Now that I have your attention, these are things I won’t do in my kitchen.

Deep-fry. Mom had one of those Fry Daddy appliances many years ago. We’d make french fries, onion rings, and doughnuts from time to time. I admit that I enjoy those foods in moderation, but I don’t make them at home. Deep-frying is messy. If you don’t have a countertop fryer, you have to transfer the oil into another container for storage. Then there’s the issue of disposing of the oil when it’s outlived its usefulness. Finally, there’s the potential fire hazard if you’re not careful. One of my former students nearly set her apartment ablaze the first time she tried deep-frying food.

Use a slow cooker. Mom also had a slow cooker back in the day. It made sense for feeding the family, especially when she was working the late shift. She could assemble the dish in the morning and it would be ready by the time we were ready to eat supper. However, it doesn’t work for Julian and me. Most old-school slow cookers didn’t allow you to brown meats in the same pan, so you still had a skillet to wash. Browning adds flavor. Most slow cooker meats I’ve tried have been bland, which is a cardinal sin in my home. A former manager of mine said it best: “My kids said everything tasted like Crock Pot.”

Cook vegetables Southern-style. Way down south in Dixie, greens and green beans are cooked well beyond done with a bit of pork (ham hock, salt pork, or the like). This method may have been helpful for the same reason slow cookers became popular – set the pot on the stove and forget it until mealtime. Another potential reason is to soften these vegetables up for folks with poor dentition. The loss of nutrients with prolonged cooking is profound, particularly for vitamin C. [An aside: Since bleeding gums are an early sign of vitamin C deficiency, did the cooking method and poor dental hygiene act synergistically to produce tooth loss?] I’d rather steam or stir-fry these veggies. I can always put some bacon or ham in the pan when I’m stir-frying if I need that flavor.

Cook with “fake meat.” There are some veggie burgers that are pretty tasty; however, the thought of serving a highly-processed food that’s supposed to be a “reasonable facsimile” of chicken or turkey runs counter to the philosophy of eating lower on the food chain. (Acquaintances of mine probably still have Tofurky in the freezer from when their daughter was a vegetarian years ago.) When I make a meatless meal, I let the ingredients be themselves.

Use shortening. I was a teaching assistant in a food science lab in grad school. I nicknamed the pie crust lab the “Salute to Shortening”, because the shortening produced a flakier product than did the other fats with the exception of lard. This was before we knew the full evils of trans fat in partially hydrogenated vegetable oil shortenings. A fun fact: Lard as it comes off the pig is one of the most unsaturated land animal fats around. Most of the lard sold in grocery stores has been hydrogenated so it’s no better than shortening, which explains why it performed as well as shortening in my former lab. If I’m going to make a pie crust (usually at Thanksgiving and Christmas), I’ll use butter.

There is one other thing that’s more a can’t do rather than a won’t do. Julian was traumatized at an early age by being forced to eat a mound of overcooked zucchini. Even though I don’t overcook vegetables (see above), bringing zucchini into the kitchen would disrupt domestic tranquility; therefore, I have to smuggle it in during the rare occasions that he’s out of town.