Kitchen Peeves

I do love a kitchen. And if you’re reading this blog, I’m assuming you like a kitchen too. The room where everything happens. Where all the cooking goes on. The scene of a hundred smiles, occasional tears, and a fair few cracked eggs gone rogue over the counter.

I loved the kitchen when I was growing up too. I’d tail my mum like a duckling, hand clasped tight around her apron strings, eyes wide as buttons as she drew out a steaming tray of her famous fudgy brownies, or helping her flip my favourite lamb chops on our 1970s’ electric fryer.

Nowadays, it’s my own boys who love the kitchen. And it’s not them making a mess with those rogue eggs: they can crack them cleaner and truer than I. My youngest scrambles, my oldest poaches, and it makes me proud.

Ah, the kitchen. Special space, precious memories, the beating heart of the home. And, just sometimes, I really hate it…

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There, I’ve said it. Kitchen gods strike me down. Throw me out of the guild. Yes, there are times when the kitchen does my head in like nowhere else on earth.

I’d go as far to say that 90% of the swear words that spill out of my mouth spill out in this one single room – sometimes drowned out by the drone of a microwave or whir of a blender, or sometimes not, as testified by a swift shout from upstairs by my 12-year old: “Dad, what did you just say…?”

Admittedly these are relatively fleeting moments – exceptions to the rule, minor tiffs in an otherwise affectionate relationship. And when they occur, it’s basically the same buttons of mine that are being pressed, i.e. situations that rub against (what I’ve ended up calling) my “Efficiency Drive”.

The What What? – you may well ask, and yes, somewhat cringely, I’d come up with this term myself, just for my own consumption. (You do things like that, right?…) Maybe there’s some official psychological term too, I don’t know.

Certainly, efficiency wasn’t part of my make-up when growing up. Perhaps it’s just been cultivated in adulthood, a necessary adaptation to modern life. Or maybe it’s just what eventually happens when working under the relentless pressures of the NHS, or the daily negotiation of its convoluted electronic records systems.

It’s not even that I am efficient; it’s just about the (often fruitless) drive to be so. If I was to describe it in a nutshell, it’d be like playing Tetris, and always angling for a run where everything fits harmoniously, with the minimum of fuss or extraneous steps. And if I was planning some time out in the city, aligning all my stops in an efficient way that minimises unnecessary zigzagging.

Conversely, anything which disrupts this… DOES MY HEAD IN. Yes, quite the polar opposite of my rather dippy, laid-back, younger self, backpacking about Oaxaca or Kerala with a dog-eared Lonely Planet or Kerouac in tow, with nary a care in the world, following whatever road the universe takes me on. For this is what I have become.

So to the kitchen, arguably the room with the greatest concentration of manual jobs and tasks and motion per square metre:

Chopping, slicing, grating, peeling,
frying, boiling, roasting, steaming,
spreading, stirring, toasting, kneading,
rinsing, stacking, soaking, cleaning…

One quantum of labour following the next, and the next, and the next. Often I try to multitask and have several endeavours on the boil, sometimes quite literally, drawing on years of muscle memory and the repetitive treading of the same invisible pathways across the kitchen floor. As a one-person endeavour to encapsulate several streams of Toyota-style lean management, it’s no wonder my prefrontal cortex strains at the seams trying to orchestrate this dance, one that would have been totally alien to our early human ancestors and, at least in my case, that evolution is still some way off in perfecting.

It all takes effort. Lots of effort. After all, the universe is grinding inexorably towards chaos and disorder – it’s written there in the Second Law of Thermodynamics – so of course it’s going to be a bit of a faff to turn a few basic ingredients into dishes with structure and form and (if the stars align) maybe even some loveliness.

So when things go awry, which it often does, I can go from a steady state of Zen to sweary toddler tantrum faster than you can say ‘Gordon F**king Ramsay!’ I am ashamed by this. But still, in a process of catharsis, I feel compelled to vent my top kitchen peeves:

“Where the f*** are the oven gloves?…”

Now one thing about the kitchen is that, generally, it is.. a room. It has walls, and a floor, and a ceiling. It is a finite space, and in it, there is stuff.

And yet, some of that stuff, on a mystifyingly regular basis, seems to defy these basic physics and go completely AWOL. I can only assume that cracks must periodically appear in the space-time continuum, portals for such items to slip into whenever the whim arises.

Of course, only certain appliances and utensils possess such a singular magical quality, and maybe it’s different in different kitchens, but in ours it’s always: the vegetable peeler, the lid from the salad-spinner, and most perplexing of all given its unwieldy size, a tattered pair of double oven-gloves.

Whichever item it is, at the very point when I need it the most (of course), I find myself instead scouring the kitchen, scratching my head at its sudden disappearance. All the whilst, it is likely careering across far-flung frozen galaxies, through the deepest recesses of the cosmos, before returning a few moments later, dappled with a little stardust, atop my stove or kitchen counter or, if I’m especially scatterbrained, inside the microwave.

Usually though it’s right in front of my nose, hiding in plain sight, like the world’s crappest chameleon.

“Now there’s fish-finger crumbs all over the freezer drawer!…”

I’ve purposely worded this next kitchen peeve in the style of an irate Daily Mail headline, mainly to highlight that such peeves don’t always come in ones, but often occur in a succession of escalating irritations, each one paving the way for the next, and each a paranoid over-reaction, as if the universe is a nefarious conspirator trying to undermine my rights to own aspirational kitchen gadgets.

Take fish fingers, for example. Now, I love fish fingers. I’ve made them a thousand times. Whether as fish-finger sandwiches, or perhaps that fish-finger bhorta recipe on Nigella’s website, or the cracking Japanese curry fish-fingers in Ruby Tandoh’s Cook As You Are.

Yet, not only do I have to negotiate Houdini-esque disappearing oven-gloves, but then there’s also the surprisingly onerous mission to extract fish fingers from the freezer. In particular, I still routinely fall into the rookie error of tilting the carton the wrong way up, causing crumbs to tumble out like a fleeing gang of orange-jumpsuited convicts, finding their way into the freezer’s iciest corners and vertices, where they remain until… well, I’d better not say. For I can guarantee there’s probably some still there now. Like I’m sure you have too.

The Chopping Board conundrum

One kitchen scenario that continually tests my Efficiency Drive is choosing between the large or small chopping board. It is a complex calculation: although the large one can accommodate pretty much any amount of chopping, counting against it is the greater time, effort and resources required to clean it, not to mention risk of a minor wrist injury as you manoeuvre this hulking great slab to the sink. And even if you’ve managed to spare rupturing a tendon, then there’s always the risk of it abruptly toppling over like a gigantic domino, buckaroo-ing the drying rack and all its contents emphatically into the sink.

Cue the small chopping board – easier to wield, seamless to store, and at first sight, a more benign risk/benefit ratio. Just don’t try chopping quantities above its station, for that road leads to nothing but misery.

It is a calculation I’ve finally honed over the years, and have developed a sure-fire system, such as beetroot must only be chopped on the small, and herbs on the large. But every now and then, something falls through my mental net, and a recurring one is… a small onion. Or even a shallot.

It’s just a little vegetable… – I usually think to myself, lulled by its innocuous appearance. I dismiss it at my peril however, forgetting all my previous traumatic attempts of onion-chopping on a board that’s slightly too small. For no matter how assiduously I try to keep the alium in the centre of the board, some slices will invariably fly off.

Now those on the periphery of the board, I can gently coax back to the centre, like a shepherd might with an errant sheep. But those that make it over the border, leaping off the counter like a gung-ho lemming, I then have to calculate whether to interrupt the chopping (anathema to my Efficiency Drive), or continue regardless and endure the occasional, deeply troubling, slice of onion underfoot.

Either way, when it comes to picking up those curved slippery slivers from off the floor, it’s never an easy feat, and I usually only succeed in chasing it around, like a cat with an unravelling ball of wool, leaving a faintly glistening trail of onion juice as I go.

The Aerodynamics of Garlic Skins

On the topic of annoying alliums and vexatious chopping boards – don’t get me started on garlic skins!

Garlic is probably my most used ingredient in my kitchen, and over the years, I consider I’ve attained some mastery in the art of slicing, grating, chopping or pounding those cloves to a slushy pulp. It’s the small matter of skin disposal that gets me every time.

Usually, as there’d be a mound of violet-tinged skins, I’d delicately convey the skins on the (small) chopping board, and then scrape them into the bin. Now if a food item can willfully resist such an endeavour, then garlic skin is it. It is like, at the very point when you’re about to tip them out, they suddenly magically awaken from a thousand years’ slumber, in realisation of their imminent fate of journeying into Wandsworth’s refuse system.

As the knife scrapes across the wooden surface, the skins gather conspiratorially. And then, just as they reach the edge, something remarkable occurs. Almost as one, they leap into the air, and sail on whatever warm currents are rising up from the festering bin waste below, a collective defiant middle-finger at my vain attempts to eliminate them.

When eventually they parachute down to earth, they land on the kitchen tiles, as still and innocent as winter snowflakes, before joining up with whatever rogue band of onion allies that happen to be around.

To this list, I can add many more – trying to evade the evil serrated lid on a red-kidney bean tin, the apocalyptic bubbling eruption of rice pudding all over the stove, and a whole host of other things that provoke me into an indignant tirade. But now I am done; my kitchen foibles are laid bare.

I admit there is a certain degree of privilege wrapped up in this. And as I’ve said, these moments of exasperation are just the exception: the kitchen is a room I’ve become so very fond of, a place of calm after an intense day in the clinic, a space to bond with my boys over their burgeoning love of cooking.

And after all this, I’m now going to retire to make a nice cup of tea. Now, just where did I put that teaspoon?…

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What are your most annoying kitchen peeves? Do tell, I’d love to know!.. In the meantime, for a more uplifting kitchen experience, I can highly recommend the ‘Kitchens’ series from the wonderful Lecker, produced and hosted by Lucy Dearlove, comprising both a podcast and zine – the latter includes a little piece I wrote on growing up in a Jewish kitchen. A shout-out too for the exceptional, brilliantly-written Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson – where the kitchen is less for peeves, and more for existential pleasure, revelation and self-expression. Finally, for more reflections on kitchen spaces, feel free to check out my post, Kitchen Revolutions.