Realising you cannot concentrate when it is too late or too slow or something else

For as long as I have lived I have enjoyed cooking spaghetti bologenese and eating it. It was a common dish when I was a child and the first dish I learned to regularly cook.

The past few weeks, however, have seen two horrible disasters cooking spaghetti bolognese:

1. a couple of weeks ago — I cannot recall the exact date — I added cornflour(!) along with milk to cut the saltiness of a sauce that I thought was too salty and that the cornflour had removed the flavour. Although my mother and brother were critical and I was a little chastised, they did eat the dinner despite their criticism.
2. today, after taking some care to ask my mother whether the sauce needed sweetening, and she said it did, I added what I remembered vaguely was a normal amount of sugar twice over. This was one, or one-and-a-half, (I do not remember exactly how much although it was merely four hours ago as I write) medium serving spoons of raw sugar. After turning the sauce off and coming back, I evaporated the sauce and served it, hoping for a really nice meal as most bologneses in the past have been.
   
   Yet, to my utter horror, my mother and brother found the sauce so sweet and so without flavour that they decided not to eat their full serving. Although my brother tried to offset the sugariness with salt and parmesan he found that this removed all the other flavours to such an extent that he abandoned the dinner as well. This was the first time this had ever occurred with a bolognese I had cooked and I got so upset that I slowly got into a horrible temper tantrum, hitting the kitchen bench with my fists for a minute or two.

This is an exact copy of the soup spoon I used to put sugar in the bolognese this evening. It holds about one tablespoon (I compared it with the tablespoon measure I had), so I could easily have put in two tablespoons of sugar

My mother and brother did not like having to deal with my temper tantrum and my insistence that they must take some responsibility for my terrible flaws in concentration and absolute inability to concentrate on tasting the sauce and on waiting for it to cook rather than go upstairs to read and listen to music on the computer. No matter how hard I try — and despite my family’s protestations I do try — I cannot keep my mind on the job for nearly so long as a bolognese takes to cook. This is why I cannot — or at the very least it is so tough that any effort will always be utterly futile — think about what needs to be done once the interesting process of frying off the meat, vegetables and tomato paste is finished.

I enjoy bolognese enough that a solution really has to be found to ensure I do not make the mistake of overseasoning. My concentration was, is and always will be so bad as to inevitably produce these sort of errors regardless of how hard I try. The trouble is that there truly is a problem in every solution:

1. if I let my mother with her orders of magnitude better ability to concentrate do all seasoning she will always be too slow if present at all
1. this was the first suggestion offered and it sent me into an immediate rage
2. if I remind myself not to over-season my concentration will always be so dreadful that I am absolutely certain to forget and forget and forget!
1. recent experience with two bad sauces shows that I am getting worse and worse and worse as I get older and there is zero hope I will recover even my awful past levels of concentration
3. if I put a sticker telling me not to over-season I am not going to have it when I need it and it will make the kitchen ugly if it is be large and prominent enough when I do need it!
4. if I use a recipe there is rarely any advice about seasoning that will ensure with anywhere near the acceptable (zero) risk that I avoid the problems experienced recently
5. if I give up bolognese I am restricting my food options and placing a burden on my mother that nobody wants — least of all myself
6. if I stay downstairs to do work I cannot take my computer with me and become unable to read the numerous large files I spend most of my time reading on the computer.
1. I also often have to listen to things that are trivial to anyone with my experience of politics
2. it is unlikely that merely being in the kitchen rather that upstairs at the computer is going to improve my concentration, especially when I, as was the case today, have to do things outside the house [shopping]

None of these offers an absolutely zero-risk guarantee that I will never, ever, ever, ever overseason again, as I have done in two of the last three bologneses to the extent of making them flavourless to my mother and brother. I was deeply upset that my mother and brother did not eat the sauce I cooked tonight, yet I know that my failure present immense doubt as to whether I can cook bolognese tastefully ever again. The basic issue is that I want to make a good sauce, but my concentration on the job is so terrible inherently that I can’t. My mother has always been too insistent that “I can’t” simply means

“I don’t want to” 

“I don’t want to try” or 

“I can’t be bothered” 

when at the very, very least it means

“it’s far, far, far too tough and not worth the effort” 

or the plain and intended meaning of:

“I am not able to”

I always wish in these situations that my mother and brother could accept that there really is no such word as “can” and make efforts to adapt to my inability to concentrate on tasks — almost certainly many, many times easier for them than it is for me to improve my concentration adequately. The fact, too, is that my concentration is sure to decline rapidly from its already terrible state as I age and that any attempt at a bolognese will almost certainly go awry in the future. Thus, regardless of the difficult burdens that I have zero desire to impose, offers by my mother and brother — whose concentration ability must be millions of times better than mine — to make bolognese needs to be taken seriously, although I possess suspicions that requests will not be answered.

The fact is that I am at a loss for a truly acceptable solution that does not require utterly impossible effort for me and for my family.