Recipe sites and recipe blogs suffer from two problems:
1) No one wants a 1-2 hour basic recipe, but most recipes are 1-2 hours for basics outside of "Chop stuff, put in pan, heat up, eat". So . . . they fudge the numbers. Prep beforehand, keep sauces and stuff in the freezer for later use, and other stuff the home cook probably isn't doing.
And the home cook doesn't want to hear "make a bunch of roux and freeze it in cubes to make quick sauces for the next three months" or "Pickle some onions to have a quick plus-up to your meals for the next two weeks", so the whole "planning out your next month of meals and doing prep in little bursts that optimize your timing" is accounted for the recipe timing, and never in the recipe instructions.
2)If you maintain a recipe blog, you get pretty fast at prep and you forget how long it takes if you have bad knives, need to figure out again how to peel and chop something every time, don't know the little tricks, don't have a good cutting board . . . it genuinely only takes me a little over a minute to peel and chop a butternut into 1-inch cubes. (Chop the top off, then slice it where the round part meets the oblong part, and peel both using a good sharp paring knife using long strokes, takes about 1s per stroke at a leisurely pace, and about 30 strokes for both halfs. Cut the round part in half and scoop out the seeds & stuff. Chop the halves into 1" sheets, keep as a stack. Split each stack and lay them down on the long side you just chopped, chop a 1" grid).
Like, a regular job for me at the hotel was to handcut 200-400lbs of fries per day, soak 'em, blanch 'em, stage them to cool, then put them in hotel pans in the walk-in. About 2-4 hours front to back. Do a hotel pan of mirepoix, (finely chopped carrots, onions, celery, about 10 kilos all together), 20 mins front to back. With the right equipment, the right ingredients, (big-ass fuckin' carrots take way less time to peel and prep 4 kilos of than small tiny ones!), and the right training.
I know that is not reasonable to expect a) of other chefs not used to my specific prep routines, b) of the apprentices, and c) of the home cook. But gun-to-my-head, I would not be able to tell you a reasonable estimate for the home cook chopping a butternut squash into 1" cubes.
It's about the erasure of the skill that goes into cooking, y'know? Everyone hears "grandma used to cook a big meal everyday", and the sexism washes about the part where . . . that was a fuckton of labour, man. And a fuckton of skill. And a lot of planning. Yeah, even for grandmas who made crappy bland meals every day. Still lots of labour, skill and planning there. And I do mean skill. If you're an adult, you've probably struggled to regularly feed yourself hot, bland, crappy meals even with instant mashed potatoes, store-bought bread, and pre-marinated chicken, you know how much skill it takes, you might've just thought you were uniquely bad at it when nah, we just have the wrong expectations.
Which leads back into: if you want to regularly make good dinners for yourself, plan your prep, the way recipe writers do and don't tell you about. Freeze roux cubes, pre-chop veg when you have time so when you don't have time and wanna cook, you already have a bowl of chopped veg, take stuff out of the freezer into the fridge three days in advance, make extra mashed potatoes tonight so that tomorrow you can make something else with them. Inventory your fridge regularly and brainstorm what you can cook with the stuff that's going bad, before it does so.
If you don't wanna do that, don't fret about it, making good suppers for yourself isn't mandatory for your humanity. Buy instant ramen noodles and plus 'em up with frozen veg and some shredded chicken. Buy precut frozen stir-fry veg mixes, get a rice cooker, and make "bullshit on rice" 14 times a week. Or just enjoy soup-from-a-can and tv dinners. If food isn't one the top three important things in your life, don't spend 1/3rd of your life making food, y'know?
But either way, recipe times are a lie invented by big chef to sell more knives, and you need to accept that cooking takes skill and time.
origamiaround
theartofmadeline
annaxmalina
gummygunk
