Secret Ingredients

Cooking is dangerous. I burn my arms in the oven and my hands on the pots. I invariably grate my fingernails along with the cheese, and sometimes it’s hard to avoid dripping blood from a cut finger into my ingredients. I always cut my finger when I’m chopping vegetables.

Maybe I have so many accidents because I don’t like cooking. I have a friend who finds the prep work therapeutic and the cooking satisfying. I think she might have a mental problem.

I’ve been using meal kits recently. I usually order three meals per week and wing it the rest of the week. I really like having all of the ingredients and recipes on hand. The kits are expensive but you can’t put a price on not having to shop or plan meals. Well, you can, actually. It’s about $40 for a meal for four, which feeds three quite nicely. That’s approximately $13 per meal, which is reasonable enough, but I still have to feed my family the other four days, so what’s the point?

I’ve tried three different meal kit services. The third one was the best. It had top-notch ingredients and delicious recipes … and a hefty price tag. The first one was bargain basement. The meals were good, but inexpensive vegetables were commonly used, and one can only eat so much zucchini. The recipes were exotic, though, which was nice … occasionally. There were lots of noodle and rice bowls with fried eggs on top. I never understood the fried eggs. The second kit I tried was a disaster. The packers threw all of the ingredients into the box willy nilly, and the produce rarely survived the trip from the warehouse to my house without wilting or rotting. Worst of all, there were no recipe cards. I had to get the recipes online. Have you ever tried cooking a complicated meal while reading the recipe from your laptop or phone? My laptop would go into sleep mode constantly so I was always pressing the cursor pad with greasy fingers to bring the screen back. Grease-covered computer keys are not covered under my warranty.

I suppose I’ll go back to grocery shopping and meal planning. I’ll have to stop off at the pharmacy first, though, for Band-Aids … and a nail file.

Can you find the fingernail?