On How I Am Horrible at Flipping Things

There are some things I'm reasonably good at.  Like everyone else, there are other things which provide me with particular challenges that might not trouble everyone in the same way.

In the kitchen, I am miles behind my wife in cooking skills to say the least, but I often try to keep up (with mixed success) and make myself useful, or at least break even on usefulness and inadvertent stumbles, so that it's roughly the same for her as if I weren't in there at all.

But for all my recently (last ten years?) acquired kitchen acumen, there is one set of directions that makes my heart sink every time I see it.

Might as well say, "You're in a lot of trouble."

Because it turns out I am the worst person in the world at flipping things over with a spatula.

I recently had some time to think over the reasons I'm bad at this, when my wife and I made butternut squash soup for dinner, and I had to take over cooking when there was an incident.

On a related note, if you haven't heard it elsewhere, be careful about chopping up and handling squash that's not yet fully ripe; apparently there's a defense mechanism in the squash (and many other fruits) which is some kind of enzyme, or other science, which causes the skin of the hand to begin peeling off at what, for the uninitiated, can appear to be an alarming rate.

But it turns out it's not serious, just something to avoid if you can.  Turns out there is such a thing as too fresh!

Anyway to make this soup, one must peel, de-seed, and cube the squash, then toss in olive oil and whichever spices are good, place on baking sheets, and bake for 30 minutes at 400°F, flipping halfway through.

Because I wanted to help out, and because my food was now effectively held hostage by circumstances only I could fix, I grimly went to the task.

In brief, these are some of the reasons why I'm apparently just the worst at this simple kitchen procedure.

1. The Oven

Clumsy is a word that's been used to describe me in the past.  Although I like to think that I'm good with my hands when it comes to crafty things (times people have said "Good Job" about something I've used scissors on: at least 10, times I've cut off fingers with scissors: 0), for some reason the oven and I don't always get along.

Getting things ready is easy: there's no real heat yet.

It's after the thing has warmed up, and you have to take stuff out midway, that things get tricky.

I try to keep in mind that the oven works by convection, according to Alton Brown (who is the best) and others, and that it's important not to keep it open too long.  

Yet every time I haul the thing open, I think to myself, "Ooh! that's hot, how do I do this?" and for some reason figuring out how to even get in there always takes like ten seconds. I find myself staring in at all the heat and apparent turmoil, as if hypnotized by some eldritch horror's waggish glare.

Then, for some unknown reason, while I'm standing there with the oven door open, my glasses fog up, and for a few seconds I am blinded.  This causes more confusion, as I hold still so as not to trip over the open door.

Finally I get around to reaching in and getting whatever I needed out of there.

This is where the real trouble starts: as I mentioned above, I am a little clumsy, and stand about a one-in-three chance of contacting some hot surface of the thing like a doofus; even if I'm wearing oven mitts I'll catch my forearm or something.

Even if I somehow manage to avert small disaster at this stage, and successfully grab the thing I'm in there to grab, then every time, every time, there's a little voice in my head that says "Hey that was a close call, glad there's no chance I'll burn myself now," even though the job's only half over.

Fortunately to date neither a first nor a second strike of this kind have resulted in my dumping whatever's on the trays onto the kitchen floor, but never say never.

2. Getting Them On the Spatula

So the stuff is out of the blast furnace and on the counter (if it's a good day, I've managed to remember hot plates or trivets or a towel or something on the first try and the tray isn't burning a hole in anything).

This isn't necessarily the most difficult or dangerous part of the process, but it's certainly the most frustrating.  It's a simple matter of geometry: to me, it seems that a 3" by 3" surface of a flat spatula ought to be able to lift a 3" by 3" area of the stuff to be lifted.  This is never the case, as should be expected, but for some reason most of the time I can't seem to manage much more than a third of this.

So I wind up working with maybe two or three pieces at a time, of the seemingly hundreds in the pan that need attention.  No biggie, this will just take longer than I wanted.

Guess I should close the oven.  (just kidding) (oh wait)

3. The flipping

Did I say that getting them on the spatula was the most frustrating part? Well sometimes I write fiction so don't take me seriously.  This part is, in point of fact, impossible and a myth, but I try to do it every time anyway.

The trouble is once again geometric in origin, or so I choose to call it: no matter what I'm trying to flip, the darn things just slip off the spatula before anything like the full flip of the wrist is accomplished.

Step One: Gently tilt spatula a little.

Step Two: Good!  Now start to tilt it a bit more...

Step Three: Watch everything you've worked for slide back to square one.

Then they just fall back onto the pan seemingly right where they were, sticking without a bounce like the evil ring at the start of that hobbit movie.  No the first one.  I mean the very first one.

Anyway, now I'm basically back where I started with, trying to get them onto the spatula, and realizing that this might, actually take an infinite amount of time.

I contemplate eating the food half-cooked, then press on.

4. Being Able to Tell Whether They're Flipped Over At All

So I've now scraped and scrambled and annihilated by violence nearly half the stuff I was trying to turn over.  At least three full scoops have leapt to the floor, one half of the flipped matter is in one big pile that needs spreading out, and if I'm lucky my hair isn't somehow on fire.

A quick illustration of what comes next: when you were on the playground as a kid, did you ever pick up a handful of gravel and toss it back into the gravel, watching the distinct pieces fall and merge back into anonymity in the whole?

Yep, I was deep.
(Note: head size to scale.)

Each piece is visible and distinct until it lands and stops moving, then like magic it's like they were never moved at all, they just vanish.

No? You never did that?

Well then take a break from the internet and find a playground, friend, it's philosophical!  You could probably use some time on the playground these days.

Anyway I my point is that once the gravel lands, it's as good as lost forever, there's no telling the gravel you tossed apart from the gravel you didn't.  This leads me to the truly baffling part of this entire experiment: I do all the above steps, and I look at what's in the pan, and apart from the ruin I have wrought in my bungling, I am completely unable to see any difference between now and before I started flipping.

This makes it especially difficult when you're halfway there you start losing track of which you've flipped and which you haven't.  So a lot of work duplication probably happens, trying to make sure things that didn't get flipped do get flipped.  But what about things that were flipped before, but have now been unflipped by your second flipping?  

Then, just for laughs, repeat everything that happened with the oven, in order to get the stuff back inside.



In the end I'm always happy to help in the kitchen.  At the very least it keeps me less than completely awful at it in case I need to fend for myself, or if I want to give my wife a break or a surprise (I mean breakfast in bed or such, and not a house on fire).

It's just one of the small strange things about this life, that no matter how often or how carefully I try, I do not get any better at this one thing, it always baffles and confounds me.  Some day I may develop a method for flipping the stuff without a spatula

but so far such a solution has eluded me.  So I'm always overjoyed when an item comes along that can be baked or broiled or otherwise heated in that big Gom Jabbar box in my kitchen, and the instructions do not ask for it to be flipped halfway through.

Bonus: cold soothes the hands.

My wife's hands turned out to be fine after all, and despite my lack of prowess, the soup was delicious!

So that means I will try again.  I'm sure it'll come with time, maybe.

On further thought, I'm not bad at pancakes, though.