Throughout my time working in restaurants, I developed an illogical dread of some basic kitchen tasks. None of them — picking and chopping parsley, peeling and mincing garlic, browning pans of ground meat — were particularly difficult. But at the scale required in a professional kitchen, they felt Sisyphean. And even though it has been years since I worked in a restaurant and I now cook for one, two, sometimes maybe eight, rather than 100, the dread still plagues me. But once I get going, I am a goldfish, invariably surprised that chopping, browning or peeling for a handful of people takes barely any time.

I get an especially acute case of agita at the thought of a mortar and pestle. The chefs who taught me to cook worshiped the tool, and I learned to make everything from mayonnaise and guacamole to masala and bread crumbs using it. But despite loving how empowering it was to be liberated from electric appliances, pounding bunches of basil, heaps of pine nuts and a dozen cloves of garlic in a mortar to make a gallon of pesto felt like torture, or maybe a weird hazing. Even that simple recipe could take all afternoon, because the bowl’s limited capacity meant I had to thump multiple batches of nuts and herbs. I was left with a splattered apron and a very sore arm.