Oooh, good one. Along the same lines, I once made cranberry sauce from fresh cranberries. Never again. It tasted VERY MUCH like the stuff in a can, and was a pain to clean up from.
Protip: use your deep fryer outside. It’s not messy and your house won’t smell for days afterwards. Double protip: Don’t leave your deep fryer outside. You’ll have a small fireworks show if you try to use it after it’s been out in the rain and there’s water in the oil. Remember that toaster in Ghostbusters, yeah, that. Actually, rewatching that, it sounded pretty similar.
Also, as I write this, I’m thinking you mean pan frying. You can get a splatter screen, but sometimes that’s just as much as a hassle. I mean, it’s nice because you don’t get hot grease on you, but it’s still another thing to clean and, frankly, wiping down the counter is easier than cleaning a fine mesh screen. Also, you have to move it every time you need to do anything with the food.
It’s been said numerous times in the thread already, but yeah, for me too: anything that requires filling and heating up the deep fryer. Making a batch of fried chicken, falafel, doughnuts, or whatever, you’re left with the following unsavory choices:
- Keeping a fryer (or pot or Dutch oven) full of slightly used oil hanging around to be used (fairly soon)
- Straining and storing a gallon of oil for the next time you feel like frying.
- Making a metric shitload of fried food right there and then to justify the oil and the effort, and since fried food don’t generally refrigerate or freeze very well, you’re also signing yourself up to eat a shitload of fried things within the next 24 hours
I’ve made pumpkin pie several times from scratch (due to being in places where canned pumpkin was not available) and I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between it and the stuff made from canned pumpkin. (I’d disagree about the cranberry sauce, but that’s pretty easy to make and hardly any effort, assuming you just mean the chunky stuff with the berries in it and not the jelly.)
Yes, I do watch for issues like that. However, it’s probably telling that one of my vegetarian relatives has announced a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy regarding my use of homemade turkey broth, chicken oil and bacon grease. Win one for the carnivores!
AH, I can help you there 
Soak the peas overnight, then take a linen towel, and plop a couple handsful of the peas in, wrap it up and whap it around, and rub - the skins will come off the peas.
Honestly? I think the thing I don’t like making the most is the fine paperlike dough for strudel. I learned to stretch it so it covers the kitchen table and you can read through it - and it can take more vertical time than my body allows now so I cheat and make single portion ones out of commercial filo dough. [and I can tell you exactly why lumbar spinal stenosis makes one suicidal.]
I absolutely adored the sous vide for making beef wellington - you cook the damned thing to medium rare while the duxelles is sauteeing up, put the damned thing together and you only have to worry about the pastry outside being cooked properly.
I love to make chicken and dumplings - I will cut in spaetzel instead of rolling out noodles. Learned that from my mom’s Amish side of the family cooking traditions. We really love things like beef bourguinon, cassoulet, ricet, anything long and slow cooked comfort foodish in winters. I bake bread twice a week [well except when we were stuck in that damned hotel with no kitchen] and make dessert once a week as a Sunday family day treat. Well, I also do batches of various cookies for Christmas.
We do a full on Thanksgiving dinner 4 times a year, because we like the leftovers. We generally do a 12-14 pound bird, the dressing we cook outside the bird [I use neck, wings and organs to make the broth we use to moisten the cubed and toasted bread, dried cranberries, walnuts or chestnuts as available and other traditional ingredients] and we do mashed sweet potato instead of candied yams or mashed potatoes, Chinese garlic stirfried green beans instead of that horrible casserole, and both apple and pumpkin pies [sweetened with splenda instead of sugar] and we make cranberry sauce, also using splenda instead of sugar. We have been doing it for more than 25 years so it is pretty much able to be done on autopilot in a single weekend. Then we eat, and break down the bird and turn the carcass into broth and make some soup out of it.
I have to admit, I don’t mind being more or less housebound now, I do get to play in the kitchen and make real food again =) WHen I was working, my job was an hour away and getting home between 6 and 7 in the evening, and needing to be in bed at 8 to get up at 5 sucked when it came to doing anything elaborate. Now I can cook all day if I want. I was planning on making chicken and noodles tomorrow anyway, now I just feel happy that winter is coming so I can get away with the comfort foods again =) Maybe I will do a celebratory tart tatin =)
Chiming in to agree with the “stuffed filled things” category. I made about 150 empanadas one day, and I’ll never make them again.
I was surprised to see Chicken and Dumplings listed, but then again I make it with leftover chicken, frozen stock, and Bisquick, so that would make a big difference.
One Thanksgiving I made the traditional Green Bean Casserole, with the twist that I made it completely from scratch, as in I made my own cream of mushroom soup, my own french fried onions, etc., etc. To this day I’m convinced someone put the recipe on the Internet as a prank. It was really good, but in the end it was still Green Bean Casserole, only it took 6 hours to make and dirtied every pot and pan in my kitchen.
The Appalachian side of my family calls it pop eye. Likely a regional variation. 
My Appalachian family (mom’s side) makes the same thing and also calls it pot pie.
Ah, gotcha. I only skimmed over the recipe before, and saw that it used what it called “masa dough”, but it looks like it’s mostly banana.
Tamales and pasteles don’t look very much alike.
The dough is different. The stuffing is different. The cooking method is different. But the people who make them both speak Spanish, so there’s that.
I spent several hours one evening making homemade General Tsao’s chicken. It was rather fantastic. Nearly as good, in fact, as I could have gotten from the local takeout for six bucks and a ten-minute wait.
Chinese, yeah, so time consuming and so cheap at the take out. Esp. when you can get it with no MSG. Same with Mexican here in AZ. Why would I even make enchiladas when there’s 100 places to pick them up on the way home.
We could start a completely new thread on “delicious dishes you don’t bother to make because they are indistinguishable from what you can get from a can/the freezer section/a good takeout place.”
I was SO excited 20 or so years ago when I bought an authentic late 19th century New England bean pot at an antiques place in Maine. Paid fifteen bucks or something.
Brought it home, scoured and cleaned it out 20 or 30 times, and made a full gallon of Authentic New England Baked Beans! Hours in the oven!
You want baked beans, buy a can of B&G. The bean pot looks handsome on the shelf, though.
Just realized a twist on the gripes here. What you make takes forever and isn’t even as good (or at least isn’t much better) as what you can just buy. Thats bad enough.
But when it cost even MORE to make than to buy.
Talk about adding insult to injury!
Thai food, Indian food, (and nthing) Chinese food. So many herbs and spices. So much work. And still not as good as from the restaurant. (Probably Ethiopian food as well, but I’ve never even bothered trying to make that.)
Have to disagree with you this. I was bitching to the Ukulele Lady the other day about the varying quality of the Indian takeout places nearby (I used to know the best ones to get certain dishes from, but they’ve all been swapping cooks or something).
She said “Why would you want to order that crap? Yours is MUCH better.”
You know, I have a vague memory of having heard of this trick before but I’d forgotten all about it. Thanks for the reminder. Maybe I’ll have to give these a go this year.
I’ve remembered another dish from my youth. Deviled Crabs. You could buy them everywhere when I was growing up in Florida, but they don’t have them in California. I have a terrific recipe, but it just ends up never being worth all the effort to make them.
It does depend on the tamale, though. I don’t think something like this Oaxacan tamale is dissimilar to a pastel in terms of looks.
I’d put the main differences on what the dough is made of, what it’s filled with, and how it’s cooked, but it seems to me that tamales and pasteles are essentially the same thing adapted to slightly different ingredients based on the region.
For me, any stuffed and baked pasta dish - cannelloni, manicotti. Enchiladas as well. Basically anything that requires two cooking steps and some repeated stuffing.