[baroomba]

Heh, I run into a lot of recipes where they have you cook in a tiny amount of oil and dump the pan out a couple times but you're still supposed to be "sautéing" whatever's in the last batch. Yeah, OK. Double the initial oil, add it again after each dump since there's still none left after the first time. Or else we're not doing what you claim we're doing, recipe. Which may also be fine, but still.

Or high-heat nonstick cooking with like one teaspoon of oil in the pan, heating it to nigh-smoke before adding anything else. LOL. Or steel or cast-iron temp + fat combos that make no sense and are guaranteed to give you a bad time. Either lots and lots of recipes are nonsense on this front, requiring modification of one form or another to be reasonable, or these people have magical pans that I do not.

[msluyter]

Weird, I've never had any problems on this front, so I'm guessing it's the latter. I use All-Clad non-stick pans.

[baroomba]

A lot of the time I'll see recipes call for heating non-stick on a medium- or medium-high flame with so little fat in ("one teaspoon of oil" or some similarly-way-under-enough quantity) them that it only covers like 1/4 or less of the pan surface, so most of the pan is heating dry, which AFAIK is a great way to turn the coating into a gas that's fairly bad for you. Though maybe that's folk-wisdom and it's actually fine to heat a nonstick pan empty? IDK.