Friday, March 16, 2007

Kitchen things that really annoy me

  • Can openers. I know this is because I am left-handed, and therefore to open a can, I need to use the stupid opener backwards. Which is not easy. All you righties, you go ahead and try it. And even though I have had 20-odd years of practice, I still hate having to turn the opener around and use it in a totally unnatural way. It really sucks, and it takes much longer than for a right-hander, and yes, I have tried left-handed can openers and they never work: very unreliable.
  • Packet cake mixes. My mother taught me never to use a packet cake mix, and never to wear white shoes after dark. It's my kitchen snobbery that keeps me from using packet cakes... not sure why I obey about the shoes though.
  • Recipes off the back of packets. They're always faintly suspicious. Why do they need to give away a recipe with a packet of sugar? Surely, if you are buying sugar, you already have a purpose in mind?
  • Stock cubes. Nothing to do with kitchen snobbery, although wouldn't it be nice to have a freezer full of homemade organic stock? It's more that they are annoyingly compact and you can't easily use half. I much prefer the powder. The best chicken stock I've found is Knorr Chicken Powder. It tastes really good, unlike the Maggi version, and comes with its own cute little scoop.
  • Cleaning the fridge. Aaarrrgh.
  • The fridge /pantry honey dilemma. Keep it in the fridge: it goes hard and annoyingly un-drizzlable. Keep it in the pantry: ants get it. Someone told me to wrap it in a plastic bag in the pantry, to annoy the ants. Might try that.

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