me the EXACT PRODUCT TO BUY otherwise i just don't know. i hate ingredient shopping so so so fucking much

it's up to you, any will work

"coarsely chopped flat leaf parsley" - is this a thing you can buy? pre-coarsely chopped? what is "flat leaf" parsley, is it different to normal parsley? how do you chop it coarsely as opposed to non-coarsely? basically how do i translate the stuff on the supermarket shelf into this ingredient? PANIC

there's 2 kinds of parsley, flat and curly. wtf the difference is i have no idea. coarsely chopped means chop it up and don't worry about the size of the pieces.

"quartering" a parsnip? see peeling it for how well quartering it is likely to go. i value my fingers

yeah, that's a little intimidating. cut it lengthwise, then cut the two long pieces in half.

i genuinely have no idea what "trimming" a "coarse, woody core" even means or how to do it

i have no idea wtf he is referring to here

- i've tried to chop onions before. it didn't end well. HOW do you get the bits even remotely the same size/shape?

they don't really have to be the same size and shape. just try to cut them sort of small i guess.

- i don't know what a roasting tin is or if i have one

something that's big enough to fit a chicken into that can go into the oven. google image search will help you here.

- what happens when i roast these things for the specified length of time but it DOESN'T COME OUT RIGHT? so many recipes i try to follow but the food just doesn't cook like it says it will - like it's obviously not done yet or it's totally burnt. at which point i PANIC again (and often just halt the recipe completely because i'm too stressed)

if you actually leave it in the oven for the time the recipe says, at the temperature the recipe says, it won't be burnt. if it's not cooked enough, put it in the oven for another 10 mins

I constantly have my phone in the kitchen while I cook so I can google terms. It's an iphone, so my new big excitement is 'Siri, how many ounces are in a cup?' and then she looks it up for me without me having to touch my phone too much with cooking fingers.

surprised no comments on H F-W's tea recipe, that shit is seriously the most epic thing i think i've ever read.

lex: "lol I'm so helpless!!!"
everyone else: oh don't worry I'm a good cook, let me tell you some stuff
lex: "lol I'm so helpless!!!"
everyone else: oh don't worry I'm a good cook, let me tell you some stuff

i tend to be terrified of not following recipes utterly slavishly and to the letter. i can't comprehend the "but that bit doesn't matter" argument because if the recipe doesn't matter i am even more adrift than before

and yeah it probably is stressing myself out for no reason but this is what happens every time! there's ALWAYS something that pushes my panic button, often something completely unforeseen that's not even part of the recipe. that is why i don't cook.

iatee can you fuck off?

little fucking cunt get the fuck out of my face

tip: put your iphone in a baggie if you want to look stuff up while cooking

I'm pretty sure if someone held a gun to your head and told you to caramelize an onion, you would 'rediscover' google.com

I don't know if I can explain this exactly, but when I quarter an apple or grapefruit, I cut off the inside bit of each resultant triangle to get rid of the core. I suspect this could be done with a quartered parsnip? Again, I am not even sure what a parsnip is.

Good tip, google! Err. google. SHIT. GOOLE! You are being difficult, fingers.

iatee: I am also a lex, for extra lex-on-lex-lols.

tip: put your iphone in a baggie if you want to look stuff up while cooking

then where do you put the weed?

yeah lex that's why i wrote about cooking being like learning a language. at some point, to succeed AT ALL, you have to be OK with making mistakes. when i was first learning french (like for real, not in school) i was paralyzed by getting things wrong, and i'd try to formulate the perfect sentence in my head before i said it, but of course the conversation had already moved on by then.

http://www.dreamstime.com/flat-parsley-thumb15552228.jpg

Flat (or Italian) parsley

this book shows you how to chop vegetables, lex

it even has step-by-step illustrations

i recommend picking up nigel slater's "appetite" as a good starter cookbook, his recipes have like five ingredients and three steps and he explains how to adjust if you can't do what he says

That tea recipe IS epic and confused and frustrated me. I kinda get where Lex is coming from now. Except I am okay with disregarding dude's instructions and waving my culinary freak flag.

DJP: the weed goes in the box in the living room! I bought the box from Rob Schneider.

i have sub-par kitchen skills and don't have an iphone, i just read that on some dickhead food blog at some point :)

happy to help tho

i'd love to have just a solid grasp of basic kitchen techniques instead of poring over a bunch of individual recipes -- seems like 'the system' expects you to go from the specific to the general over n100 years, i'd rather know the general

you should get that book i linked for lex then, it just goes technique-by-technique w/o recipes

btw to do a "perfect dice" on an onion:

1) turn the onion so it's standing straight up on its roots (the little hair-type things that hang from the bottom)

2) using a sharp knife, make parallel cuts in one direction, as wide as you want your dice to be. DO NOT GO ALL THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM OF THE ONION. i.e. do not slice up the onion, just make deep cuts that stop a little before you would chop off a slice

3) do the same thing in the perpendicular direction. when done, your onion should be sliced "in a grid", but still all one piece.

4) now turn the onion on its side and make parallel cuts, straight down and all the way through the onion.

you now have "perfect dice", i.e. pieces that are all the same size

yeah lex that's why i wrote about cooking being like learning a language. at some point, to succeed AT ALL, you have to be OK with making mistakes. when i was first learning french (like for real, not in school) i was paralyzed by getting things wrong, and i'd try to formulate the perfect sentence in my head before i said it, but of course the conversation had already moved on by then.

haha i was competent in french at school (got a at a-level, could just about hold a simple conversation then) but was so much better at reading and writing it than speaking or listening because i'd do the exact same thing. i'm fairly sure i could still read and write after a vocab brush-up, but the other two have rusted away so much. too bad for me they're the ones i'd actually need to communicate in france. i am paralysed by the idea of getting things wrong across basically everything i do! always have been! it's lucky there are things i can actually do.

languages is a good analogy though - look there are people who have such a natural, unbelievable flair for picking up languages, esp speaking. got a few friends like that, also my dad. then there are people like me, i was smart enough that i could understand the grammar and work out bits of vocab from etymological roots to become competent, but it never felt "natural" and it didn't really stick without practice. and then there are people who are absolutely hopeless and can't seem to progress to communicating intelligibly in a different language at all. you either have it or you don't.

also just like language, if you *have to do it*, you will be able to do it. any human can do it.

If dicing an onion is too intimidating, there's also this marvelous device called a food processor.

lex i imagine your biggest barrier to cooking success is 1) it's easier for you to get take-out and 2) you don't really feel the personal need to be a good cook

late great you forgot to tell lex to peel it! and HOW to peel it! (actually i would love to know a trick - any trick - for how to peel an onion without becoming enraged)

1. peel onion
2. don't get enraged

cut it in half, then peel the halves

lex i imagine your biggest barrier to cooking success is 1) it's easier for you to get take-out and 2) you don't really feel the personal need to be a good cook

this is true as well. i dislike it because it's time-consuming, boring, i'm very bad at it and i'm lazy.

throw onion out window. run screaming to nearest cafe.

you know i actually chop up onions *without* peeling them and then just pick the skins out of the pile of chopped onion

then again i almost never do a perfect dice, usually i chop onion into big chunks

i think the easiest way to peel an onion is just to cut off one of the end opposite the root and then just peel it like a banana. never seem to have too much trouble w/ that. i usually take off the outer layer of onion too since it has a different flavor from the rest of the onion.

i dont know why lex is wasting his time insisting on his helplessness here, or why other people are wasting their time attempting to help someone who really doesnt care, but it makes for oddly fascinating reading

you know i actually chop up onions *without* peeling them and then just pick the skins out of the pile of chopped onion

then again i almost never do a perfect dice, usually i chop onion into big chunks

I'm jealous of other people's ability to chop onions; this is exactly what I do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwGBt3V0yvc

here u go... mates

I kind of don't see the point of a perfect dice tbh; I just chop and chop and chop until the largest pieces are small enough for me