Buying tortillas is getting kind of expensive, but making tortillas seems like such a damn pain uuugh

Chicken Biryani. I keep getting the ingredients and making simpler things.

Sourdough

Sourdough

As much as I love barbecue I don't and won't own a smoker.

Croissants. Tasty and pretty, but a ridiculous amount of fiddly work with all the rolling and folding.

Ditto puff pastry from scratch.

Gonna take a detour here and mention the time that I tried to make tofu from scratch, starting with making soy milk from dried beans that I'd ordered just for the task:

The soy milk turned out surprisingly well, with the help of a semi-automated device, but I realised on the spot that most commercial soy milk has a tonne of sugar added to it, and I didn't want to go down that route. In fact, it just about turned me off of soy milk permanently.

Anyway, I moved on to the tofu-making stage, and realised that both coagulants I tested (lemon juice and nigari powder) imparted a huge, unwanted taste to the tofu, on top of neither being all that great at coagulating the soy milk. In the end, I think I could have improved on this cooking disaster, but my motivation was gone at that point, and I wanted to move on.

There's also the fact that no matter what a versatile food tofu is, it's also a significantly processed one, and I wanted to move in the opposite direction. That said, I understand that fresh-made tofu in Japan and other places can be incredibly tasty, almost worth wolfing down straight with no cooking or spices.

Beef Wellington

Papa reyeñas(sp?). They're so good, it's basically mashed potatoes with ground beef mix inside, then fried/seared and baked until it sorta looks like a potato again. Then you take finely sliced red onions and soak them in lime juice for 12 hours so they get less harsh and use it like a topping

Honestly, I know how to do all off the top of my head except how long to boil the potatoes...I just would never put that much effort into my meals, so I would need a reason to cook it for others. There's also a lot of cleanup, you need a frying pan you need a frying pan you wash twice, a big bowl, a masher, an oven dish, a lime squeezer, Tupperware (or a ziplock, but I get enough plastic), a knife, a spatula, and whatever serving dishes

I don't enjoy cooking, but I'm pretty good at it when I want to be... But I have to want to be

All food is like that to me. I only cook because otherwise I'd die of starvation. I eat to live - food has always just been fuel for me. I don't want to put any more effort into cooking than what is absolutely necessary. If money was not an issue, then personal chef would be the first person I'd hire. Hell, if it was possible I'd hire someone to eat it for me too.

Doughnuts. I made doughnuts by hand recently, and kneading the dough. For. 30. Minutes. By. Hand. Fuck, never again. I usually don't mind kneading dough by hand, but this was the first time I wish I had a mashine for it

Lasagne. And I hate Mondays.

Century egg

I don't really lack for motivation, I'll take on some pretty wild culinary adventures, but occasionally I run into things that I just can't logistically make happen.

For example, nowhere in my house has the right sort of temperature/humidity to cure my own salami and such (I've checked,) and I just don't have the space to squeeze in another fridge with humidity controls and such to make a curing chamber.

I've made my own bacon, various kinds of sausages (including smoking my own kielbasa, andouille, and hot dogs) I've helped butcher chickens, I've made beef Wellington, sushi, I've baked bread and cakes in a Dutch oven in a fire pit, I've made ice cream, homemade pierogies.

Khao soi

Proper paella. I enjoy making it in the sense that it's simpler to cook and is more like a risotto, but to make an actual paella as close to the way the dish should be made takes so much effort, the correct ingredients and equipment I have neither the time nor the money for.

I have the Ladurée macaron cookbook and I look at it frequently, and then go buy a lesser version of the cookie and pretend I’m happy.

https://www.kitchentreaty.com/40-cloves-of-garlic-soup/

I made it once for Thanksgiving years ago. Everyone loved it. It was a pain. Especially since I didn't have an immersion blender.

I live in a different city and often find myself wishing for my mother's Portuguese Salted Cod Casserole. It was out typical sunday family dinner when I still lived in the same city as them. Not a cultural tradition, just because it was my favourite dish.

But the nature of it ensures that I'll never ever ever have the patience to do it myself, considering that step one is soaking the dried salted cod in cold water that you repeatedly replace for up to 48 hours in order to get the salt out.

Mianjin (seitan) or vegan ramen. Both super time consuming and hard but awesome!

Spring rolls. They are so much work. If you wanna do them right you have to start the night before. So many ingredients, the sauce. But they're soooo good.

Pavlova.

Working in the kitchen requires good coordination and an intuition I will never have in my current setting because it's not the form of intuition I was raised on. The ability to cook to precision without everything spelled out comes off to me as almost psychic, and I don't have that. So I will never be making myself my favorite dish.