What Food/Dish Do You Hate To Prepare?

Yorky probably gets his ginger locally, very fresh, very young - I get mine from the garden and it looks exactly the same.
As long as it´s fresh like that, you can virtually peel it with your fingernails.
If it´s bought, there´s no need to peel it. Just make sure it´s clean (I use a little nail brush) then blitz it in a blender.
 
Windigo said:
I hate peeling and grating ginger. It's hard to peel, hard to grate and I skin my fingers doing so. But it's so worth it!
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I use a spoon to peel my ginger, much safer to scrape the skin off rather than use a vegetable peeler or knife to peel it.
I agree with the grating though, watch your fingers and nails!
 
Here's one I think others may empathize with: Fish. Don't get me wrong, I love catching, cooking, and eating fish, but I specifically dislike the process of filleting/deboning fish. I find it very time consuming.

To add insult to injury, you would think smaller fish would be quicker to deal with than larger fish, but the opposite is true! Smaller fish have smaller bones and have less meat on them, so the process of removing skin/bones while saving as much meat as possible requires more fine motor skills and a careful eye!
 
FowlersFreeTime said:
Here's one I think others may empathize with: Fish. Don't get me wrong, I love catching, cooking, and eating fish, but I specifically dislike the process of filleting/deboning fish. I find it very time consuming.

To add insult to injury, you would think smaller fish would be quicker to deal with than larger fish, but the opposite is true! Smaller fish have smaller bones and have less meat on them, so the process of removing skin/bones while saving as much meat as possible requires more fine motor skills and a careful eye!
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Yep, I thought about that, but thankfully I don't prep fish all that frequently, all the big supermarkets in Portugal have fishmongers who do it for us. But whenever I buy salemas (this fish here) I need to clean it at home because they never clean it well enough in the supermarket and the "blackish" stuff that's inside salemas' belly tastes bad, and that's always a hassle.
 
Windigo said:
Nice but there's no young ginger for sale here anywhere near where I live. It's the Netherlands not a culinary walhalla
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You probably use it way more often than I do. I am not crazy about ginger and will use it occasionally--very sparingly--in certain recipes. At any rate, I buy an organic ginger paste in a tube that keeps well in the refrigerator and lasts me a long time. I found it at Aldi's for about $2.50 for a 3 oz tube.
 
I found another ingredient that I dislike preparing.

Picking green peppercorns off the "vine". Very fiddly to ensure that there are no woody stems left.

Loose s.jpg

Loose s.jpg

 
karadekoolaid said:
Yorky probably gets his ginger locally, very fresh, very young - I get mine from the garden and it looks exactly the same.
As long as it´s fresh like that, you can virtually peel it with your fingernails.
If it´s bought, there´s no need to peel it. Just make sure it´s clean (I use a little nail brush) then blitz it in a blender.
Click to expand...

I use a dedicated scrubbing brush to clean it (similarly with potatoes and carrots). I prefer generally to use a food chopper to give this:

ginger root minced s.jpg

ginger root minced s.jpg


Or a blender (with a little ELOO) to give this:

Ginger root, pureed.

Ginger root, pureed.

 
I start to lose interest in dishes that take more than (say) five ingredients. I just dont do it for the most part.
 
Try cleaning tamarind, either still in the pod or if  someone doesn't pay attention and grabs the first package they see of the pulp/paste, which wasn't cleaned well at all of the pod pieces, seeds and fibrous material. Major pain in the behind and time consuming, though cleaning from the pod was actually easier than the pulp/paste. Pay the extra money and buy the high grade pulp/paste, trust me.

The ginger in the Asian markets here is always young and nicely plump. The regular groceries are a crapshoot. You can get anywhere from young and plump to old and shriveled.
 
medtran49 said:
Pay the extra money and buy the high grade pulp/paste, trust me.
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I much prefer the pods. A lot of the concentrates or pastes have sugar and salt added to them.

I just add it to decent quantity of boiling water and allow it to stand for an hour or so, mashing it with a fork. Then it gets pot through a sieve again using plenty of boiling water. Maybe ⅓ hrs work and the taste is so much better.

Luckily my dishes that require it generally have extra water added to them so it isn't a problem.

Here is Australia, the tamarind dates are not often stoned before sale, but in order to prevent the seeds being used they are chopped up seeds and all, so the seeds are in pieces. It has made it slower to deal with the pulp but that plenty of water approach works wonders and I avoid the extra salt or sugar or preservatives added to the meal.
 
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