Big things in little spaces, or vice versa

I am not well known for having a great spatial sense. I always did terrible on those tests you take in school where you have to imagine what a flat shape would look like all folded up, or vice versa. By the way, whoever made up those problems must have been interesting to live with. I imagine them going around their house, looking for boxes they could tear apart, draw for the test questions, and put back together again at the insistence of their spouse, who like me probably always did poorly on those tests.

Thankfully these annoying shapes and boxes have no practical application in my everyday life, although I do have trouble judging volume -- for instance, fitting clothes into a suitcase of suitable proportions, as my husband would no doubt heartily agree with. And our refrigerator tends to be overfull at any given time, due not to large amounts of food but to enormous leftover containers, each of which contains roughly a teaspoon of food because I cannot properly judge container size.

But I defy anyone who DOES have a good sense of space to follow the directions I encountered in a recipe the other day. It said to julienne a red pepper, which I know as well as anyone means to cut into thin strips with an impossibly sharp knife, preferably without also chopping off one's finger. And so I did. I even managed to get reasonably even strips, which is not always the case when I'm distracted by the thought of my finger getting the chop in an unguarded moment.

I looked at the recipe to see how much of the pepper I was supposed to use. Instead of saying "one red pepper" or "half a red pepper" or something equally sensible, it said "1/2 cup." I looked again. No, actually it said "1/4 cup."

1/4 cup of 5-inch-long, thin strips? How on earth does one fit 5-inch-long, thin strips of pepper into a round cup approximately 2 inches across? This must be what they mean by imaginary math.

Was I supposed to stand them on end and see how many I could fit in the cup? Or maybe squish them all into the cup, in the act breaking them so they were no longer julienned?

This conundrum so paralyzed me that I was unable to continue with the recipe for quite a while (not unlike my reaction to math and science in school). In the end, I opted for a completely scientific, mathematical solution: I called my husband. No, just kidding. I grabbed a handful of pepper strips and threw them in the pan.

The remaining peppers, I judged, would fit very nicely in my mouth for a snack later on.