Simple cooking skills you've never mastered...

[glitch]

Cooking breakfast this morning got me thinking that while I might be a dab hand at a lot of things in the kitchen, there's one skill which I've never seemed to be able to master.

I can bone and fillet a whole chicken, finely dice an onion without thinking about it, French trim a rack of lamb, make pastry from scratch and make a beurre blanc sauce with something approaching consummate ease.

But when it comes to cracking eggs I'm nothing short of useless.

I must have cracked hundreds if not thousands of the bloody things and I've never attained any sort of consistency over the years. More often than not I end up with a tiny bit of shell in with the eggs - how can I be so awful at such a simple job?!

So, what 'simple' skills have you never mastered? And please don't let it be just me who is rubbish with eggs...

 

[glitch]

My fairy cakes / victoria sponges always come out too hard

Rubbish! Doesn't matter which recipe I use.

Sounds like a combination of over-working the mixture and baking the cakes for a little too long.

Are all your ingredients at room temperature? Do you cream the butter and sugar by hand? Do you sieve the flour before folding in to the mixture?

risotto, im just rubbish at it, spend ages adding and stirring, leave lots of time to complete it, and rice as hard as gun pellets!

You're either using the wrong type of rice, your rice is stale or you are working at too high a temperature.

A medium heat and 500ml of stock ought to perfectly cook 150g of rice in twenty/twenty-five minutes.