COOKING can be fun and relaxing unless you’ve chosen fiddly as f**k ingredients. These five aren’t worth the hassle:
Mangoes
Mangoes are up there with coconuts and pomegranates in giving you scant reward for considerable graft. They’re so slippery to peel you either drop them on the kitchen floor or chop off a fingertip. And what do you get for all that work? A pile of sickly sweet yellow mush.
Avocado
Avocados are incredibly high maintenance. Despite the packaging’s promise that they are ‘ripe and ready to eat’, they’re rock hard so you spend three long, patient weeks gently squeezing them to see if they’re edible yet. And when they finally are, once you’ve removed the skin and the massive stone, there’s barely a scrap of flesh left. Useless.
Lentils
One day you decided to buy a bag of dried lentils to cheaply make your own delicious dhal. However, when you realised you’d have to soak them overnight before you can even begin cooking, you regretted your foolish mistake, especially as they smell and taste like noxious flatulence. Order a curry from someone who knows what they’re doing instead.
Poached eggs
Who hasn’t had an idyllic, lazy Sunday morning absolutely ruined by these bastards? They seem like a great idea for an aspirational brunch until you end up with either a gelatinous blob of translucent slop or an egg that has somehow become harder than a diamond. Just fry it instead, you ponce.
Lobster
Delicious when you finally get to eat it, but preparing a lobster is like performing a gruesome psychotic murder in miniature. You can either stab it in the brain or boil it alive before performing a clumsy autopsy to retrieve the few tiny morsels of flesh that are edible. You’ll be left both hungry and lastingly disturbed.
