.... cooking requires patience

Is it any wonder I dislike it so much when it wastes so much time. You can't just put it on to cook and leave it, you have to stand there and watch the damn thing. Get distracted for a minute or leave the kitchen and it boils over or burns, so you have to stand there, with nothing to do, waiting for it to cook, which of course it doesn't, not whilst you are watching it. It waits for you to suddenly remember that there is something quick you can do whilst it cooks, before it decides that it really can't take another moment in the oven or on the hob and commits gastronomic suicide in the most sticky, burnt on, never coming off the pan, way imaginable.

A lot of this drama may well be because of the electric cooker we have at the moment, and in a gentle aside to this rant I would tender my advice to anyone thinking of buying a new cooker: NEVER, EVER, EVER BUY AN ELECTRIC OVEN AND HOB. There is no control, none at all, it is either on or off, there is no gentle simmer, no warm through, no rolling boil or slow cook, it is either cold or full on. But stuck as we are with an electric cooker in a rented flat I am doing my best to appease the gods of edible cuisine and suffer the cookers little foibles with good humour but I find that it just confirms my long held conviction that patience and I have little in common.

There is a Burnt Food Museum online but they 'cater' for actual food disasters and accidents, whereas I tend to know that my cooking will end up cremated if I leave it to it's own devices - I just can't bring myself to stand there and supervise it.

I've tried taking a book into the kitchen and reading whilst stuff cooks, resulting in stick pages and the realisation that 'just one more page' often means 'scrape the burnt bits off and no one will ever notice'. I've tried taking an interest in the whole process, chopping, blending and stirring stuff to occupy the time but there is always that period when it is in the oven or on the hob and has to cook for 20 minutes or so. So there you stand, you have done the washing up, the kitchen is clean and tidy (well it is if you are me) and there is nothing for you to do but wait. So you think to yourself 'I'll just go and finish that drawing, that piece of sewing, that bit of writing' or you remember something that you wanted to look up or look for and off you go, leaving the food to get it's revenge on you for leaving it by becoming the culinary equivalent of a brick. Oh you can spend your time rushing from kitchen to drawing, from kitchen to computer but it knows when to pounce and will suddenly become beyond redemption the minute you take your eyes off it.

So what to do? Well it is no good buying ready meals and putting them in hoping they will just get on with, ready meals are what I'm talking about here. You think you have time to do something whilst they cook but no, time saving doesn't mean you have time for other things whilst they cook, time saving simply means you don't have to prepare them. Whatever you do, spend hours preparing food or simply putting something in the oven, it is the cooking time that drives me up the wall, waiting for it to cook is just dead time, either you are standing over it thinking about all the other things you could be doing or you go off to do them but have to keep coming back every few minutes to check that the kitchen hasn't turned into Dante's Inferno. Either way it winds me up, makes me agitated and resentful.

The answer? There is no answer. Unless I could afford a full time cook to do it for me, it looks as if I shall have to carry on waging war against this pointless pastime. Trying to remain calm and patient would help and I do try but I have not succeed yet. Maybe one day I will get to like cooking, but then one day I might find I like eating more than just pasta, buns and chocolate - but I doubt it!