unless the object in question is clothing, do not peel!
At Life of Reiley, part of the process of finishing a cookbook involves volunteers who we ask to test the recipes in their homes. This isn’t necessarily a typical practice in publishing but it isn’t unheard of. We do it to make sure that your average home cook can follow the directions and has the necessary equipment to create the recipes in the book. With each of our recipes for The Love Diet, we’ve had 2 or 3 people try them out at home.
Our testers are the best! They play a vital role in creating a final cookbook that is easy, practical and (relatively) foolproof. But there is just one thing that has made me want to go into several of their homes and steal one piece of equipment that these zealous, fanatic, type A cooks cannot seem to keep themselves from doing: peeling. As in fruits, vegetables (and even shrimp).
When they see the word unpeeled, most of our testers see (un)PEELED. If I write do not peel, they see PEEL. If I say nothing, as in wash and cut your potato, they see wash, PEEL and cut your potato. UNLESS WE’RE TALKING ABOUT CLOTHING I AM NOT RECOMMENDING THAT YOU TAKE IT OFF. (Just to protect myself legally, for those of you who now intend to cook in the nude, you should always wear an apron when working with hot oil.)
You know, I can forgive the sweet potato eaters who chose to wash their nutritious skins down the drain because they hallucinated extra instructions, I totally get the girl who peeled the pears before adding them to a smoothie but the one I will never be able to get over is the tester who peeled the shrimp before cooking them in rock salt. (The shells act as a vital barrier between the sweet shrimp flesh and the salt in which they are baked.) He emailed to tell me that he thought the dish was awfully salty. Ya think?!?!
Now, I love him dearly. I love them all for sharing with me that the average American loves to peel. (Seriously, who knew?) But HOW am I supposed to finish a cookbook with lots of dishes calling for unpeeled ingredients in a world full of peel freaks? If anyone can suggest to me an alternate wording for keeping your skin on in which the world “peel” does not appear in any guise, I’d be so grateful I’d send you the first copy of The Love Diet off the press, on me!