Forget Serious: Let’s (not) cook!

This image is nowhere near close to the mess I created today!

To put this in perspective, I have a husband who reminds me of my mother, pick up a cooking spoon and he will be hovering. Only he’s worse, he once told me the right way to cut a tomato for cooking and was upset by the shape of my mushrooms. I crushed a tomato, which made him a very lucky man!

This was more recently, but many years ago I took off my apron, exited the kitchen, and left him to create.

Sadly he did something to his leg a few weeks ago, and that means I have had to take a lot of responsibility in the kitchen for slicing things, boiling things, and not burning things. I wasn’t doing too bad until today.

Slow is best

In my ‘wisdom’ I decided to buy a slow cooker. My Frister and her hubby cook joints in their slow cooker and it works very well. So I went to the supermarket three weeks ago and bought a piece of gammon.

The first issue is that it has to be on about 6 hours to cook meat properly, and we tend to be out and about at weekends. Until it’s tested I didn’t want to leave it alone, I prefer to know things work.

I looked at the gammon today and it has to be eaten by next Tuesday. I won’t be able to burn it this weekend, I can’t do it Monday, and Tuesday I may be out, so today it was.

I entered the kitchen full of enthusiasm. Stuck a small can of coke in the slow cooker, switched it to high, dropped the gammon in, put the lid on, then thought “I wonder if you should warm it up first?” So I went up to get the instruction manual and that’s when the wheels came off!

A step-by-step crisis

• Remove gammon from pot, throw away coca cola, wash pot. So far so good.
• Gammon should be placed in water and brought to the boil first. Place gammon in slow cooker pot, switch on. Realise 5 minutes later nothing is happening. Hob is broken! Minor panic.
• Is it me or had I read that this pot can’t be used on an induction hob? Who makes something that doesn’t work on one of the most popular hobs anymore? Place unknown person on hit list! (Don’t worry, I lose the list regularly, one day I will find a huge list of names of unknown persons and throw it away because I don’t know why I have it.)
• Find large saucepan, just big enough to take gammon, fill with water, pop lid on, bring it to the boil. Check!
• Realise that you’re so out of touch with cooking that you’ve forgotten that things boil over. Hear the sound of external sizzling and realise that the gammon is boiling over…the hob, the worktop, and the floor. Turn it off. Flat hobs? Pretty but useless.
• Clean kitchen, place pot back on halogen hob for a moment. Remember that Halogen hobs stay hot for rather a long time, hear sizzling, lift pot. Clean kitchen.
• Warm up useless slow-cooker pot, put another can of coke in it, place gammon in, place lid on top. That wasn’t too hard.
• Look at drying up cloth to realise that somehow when washing the pan to put the gammon in you’ve covered it in tomato sauce, which may have come from the frying pan you also just washed but it looks clean, however, there is no tomato sauce in sight. Wash cloth by hand to stop it staining.
• Go upstairs, shaking slightly, request coffee and something for your nerves, but too early for alcohol. Sit down to do some work, only to realise that you don’t own a meat thermometer so won’t know that the gammon is safe to eat.
• Create shopping list: meat thermometer, calming products, small cup to disguise alcohol as my mugs are big enough to flatten a regiment if they were full of whisky! It’s how I make myself drink more coffee and other non-alcoholic products, outsized mugs. Frankly I felt like an outsized, out of depth, mug, in that kitchen!
• Gammon will now be transferred to oven to complete the cooking process, a meat thermometer will be purchased, put in a safe place, then promptly lost. I will start using the cookery book I bought rather than leaving it on a bookshelf to look pretty. Out of sight is truly out of mind if it’s not a novel!

Sigh!

When I think about the meals I used to cook, the cakes I made, the people I entertained, it’s really upsetting that a mere 30 years ago I was a kitchen wizard, now I’m more of a House Elf!

A rather frazzled but not singed (yet)

Deb xx

P.S. I hope the people who told me that gammon in coke is nice weren’t kidding. I have a useless cooking pot and I’m not afraid to use it!

P.P.S. Okay it’s not useless, it just doesn’t do exactly what I want and I didn’t know there were things that couldn’t be used on hobs that have been around for at least a decade.

P.P.P.S. I want my gas cooker back! We understood each other. You turned the hob down and the effect was instant. The buttons were well away from your hands. You didn’t have to reach next to the pot and get splashed with boiling water to turn down the heat, with no effect whatsoever! Whoever thought this was a good idea?

P.P.P.P.S. Thank goodness someone else cooks my chocolate!