Cooking blogs seems to very in right now and I’m still on my cooking kick (because there is absolutely no proof that my friend’s husband got sick from my experimental chicken sushi).

So I’ve decided this is a cooking blog now.

“But I thought this was a lifestyle blog,” you say, if you happen to have read that post.

The lifestyle thing just wasn’t working out for me. I think I have too many toes and I don’t like chihuahuas.

So if anybody asks, this is your favorite cooking blog. And just tell them all those posts about my puppy are about how to cook dog meat.

For my first, er, next post about how to cook I’d like to answer some reader questions as read to me by the voices in my head.

“Dear Veronica, How are you? I am fine. Why does cooking take so freaking long? Sincerely, Steve”

Well that’s a pretty stupid question, Steve, but I’ll answer it anyway.

Cooking takes so long because most of it is busy work. Recipe writers don’t want people to think cooking is easy or they won’t need recipes anymore. So people come up with useless activities to make cooking seem more complex and time-consuming than it is.

For example, waiting for butter to get soft. A lot of baking recipes recommend you set a stick of butter on the counter and wait for it to get soft. They hope you won’t remember that you own a microwave and can thus have soft butter in seconds. Even if the power should go out, I own matches and am not afraid to set butter on fire. There’s no reason I should have to wait for soft butter.

Many recipes instruct you to separate the egg yolk from the egg white. Then some recipes wait several steps and then tell you to mix the egg yolk and egg white back together, hoping that by then you’ll have forgotten how painstakingly you separated them in the first place!

Then there’s flour sifting. I am a firm believer that when I buy something from the store, it should have already been completely made. By the time the flour gets to my home, it should be a finished product with no assembly still required.

Are they so understaffed and overworked at the flour factory that they suddenly declared, “Forget it! We don’t have time to sift all this flour! Just bag it up as it is and the people who buy it can sift it for themselves!”?

I personally refuse to sift my own flour because it sets a very dangerous precedent. If we let flour makers get away with it, it will quickly spread to all food manufacturers. You’ll open a jar of peanut butter to find a handful of peanuts and a hammer.

And that won’t be nearly as upsetting as when you go to a burger joint and they present you with a cow and a hammer.

That will cause most people to go vegetarian. So then we’re all eating things like coleslaw, which will come in a bag with a cabbage and a machete. Pretty soon the population of the world will be largely finger-less.

It’s difficult to blog without at least a few fingers, so there’s an end to my profession and suddenly I’m stuck trying to find some other job that doesn’t actually pay me anything.

All because you gave in to the peer-pressure of sifting your own flour.

Why? Why would you do that to me? Do I come to your workplace and mess up your job with my cooking? No! Mostly because I don’t know where you work.

Some people say it’s important to sift flour in case any bugs were accidentally packed in your flour. Call me crazy, but I’ve always thought that part of what I was paying food manufacturers for when I buy their product is to keep bugs out of my food.

If I routinely found bugs in my flour, my first thought would not be “I need to come up with a way that I can add flour to my food while straining out all the bugs that appear to be living in that flour.” My first thought would be to Google attorneys so I can sue the flour company for mental anguish caused by finding bugs in my flour. Then I’d be a millionaire. I’d buy a few mansions and hire more servants than I needed.

Of course, then I’d have to come up with something to keep them all busy.

“Hey, you! Go separate some eggs. And when you’re done with that, go get yourself a lifestyle.”