Tonight, I was in a rush to cook: both of my blue apron meals tonight were in the longer side on prep time, and I got home somewhat later than intended, and wanted to get food on the table. As a result of being in a rush, I did something that I regret in hindsight: I started cooking without setting everything I’d need aside first.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve come to realize how much value reading through the whole recipe first gives me. When I chooes not to do this, I make a choice which is… “suboptimal”. The most crucial thing I get out of reading the recipe all the way through first – and doing a couple minutes of prep – is finding tools that I need in order to cook. The second most important thing is thinking a step ahead to whether the action I’m taking is actually going to move forward, or leave me in trouble.
Tonight’s meal (Mexican-spiced Shrimp) involved grating carrots. In this one small task, I made two mistakes. First, while I had a sense that we had a box grater around somewhere, I did not know where it was – the easy places to look didn’t turn it up. After peeling the carrots, and slicing them in half, I looked through all the places I could look – while at the same time, I had food on the stove and in the oven. The stress of trying to search quickly meant that I didn’t search well. I did attempt to do a rough grate using a peeler, but eventually just stopped what I was doing and was able to find the grater. Once I had set aside the time to search, I found the item almost immediately: the problem was that I was trying to look quickly. By trying to look while something else was going on, I allowed myself to become flustered, and ignored an obvious place for the item to be. Had I searched for the item before starting cooking, I wouldn’t have had that problem.
The second issue was that I was not thoughtful about how the carrots were going to be used. When asked to peel the carrots, then slice them in half, I immediately shortened them first (to make the slices in half more even). While this would have been sensible if I was making carrot sticks, for grating, this was a problem: instead of two long halfs per carrot, I had many smaller chunks. Using a grater on carrot sticks is significantly more difficult than doing it on the longer carrot. (In hindsight, I don’t think asking me to half them was really appropriate either: I would have rather just chopped the end off and grated from the end.) In trying to get as much carrot as I could out, I repeatedly grated down to the point where it was difficult to hold the carrot. Had I read the recipe first and thought about it, I might have realized that I shouldn’t have cut the carrots in this way.
Because I didn’t read the recipe ahead of time and prepare, I took probably 4 times longer on grating the carrots as I really needed. This rushed the rest of the meal, and made the entire process more stressful and unbalanced. Setting aside a few extra minutes of prep almost certainly would have saved me stress and made the overall prep take less time. For the first time since the first week of Blue Apron, I think I overshot the estimate by more than 5 minutes – even though I explicitly decided not to film this meal.
The reason I typically spend more time doing prep is because I plan to film – so I want to make sure that from the time I press “record”, I am not going to be mixing in sorting through a pile of pans for the one I want, or similar things. Filming does require some additional setup – placing the camera and lights, making sure I’ve got a good battery in the camera, etc. – but it turns out that because I tend to gather all my materials first, filming actually causes to be more thoughtful about the recipe… in a way that may actually save me time in the end.
Of course, the actual answer here is just to never skip on that prep step, even when the camera isn’t going to be rolling. Lesson learned.