[ul]You don’t “use *these *towels”? Sorry, how was I to know? I typically keep my kitchen towels in the kitchen; where do you keep yours?[/ul]
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[li]A steak knife isn’t really an all-purpose knife. Do you have any other knives? No, plastic silverware isn’t what I’m looking for.[/li][/ul]
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[li]Yes, your oven can safely go up to 500°. No, it will not burn your house down.[/li][/ul]
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[li]Yes, the counter is the little messy. Garlic and onion skins, bits of flower? Uh-huh. Like I said, I will gladly clean up when I’m done. Relax, I don’t need to stop to wipe up every speck as I cook.[/li][/ul]
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[li]They’re called shallots/leeks/etc./fill in the blank Yes, I know you’ve never bought them. I was happy to bring them over. No, you’ll like them. You like onions/comparable ingredients/etc? You’ll like these. Promise. I got them at Kroger. It is not the height of exoticism.[/li][/ul]
My daughter’s house at Thanksgiving–You use this incredibly dull vegetable peeler to prep potatoes for boiling/mashing? Guess what you’re going to find in your Christmas stocking. A nice, sharp new one.
My brother’s house at a different Thanksgiving–You expect me to make gravy from the turkey drippings and YOU DON’T HAVE ANY FLOUR? WTF? Whose house doesn’t have flour? Guess what you’ll find in your Christmas stocking.
drastic, I love your real bullet points. Hope nobody minds my fake, asterisk ones.
I keep my kitchen towels rolled up in a basket in my kitchen. I keep my guest hand towels rolled up in a basket in the bathroom (with a used one in a little basket beside the sink, hint, hint). I can never get anyone to use either. I hate paper towels.
I don’t have any horror stories because
I don’t cook
I never cook at other people’s houses
When I do prepare food at other people’s house, I bring everything I’ll need, including my own linen kitchen towels (for drying vegetables) and knives.
Dull knives. I’m not that choosy as to type, but I get annoyed awfully fast if their “sharp” knives are about as dull as a butter knife.
Why don’t people keep their knives sharp? There are innumerable gadgets and gizmos out there to keep them sharp- just use one of them with some regularity and they’ll be fine.
Instead, the knives are sharp when they got them as a wedding gift in 1968, never to have been sharpened again.
Lack of basic culinary items. Stuff like chicken stock, garlic powder (not garlic salt), olive oil, etc…
But have any of you opened a kitchen cupboard, and there sitting on the stack of clean dinner plates, is… a dinner plate.
…filled with food. The previous night’s dinner, untouched (by human hands or plastic wrap).
This is my number one complaint using other peoples kitchens. One of my friends professionally sharpens knives so I’ll offer to have the knives sharpened and returned to them. At which point I learn why they don’t keep their knives sharp. They are too fucking stupid to have sharp tools around. They always seem to manage to cut themselves with the newly sharpened knives. “I wanted to see how sharp it was so a ran my finger down it”
Aaaugh! The people I work with do this, in a commercial kitchen, no less. Thankfully, their idea of sharpening a knife is running it through one of those V-shaped tools with as much force as humanly possible in order to “sharpen” it. Thank goodness I am not their knives.
My list:
^Not knowing where anything is, or not having basic kitchen implements - hand strainer, wooden spoons (there’s something special about them), TONGS!, non-nylon spatulas, and even some more esoteric things that relate to their hobby. Had a friend into bread-baking who had never heard of a bench scraper, and boy, did his face light up when I gave him one.
^Weird selection of tools, like having only a flexible plastic cutting board and a glass one - this one is straight from my parents. And they got a purty bamboo cutting board for Christmas, mere days later.
^Weird setup - for example, when we moved into this house, the refrigerator and stove were right next to each other, and the nearest work area was about 5 feet away. There were no counters anywhere near the stove. We moved the fridge into the other room.
^Overbearing hosts - I don’t need a running commentary or having you grab your spouse to come look at how I’m chopping a carrot. No, I’m not mincing it. It’d be a dice, at least.
I am now smart enough to always take my own knives, cutting board if I think they won’t have one, and every seasoning I think I’m going to need - even salt and a pepper grinder.
The horror: They don’t tell you things you need to know until it’s 5 seconds too late.
Like, for instance, “The coffee grinder keeps grinding when you take the lid off you have to unplug it to stop it.”
Oh. That would have been really nice to know before I took the lid off and freshly ground coffee spewed all over your immaculate brand-new kitchen (and now it will be in the impossible-to-reach corners and crevices forever, not to mention inside the burners of the stove).
A good time to tell me would have been when I asked where it was. Or maybe as I was putting the coffee beans in and asking, “Is there a place to plug this in?”
Ugh! Last Christmas I did the cooking at my in-laws’ because they had invited the extended family (about 25 people,) and then my brother-in-law wound up sick and in the hospital.
No usable flour (weevils. Ick.)
Knives too dull to cut butter, much less meat and vegetables.
Three thousand weird gadgets, but a serious lack of normal common ones. (Seriously, who owns two of everything sold by Ronco, but no whisk or grater? My mom-in-law, that’s who!)
And the most annoying thing, to me: counters that are so crowded with cutesy figurines and knick-knacks that there’s no room to actually cook!
I’m currently visiting my parents, and will probably be cooking most of the dinners. I brought my own chef’s knife, but finding the rest of what I needed was…interesting. The only pot between 1 qt and 8 qts was full of pea soup in the refrigerator, and the cutting board was only about 1 foot square and gashed and warped. The tongs didn’t exactly meet when closed, and, worst of all, the stove is electric! I did a lot of digging through cabinets and managed to find sufficient equipment for last night’s meal; I think I’ll start earlier on it tonight.
Aaugh! Terrible graters. No joke, everyone whose kitchen I visit gets a microplane if they don’t have one. If I could afford extras, it’d be one of the box graters.
My inlaws, while lovely people, have a small kitchen with little countertop space or storage. So the microwave is also the breadbox and the oven is where all the pots and pans are kept. So if you want to cook something, you have to stack stuff up on the kitchen table - that is if you remember to take the pots and pans out before you preheat the oven, in which case they will be hot and you have to stack them on the glass stovetop, which is probably still hot anyway from the egg you cooked in that tiny peeling ‘nonstick’ pan six hours ago.
They also have the absolute worst cutting board I have ever seen: glass, but with a pebbled surface! So you have to hold the knife still and slide the food around underneath it to get it to cut all the way through. I would swear to God that they use it upside down, since the other side is at least smooth, but there are feet on it that are clearly on the smooth side.
Their black pepper sits in a glass shaker on the stovetop; it’s really just a jar of black sand at this point. They have twenty kinds of spice mixes but no plain spices.
If we’re expected to cook, I throw some knives, a steel, spices, a stick blender, a small cutting board, an instant-read probe thermometer, and a microplane grater in a box and bring it with us. I’ll have to add a whisk and a silicone spatula as well since I missed having them the last time we were there.
I cook at other people’s houses (and in other odd situations) a lot.
As others have noted, the #1 problem is the lack of a serviceable cutting board. It’s just stunning to me how many kitchens don’t have one. I had one in the trunk of my car, until it got wet and moldy and I had to throw it out; I’m going to replace it with one of those four-packs of plastic flexible boards, which aren’t terrific but they’re better than the glass knife-dullers you find in most kitchens.
In fact, I have a plastic box that I’m going to stock with the flex cutting boards, a cheap but decent chef’s knife (restaurant-supply grade), a cheap pepper grinder, a Microplane, and some small containers of flour, kosher salt, cornstarch, and some other staples. I’ll keep it in the trunk as my Shitty Kitchen Kit.
I was helping cook Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother’s house a few years ago and I was rummaging around for some sort of seasoning salt. I found some that had a price tag on it from Moloney’s, a little department store in our town. Which had closed fourteen years earlier.
The entire spice collection consists of salt, pepper, 2 or 3 others, and a bunch of vague seasoning mixes (e.g. “fish seasoning”) that are mostly salt anyway.
In the “Horrors and Inconveniences of Someone Else Cooking in Your Kitchen” department, did you really just take my clean dish towel, wipe out your bowl with it, and then throw the now pulp-covered and juice-soaked mess ON MY CLEAN DISHES?!
I used your garbage disposal. :oThat works?:eek: