There's fussy eating and then there's fussy cooking. I like fussy
cooking. Not fussy in the sense of finding nits to pick or having a
list of dislikes, but fussy in the sense of making extra efforts to
ensure that a dish's appearance and aroma and taste all add to the
pleasures of eating it. I like cutting vegetables and meat for a stir
fry or a stew or a salad 'just so' to make them uniform and
appropriately shaped and sized for the dish. I like ensuring that all
the silverskin and fat streaks are cleaned away from the pork
tenderloin or flank steak before I dry rub or marinate it, all the
excess fat trimmed from the chicken. I like making the gremolata to
add that final touch to the osso buco. I don't omit 'extra
unnecessary' steps from traditional dishes, like the brandy flambe in
coq au vin. I'm happy to make a compound herbal/garlic butter the day
before I'm going to use it so the flavors have time to permeate the
mixture. I've even been known to try the seven-sided potato shaping
you see in classic French dishes (tournet? tournons? something like
that). I scissors off the pointy ends of artichoke leaves.

And I always taste and smell during and at the end of cooking. It
drives me crazy to see tv cooks prepare a dish and serve it up without
ever tasting it or at least giving it a good sniff test.

I think part of this comes from having started serious cooking with
Chinese stirfry dishes where the preparations take far longer than the
cooking and tradition dictates things like whether to slice that
carrot into coins, ovals (diagonal), shreds, roll cut or dice. During
my brief commercial kitchen stints I learned the same lesson:
complete preparations are what enable efficient production of the
final dishes. Part of it came from slavish devotion to some of
Julia's directions, too. This is how you prepare Brussels sprouts....

Oh sure, sometimes we're in a hurry, what with work and family.
Fortunately, since retirement I'm able and willing to spend more
time. And I get positive reinforcement from an attentive and
(usually) appreciative audience to add to the feeling of
accomplishment. When I was working I would sometimes do substantial
amounts of prep work late at night for the next day's dinner. Among
its other pleasures, fussy cooking may be good therapy.

Those who think I'm just anal or suffer from ocd, may pass on to
another thread. Those who want to say how or where they like to fuss,
feel free. -aem