This year we've decided not to make our usual number of Christmas cookies. We're going to make maybe three or four batches, and leave it at that. In years past we've made up to 150 dozen cookies to share with our friends, family and coworkers. Yes, we are insane. Between the day after Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas our breakfast used to consist of breakfast + a cookie or two. And we still had hundreds to give away.
The tradition was one my husband started years ago when he worked for a fairly small company. He didn't really like his coworkers that much, so he didn't care about attending the annual holiday party. But at the same time, he didn't want to look like the original bad elf. So he would say that he had something else he needed to do at that time (the party was always held right after work on a weekday) and leave a huge tray of cookies for everyone to enjoy.
The selection was pretty run of the mill--oatmeal raisin, peanut butter, chocolate chip. He'd also send a tin of these to his parents (his dad liked the oatmeal raisin, his mom liked the peanut butter and they'd serve the chocolate chip at holiday gatherings).
Then he married me, and things got really out of hand.
I joined in the annual cookie orgy, and with two of us cooking (and a larger kitchen and more storage space) we could make more varieties. We still stuck with the tried-and-trues as our “core” offering, but we added many, many others, choosing a couple of new recipes each year. There were the bar cookies my grandmother called "magic cookies" (no idea why). They're made with German chocolate cake mix, melted caramels, chocolate chips and walnuts. The recipe came out of a package of Kraft caramels, and Kraft refers to them as Favorite Caramel Chocolate Nut Bars (wonder how they thought of that name?). There were sugar cookies, lemon bars, Mexican wedding cakes and orange balls. The selection changed every year, and we'd spend hours choosing and then calculating how many pounds of this or packages of that we were going to need to make them all. On average we'd make at least four batches of each variety, and we'd each make at least four varieties.
One memorable year we had been to visit my family in the Pacific Northwest in the fall, and had bought a huge bag of unshelled hazelnuts. I found a recipe for raspberry bars with a hazelnut shortbread crust, and it seemed like a great idea. It was not. If there's anything more tedious, time consuming and downright dull than shelling 10 pounds of hazelnuts, I'm not sure what it is. The cookies were fantastic (they damned well better have been), but I swore never to make them again because of the work involved. And for those who suggest buying shelled hazelnuts instead, I would say that unless one comes into a significant inheritance, or wins the lottery, this is NOT an option.
One choice that proved to be very popular but sounded just downright weird when I decided to make it was a cookie made with ground up Werther's butterscotch candies. The cookies spread to an incredible degree, and they're not recommended for anyone with extensive dental work about which they actually care, but they're a nice addition to a holiday cookie platter. The candy melts into the cookie dough and makes a very crisp, melty, almost lacy cookie. Broken up it would probably make a fantastic ice cream topping (although if you undercook them they're too chewy to break up, so they'd have to be slightly overdone).
We dismissed such obvious choices as the peanut butter cookies with a Hershey's kiss jammed in the middle of it, or anything with broken up starlight mints. Anything that appeared in a holiday candy or butter ad was right out. They're the kind of thing that anyone can make. We go for the unusual or, in the case of "the usual," the particularly good version.
Truthfully, most of the recipes we use come from pretty mundane sources. But they're really good versions. The oatmeal raisin recipe comes from the canister of oats. The peanut butter recipe is from The Joy of Cooking. The bag of morsels supplies the chocolate chip recipe. We do have two or three cookbooks that have been a source of some good selections over the years. The Rombauers put out a "Joy of Christmas Cookies" that has some good ones in it, and Nancy Baggett's All-American Cookie Book has lots of interesting recipes, along with lots of background information on the history of different types of cookies.
Starting in mid-September we'd start buying non-perishable baking supplies when they were on sale. Flour, sugar (both brown and white), chocolate chips, caramels, peanut butter, raisins. Then starting after Halloween we'd start buying things like margarine and nuts on sale. We never used butter (see unshelled hazelnut comment above), and besides, margarine keeps almost indefinitely (probably because it's one molecule away from plastic--but it makes decent cookies). Then we'd start making dough and freezing it. Chocolate chip, oatmeal and peanut butter dough all freeze exceptionally well. Right after Thanksgiving we'd thaw the dough and start baking off cookies.
We were fortunate (in a strange way) to have a finished but unheated attic. The closed staircase got to a temperature that rivaled the refrigerator for keeping the cookies fresh for several weeks. We'd pack them in tins between layers of waxed paper and put them on the stairs. Every holiday season we'd acquire a few more tins, mostly from gifts sent to our offices. In the end we probably had 25 tins and every year they were all filled to capacity. We also used Ziplock bags for sturdy round cookies that could be packed in rows, like peanut butter.
About a week before Christmas, we'd load up enormous platters (the ones that most people use to hold their 22 pound turkeys) and take them into work. The cookies would stay for about two days, by which time they were almost always gone. There were even people who would email or call me because they weren't going to be in the office on "cookie platter day" and ask me to make them up separate small plates for when they got back. In fact, when I left my last job I got many very distressed emails because my last day was Halloween--no cookies. But, as I said, this year we've come to our senses and besides, we now have four children.
So this year we'll make a few batches for ourselves and our kids and whatever friends or family happen by during the holidays, but the cookie frenzy is over. And I think we'll enjoy our cookies even more without the pressure of having to make dozens and dozens against a deadline. Those cookies were part of what makes the holidays so hectic. Baking cookies should be fun, not mandatory. When things stop being fun, we should stop doing them. Making hundreds of cookies used to be fun, partly to share the pleasure with our friends, and in part to see the looks on people's faces when we walked into the office with those enormous platters, but the thrill is gone. Now we'll enjoy the looks on our children's faces when they taste those Favorite Caramel Chocolate Nut Bars for the first time. I'm sure it'll be just as much fun, and even more rewarding.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Stuff It
At our family Thanksgiving, the general consensus was that it was the stuffing that really makes the meal every year. There was a lone dissenting voice in favor of the sweet potatoes as being the vehicle that carried the essence of the meal and evoked the Thanksgiving feeling. But the stuffing won out by popular vote.
The stuffing my aunt made was pretty close to perfect. I might complain that the onion and celery weren’t chopped finely enough, and that it didn’t have any sausage in it, but it had good flavor, at least. And if I had been making stuffing enough for 15 people, I might have cut some corners in chopping the vegetables too. It was a little mushy and wet, but that had more to do with what part of the stuffing I got—I like to get mine from the casserole that’s cooked with the bird, as opposed to that which is cooked in the bird. That bit of browned crispness on top of it, softened with the gravy, is an experience I look forward to all year. This year I didn’t get it, but since my husband likes to make a separate bird for us as a family, I’ll get it in a few days.
My husband likes Thanksgiving leftovers and misses them when we have the meal at someone else’s house. So on the years when we’re invited out for dinner, he likes to buy a turkey and all the other ingredients and make a second Thanksgiving meal on the Saturday or Sunday of that weekend for us to have all to ourselves. Then we get the bird, stuffing, side dishes, rolls, and dessert exactly as we want them. Oh yes, and we get the leftovers.
I have heard of people eating cold stuffing for breakfast the day after Thanksgiving, and I can’t say I agree with this tendency. I do like stuffing for breakfast the next morning, but reheat mine, please. Oh, and don’t forget the gravy.
When it comes to stuffing recipes, everyone has their own ideas and naturally, I think mine are the right ones. Stuffing made with fresh bread generally disappoints me. Even day old bread doesn’t do it. It has to be dry as dust with every possible hydrogen-and-two-oxygen-molecule wrung from it, preferably by commercial equipment. Fresh bread (or day old fresh bread) is too moist for stuffing. It comes out like a damp sponge with herb seasoning. Corn bread isn’t the right stuff either. Although it’s naturally somewhat dry and crumbly, it doesn’t take well to the seasonings I like in my stuffing, and is therefore right out. I confess that I am perfectly content with Pepperidge Farm bagged stuffing. Add some seasoning and dampen it with some chicken broth and melted butter and holiday satisfaction is just a short turn in a 350 degree oven away.
As to what seasonings are used, I have very strong opinions and won’t budge. No weird stuff, say I. And by weird I mean nuts, dried (or worse, fresh) fruit, wild rice and/or things like oysters. Would you make stuffing out of fruitcake or Uncle Ben’s? Would you put tuna fish in stuffing? Then why would you put dried fruit, nuts, rice or oysters in bread stuffing? I have a friend who maintains that what everyone really wants is mushy bread drowned in gravy. Well, pretty much, yes. But if that was really all I wanted, I could go out and buy a loaf of Wonder bread and a jar of Heinz gravy and have “stuffing.” I want mushy bread with lots of seasoning and some sausage that has some crispy bits drowned in homemade gravy. That’s what I want.
If using the aforementioned Pepperidge Farm bagged stuffing (the blue bag, please), you actually don’t need to add herbs. There are herbs already in the mix and they’re perfect. However, if you want to make the stuffing from scratch (and have dried out your bread sufficiently), then this is one place that dried herbs are superior to fresh. Because the goal is to have the stuffing be as dry as possible before moistening it with the butter and broth, fresh herbs just don’t work texturally, and their flavor is too tentative unless you use whole cups of fresh sage, in which case you’re changing the texture of the stuffing and making it as much herb as bread. You really need the dusty, powerful dried ones (I’ll skip the rant on throwing out spices that are so old they’re turning yellow…we’ve all read it before). Since I always buy the Pepperidge Farm blue bag stuffing, I can’t really dictate what herbs go in there—thyme and sage for sure, but beyond that I can’t really say. I just stick with the bagged stuff and let the food snobs make the most of it.
Other than herbs, stuffing needs both onion and celery. These need to be chopped pretty finely. I’ve had many stuffings in which the onion and celery both were in pretty big chunks (such as that I had this year). Doing this means that the vegetables upstage the stuffing itself—not the idea of these ingredients. It’s hard when making for many people, but it’s really critical to the integrity of the stuffing that the pieces be smallish. I used to be convinced that my father thought that “diced” vegetables meant that the pieces were the size of actual dice.
Beyond butter or chicken broth (or a combination of the two) being used to moisten the stuffing until it just holds together, the other essential ingredient is a little cooked pork sausage. Not much—I used to use lots more, but sausage has an unpleasant effect on my husband, and I realized that it was pretty fatty stuff to be using too generously. But a little bit adds a wonderful savory flavor and a meaty component that works perfectly with the bready stuffing.
Once the ingredients are settled, preparation method is the other controversial topic. Some people insist that the stuffing has to be cooked in the bird. Others (mostly employees of the US Department of Agriculture, I’d imagine) cringe at the very idea, visions of Salmonella dancing in their heads. Although we’ve been being warned against stuffing turkeys for at least 10 years now, people are still doing it. It does add flavor to the stuffing in a way that a casserole in the oven never can, but it can also make the stuffing mushy and pasty. It’s not really possible to avoid it, but I think there needs to be some stuffing cooked in a casserole as well, so that there’s more crispy surface for those of us who want it. Otherwise the only crisp bits are those at the very back of the bird—hardly enough to go around.
We used to have a friend whose mother made something their family called stuffing balls. She’d take prepared stuffing and mold it into balls in her hands (not too firmly compressed—just enough to hold together) and then bake them in a 350 degree oven until hot and crisp. Thanksgiving was always at the mother’s house, and the stuffing balls were an annual tradition. Then came the year that our friend’s mom decided she was too tired to do the full family Thanksgiving at her house (this friend was the youngest of eight children, so his mother was both older and pretty tired by that time).
His sister-in-law offered to have the family to her house. This was nothing short of catastrophe to our friend and his wife—this sister-in-law was already pretty much a family pariah for a number of reasons (some food-related, some not), and had once served a pasta dish that included shrimp in whipped cream. Not shrimp in heavy cream sauce—shrimp in heavy cream that had been whipped (and, if memory serves, also sweetened). My friend and his wife (and all the other siblings and their respective spouses, with the possible exception of the hostess sister-in-law) begged the mother to make stuffing balls. I can’t recall if she did or not, but I remember thinking at the time that I understood perfectly their panic. Stuffing is what Thanksgiving is all about.
Turkey, after all, is pretty much turkey. Oh sure, you can baste it with various things—lemon juice, orange juice, chicken broth—or you can jam herbs under the skin or any of a number of other things, but basically it’s just turkey when you slice it up and serve it. And of course, most people have some version of sweet potatoes along with the meal, but so many people don’t like sweet potatoes that they become less controversial. Those who don’t eat them don’t care what recipe you use. Mini marshmallows? Brown sugar? Apple pie spice? If they’re not going to eat them in the first place, it’s all the same to them what you put in there.
Just about everyone likes stuffing, and just about everyone thinks their stuffing (or their mother’s stuffing, or the stuffing they’ve been eating every year since they were four) is the very best one. And for many people (me included) a Thanksgiving dinner without the “right” stuffing is a just a turkey dinner.
The stuffing my aunt made was pretty close to perfect. I might complain that the onion and celery weren’t chopped finely enough, and that it didn’t have any sausage in it, but it had good flavor, at least. And if I had been making stuffing enough for 15 people, I might have cut some corners in chopping the vegetables too. It was a little mushy and wet, but that had more to do with what part of the stuffing I got—I like to get mine from the casserole that’s cooked with the bird, as opposed to that which is cooked in the bird. That bit of browned crispness on top of it, softened with the gravy, is an experience I look forward to all year. This year I didn’t get it, but since my husband likes to make a separate bird for us as a family, I’ll get it in a few days.
My husband likes Thanksgiving leftovers and misses them when we have the meal at someone else’s house. So on the years when we’re invited out for dinner, he likes to buy a turkey and all the other ingredients and make a second Thanksgiving meal on the Saturday or Sunday of that weekend for us to have all to ourselves. Then we get the bird, stuffing, side dishes, rolls, and dessert exactly as we want them. Oh yes, and we get the leftovers.
I have heard of people eating cold stuffing for breakfast the day after Thanksgiving, and I can’t say I agree with this tendency. I do like stuffing for breakfast the next morning, but reheat mine, please. Oh, and don’t forget the gravy.
When it comes to stuffing recipes, everyone has their own ideas and naturally, I think mine are the right ones. Stuffing made with fresh bread generally disappoints me. Even day old bread doesn’t do it. It has to be dry as dust with every possible hydrogen-and-two-oxygen-molecule wrung from it, preferably by commercial equipment. Fresh bread (or day old fresh bread) is too moist for stuffing. It comes out like a damp sponge with herb seasoning. Corn bread isn’t the right stuff either. Although it’s naturally somewhat dry and crumbly, it doesn’t take well to the seasonings I like in my stuffing, and is therefore right out. I confess that I am perfectly content with Pepperidge Farm bagged stuffing. Add some seasoning and dampen it with some chicken broth and melted butter and holiday satisfaction is just a short turn in a 350 degree oven away.
As to what seasonings are used, I have very strong opinions and won’t budge. No weird stuff, say I. And by weird I mean nuts, dried (or worse, fresh) fruit, wild rice and/or things like oysters. Would you make stuffing out of fruitcake or Uncle Ben’s? Would you put tuna fish in stuffing? Then why would you put dried fruit, nuts, rice or oysters in bread stuffing? I have a friend who maintains that what everyone really wants is mushy bread drowned in gravy. Well, pretty much, yes. But if that was really all I wanted, I could go out and buy a loaf of Wonder bread and a jar of Heinz gravy and have “stuffing.” I want mushy bread with lots of seasoning and some sausage that has some crispy bits drowned in homemade gravy. That’s what I want.
If using the aforementioned Pepperidge Farm bagged stuffing (the blue bag, please), you actually don’t need to add herbs. There are herbs already in the mix and they’re perfect. However, if you want to make the stuffing from scratch (and have dried out your bread sufficiently), then this is one place that dried herbs are superior to fresh. Because the goal is to have the stuffing be as dry as possible before moistening it with the butter and broth, fresh herbs just don’t work texturally, and their flavor is too tentative unless you use whole cups of fresh sage, in which case you’re changing the texture of the stuffing and making it as much herb as bread. You really need the dusty, powerful dried ones (I’ll skip the rant on throwing out spices that are so old they’re turning yellow…we’ve all read it before). Since I always buy the Pepperidge Farm blue bag stuffing, I can’t really dictate what herbs go in there—thyme and sage for sure, but beyond that I can’t really say. I just stick with the bagged stuff and let the food snobs make the most of it.
Other than herbs, stuffing needs both onion and celery. These need to be chopped pretty finely. I’ve had many stuffings in which the onion and celery both were in pretty big chunks (such as that I had this year). Doing this means that the vegetables upstage the stuffing itself—not the idea of these ingredients. It’s hard when making for many people, but it’s really critical to the integrity of the stuffing that the pieces be smallish. I used to be convinced that my father thought that “diced” vegetables meant that the pieces were the size of actual dice.
Beyond butter or chicken broth (or a combination of the two) being used to moisten the stuffing until it just holds together, the other essential ingredient is a little cooked pork sausage. Not much—I used to use lots more, but sausage has an unpleasant effect on my husband, and I realized that it was pretty fatty stuff to be using too generously. But a little bit adds a wonderful savory flavor and a meaty component that works perfectly with the bready stuffing.
Once the ingredients are settled, preparation method is the other controversial topic. Some people insist that the stuffing has to be cooked in the bird. Others (mostly employees of the US Department of Agriculture, I’d imagine) cringe at the very idea, visions of Salmonella dancing in their heads. Although we’ve been being warned against stuffing turkeys for at least 10 years now, people are still doing it. It does add flavor to the stuffing in a way that a casserole in the oven never can, but it can also make the stuffing mushy and pasty. It’s not really possible to avoid it, but I think there needs to be some stuffing cooked in a casserole as well, so that there’s more crispy surface for those of us who want it. Otherwise the only crisp bits are those at the very back of the bird—hardly enough to go around.
We used to have a friend whose mother made something their family called stuffing balls. She’d take prepared stuffing and mold it into balls in her hands (not too firmly compressed—just enough to hold together) and then bake them in a 350 degree oven until hot and crisp. Thanksgiving was always at the mother’s house, and the stuffing balls were an annual tradition. Then came the year that our friend’s mom decided she was too tired to do the full family Thanksgiving at her house (this friend was the youngest of eight children, so his mother was both older and pretty tired by that time).
His sister-in-law offered to have the family to her house. This was nothing short of catastrophe to our friend and his wife—this sister-in-law was already pretty much a family pariah for a number of reasons (some food-related, some not), and had once served a pasta dish that included shrimp in whipped cream. Not shrimp in heavy cream sauce—shrimp in heavy cream that had been whipped (and, if memory serves, also sweetened). My friend and his wife (and all the other siblings and their respective spouses, with the possible exception of the hostess sister-in-law) begged the mother to make stuffing balls. I can’t recall if she did or not, but I remember thinking at the time that I understood perfectly their panic. Stuffing is what Thanksgiving is all about.
Turkey, after all, is pretty much turkey. Oh sure, you can baste it with various things—lemon juice, orange juice, chicken broth—or you can jam herbs under the skin or any of a number of other things, but basically it’s just turkey when you slice it up and serve it. And of course, most people have some version of sweet potatoes along with the meal, but so many people don’t like sweet potatoes that they become less controversial. Those who don’t eat them don’t care what recipe you use. Mini marshmallows? Brown sugar? Apple pie spice? If they’re not going to eat them in the first place, it’s all the same to them what you put in there.
Just about everyone likes stuffing, and just about everyone thinks their stuffing (or their mother’s stuffing, or the stuffing they’ve been eating every year since they were four) is the very best one. And for many people (me included) a Thanksgiving dinner without the “right” stuffing is a just a turkey dinner.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving has snuck up on me this year. In part I think that’s because I’ve been pretty preoccupied with a new baby and three other kids, and in part it’s because I’m not contributing anything to the Thanksgiving meal this year except a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread (which I’ve been instructed to purchase). My cousin, who is having Thanksgiving at her house this year, decreed that any family with a baby younger than one month old was not required to provide anything substantial. I had to beg to be allowed to bring bread.
However, now that I’m fully in the throes of Thanksgiving, I’ve been reading holiday magazines and looking at holiday recipes (it helps to pass the time between feedings). These days I’m a big fan of Thanksgiving, but I remember as a kid feeling that it was a wasted holiday. After all, there were no presents, no candy or costumes, no fireworks, you didn’t even get to stay up until midnight. Thanksgiving was a “talking” holiday.
Talking holidays were the ones where the grownups sat around talking for hours, and us kids were bored because we didn’t care about the conversation, and after awhile we didn’t even want to play with each other. We just wanted to go home and watch TV. Memorial Day and Labor Day were also talking holidays. The only holidays more pointless and less fun than talking holidays were the ones like Washington’s Birthday (as it was then—not President’s Day) and Veteran’s Day—they were only good for a day off from school.
Now that I’m a grown up myself, I find that Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. Besides the talking, which I now enjoy, I’ve developed a greater interest in food and Thanksgiving, as we all know, is all about the food. Because of this, I read the aforementioned holiday cooking magazines and cookbooks quite avidly, and I’ve noticed some things that I find tedious or unappealing, or both.
I just read Mark Bittman’s column in the New York Times last week in which he gave a sort of formula for stuffing or dressing. He claimed (rightly) that it was dressing rather than stuffing because he liked it cooked alongside the turkey, rather than in it. He feels that cooking it inside the bird makes it soggy and overly mushy. That happens to be how I like my stuffing, but I also like some of what’s cooked in a casserole with the turkey, so I can get that crisp top and drown it with gravy.
In any event, his “formula” called for bread, fat (he recommended butter), nuts for crunch, and something interesting as an add-in, such as apple, chestnuts, or sausage. Let me say right now that I always use Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix, so I’m sure there are plenty of food professionals out there who would scorn my opinion as that of a philistine. However, I must protest a couple of Mr. Bittman’s suggestions. First, nuts do not belong in stuffing. I don’t care for nut breads, either. The contrast between the very firm crunch of the nut and the mush of the bread is just too much contrast for me. Second, while I heartily agree that sausage is excellent in stuffing, I can’t bear weird ingredients like apple, dried fruit, chestnuts, or oysters. Stuffing is supposed to be savory—keep the dried fruit out of it.
Also in my reading, I’ve come across several suggestions for stuffing not made with bread at all. Often recommended are things like wild rice, bulger, barley, and even quinoa. Any of these might be fine on any other day, but on Thanksgiving bread stuffing is the only way to go. If I were served one of those grain-based stuffings instead of bread stuffing, I’d feel like there was a huge hole in my Thanksgiving holiday.
Another suggestion I’ve read many times is for potatoes other than mashed. This is just wrong. Au gratin potatoes, twice baked potatoes, any of these preparations is, again, fine for a non-holiday meal. But Thanksgiving calls for mashed potatoes. After all, mashed potatoes and gravy is a classic. Who ever heard of au gratin potatoes and gravy? Ick.
And then I must protest the thousands of “new” ways to prepare turkey. I don’t mean the dozens of variations on herbs, rubs, and basting liquids. I mean all the ways they encourage cooking a turkey besides simply roasting it. What’s wrong with roasting it? We’ve been doing that for hundreds of years now, and it’s always worked fine for me.
But no, now we’re urged to deep fry it, or grill it, or smoke it. A friend of mine’s mother-in-law smoked their turkey one year, and my friend said it was the most disgusting thing she’d ever tasted. I can’t say if that’s because the mother-in-law is generally a pretty poor cook, or if smoked whole turkey is just a bad idea. I had deep fried turkey at a wedding one time (don’t ask—I’m not sure why), and it was fine, but boring. It tasted OK, but it was just turkey with deep fried coating on it. I really couldn’t see the point.
The other fad, which seems to show no signs of faltering or fading, is brining a turkey. That is, soaking it in a bath of salt water with some spice in it for a couple of days. Again, the appeal of this eludes me. The same chefs and food writers who scorn commercial turkeys (like Butterball) because they’re injected with salty water are perfectly OK soaking an organic free-range turkey in a similar salt water solution for a day or two before cooking. Seems to me it amounts to the same thing in the end.
I freely admit that I’m a Thanksgiving traditionalist and don’t want to deviate from the familiar. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, a vegetable or two, some rolls and butter, and a little dessert are all I ask for. I don’t require sweet potatoes. I can take them or leave them. And I prefer my turkey roasted, and wish all of those faddish ways of cooking turkey would go away. I guess some people get tired of the same meal year after year, but since it’s 364 days from one Thanksgiving to the next, I actually look forward to the same thing we had last year.
However, now that I’m fully in the throes of Thanksgiving, I’ve been reading holiday magazines and looking at holiday recipes (it helps to pass the time between feedings). These days I’m a big fan of Thanksgiving, but I remember as a kid feeling that it was a wasted holiday. After all, there were no presents, no candy or costumes, no fireworks, you didn’t even get to stay up until midnight. Thanksgiving was a “talking” holiday.
Talking holidays were the ones where the grownups sat around talking for hours, and us kids were bored because we didn’t care about the conversation, and after awhile we didn’t even want to play with each other. We just wanted to go home and watch TV. Memorial Day and Labor Day were also talking holidays. The only holidays more pointless and less fun than talking holidays were the ones like Washington’s Birthday (as it was then—not President’s Day) and Veteran’s Day—they were only good for a day off from school.
Now that I’m a grown up myself, I find that Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. Besides the talking, which I now enjoy, I’ve developed a greater interest in food and Thanksgiving, as we all know, is all about the food. Because of this, I read the aforementioned holiday cooking magazines and cookbooks quite avidly, and I’ve noticed some things that I find tedious or unappealing, or both.
I just read Mark Bittman’s column in the New York Times last week in which he gave a sort of formula for stuffing or dressing. He claimed (rightly) that it was dressing rather than stuffing because he liked it cooked alongside the turkey, rather than in it. He feels that cooking it inside the bird makes it soggy and overly mushy. That happens to be how I like my stuffing, but I also like some of what’s cooked in a casserole with the turkey, so I can get that crisp top and drown it with gravy.
In any event, his “formula” called for bread, fat (he recommended butter), nuts for crunch, and something interesting as an add-in, such as apple, chestnuts, or sausage. Let me say right now that I always use Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix, so I’m sure there are plenty of food professionals out there who would scorn my opinion as that of a philistine. However, I must protest a couple of Mr. Bittman’s suggestions. First, nuts do not belong in stuffing. I don’t care for nut breads, either. The contrast between the very firm crunch of the nut and the mush of the bread is just too much contrast for me. Second, while I heartily agree that sausage is excellent in stuffing, I can’t bear weird ingredients like apple, dried fruit, chestnuts, or oysters. Stuffing is supposed to be savory—keep the dried fruit out of it.
Also in my reading, I’ve come across several suggestions for stuffing not made with bread at all. Often recommended are things like wild rice, bulger, barley, and even quinoa. Any of these might be fine on any other day, but on Thanksgiving bread stuffing is the only way to go. If I were served one of those grain-based stuffings instead of bread stuffing, I’d feel like there was a huge hole in my Thanksgiving holiday.
Another suggestion I’ve read many times is for potatoes other than mashed. This is just wrong. Au gratin potatoes, twice baked potatoes, any of these preparations is, again, fine for a non-holiday meal. But Thanksgiving calls for mashed potatoes. After all, mashed potatoes and gravy is a classic. Who ever heard of au gratin potatoes and gravy? Ick.
And then I must protest the thousands of “new” ways to prepare turkey. I don’t mean the dozens of variations on herbs, rubs, and basting liquids. I mean all the ways they encourage cooking a turkey besides simply roasting it. What’s wrong with roasting it? We’ve been doing that for hundreds of years now, and it’s always worked fine for me.
But no, now we’re urged to deep fry it, or grill it, or smoke it. A friend of mine’s mother-in-law smoked their turkey one year, and my friend said it was the most disgusting thing she’d ever tasted. I can’t say if that’s because the mother-in-law is generally a pretty poor cook, or if smoked whole turkey is just a bad idea. I had deep fried turkey at a wedding one time (don’t ask—I’m not sure why), and it was fine, but boring. It tasted OK, but it was just turkey with deep fried coating on it. I really couldn’t see the point.
The other fad, which seems to show no signs of faltering or fading, is brining a turkey. That is, soaking it in a bath of salt water with some spice in it for a couple of days. Again, the appeal of this eludes me. The same chefs and food writers who scorn commercial turkeys (like Butterball) because they’re injected with salty water are perfectly OK soaking an organic free-range turkey in a similar salt water solution for a day or two before cooking. Seems to me it amounts to the same thing in the end.
I freely admit that I’m a Thanksgiving traditionalist and don’t want to deviate from the familiar. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, a vegetable or two, some rolls and butter, and a little dessert are all I ask for. I don’t require sweet potatoes. I can take them or leave them. And I prefer my turkey roasted, and wish all of those faddish ways of cooking turkey would go away. I guess some people get tired of the same meal year after year, but since it’s 364 days from one Thanksgiving to the next, I actually look forward to the same thing we had last year.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
That's Disgusting! (But I Love It)
Having had this baby, I’m now trying to make an effort to eat a little better. Early on in my pregnancy, I was so sick that the doctor told me that pretty much anything I could get in my stomach and keep there was fine. Then toward the end, I had a kind of a similar problem that turned out to be appendicitis (for which reason the baby was born a month early). Anyway, now that all those problems are behind me, I need to make a move in the right direction and try to start eating a little better.
Because of this (and because other people in our house need to eat), we were at the grocery store the other day. And as I wandered the aisles (as I am apt to do at the grocery store, going up and down and just browsing), I realized that there are lots of foods that I just adore, but that I wouldn’t admit to liking publicly on a bet. (Although isn’t that what I’m doing in this blog? Oh well, so much for winning that bet.)
I bought two boxes of chicken flavored rice-a-roni. I still remember the jingle they had when I was a kid and the stuff was pretty new—“Rice-a-roni: the San Francisco treat/Rice-a-roni: the flavor can’t be beat/One pan, no boiling, cooking ease/A flavor that is sure to please/Rice-a-roni: the San Francisco treat!” Of course you do bring the water in rice-a-roni to a boil, but really, who cares? I suppose in some way it violates the truth in advertising laws, but I’m not a lawyer. I remember making this stuff as a kid and thinking that it took the vermicelli hours to brown, so anxious was I to dig in to a plate of rice cooked in powdered chicken bouillon.
In fact, pretty much anything cooked with excessively fake chicken flavored anything is high on my list of favorites. Chicken flavored Stove Top stuffing comes to mind. Soggy bread with super salty chicken flavoring in it. Yum. Their big push when I was a kid was “Stove Top instead of potatoes.” Even when we started hearing that meat should be more of a flavoring or a condiment than the center of a meal, (and suggesting that meat be a condiment has to be about the most half-assed idea any nutritionist has ever come up with—stupider, even, than suggesting that we eat baby carrots instead of potato chips when we crave “something crunchy”) Stove Top was still plainly in favor of the meat/vegetable/starch meal configuration.
Sometimes the starchy thing is the whole meal. Kraft macaroni and cheese is a lunch. NOT that horrible thing with the packet of Velveeta. The even worse one with the packet of cheese powder that you mix with milk and margarine (don’t waste butter on it) and it makes a “cheese sauce.” I’ve come to realize that the world can be divided into two groups of people: Velveeta packet people, and powder people. Well, technically it can be divided into three groups, with the third group being headed by my aunt, who wouldn’t eat boxed macaroni and cheese if you offered her the contents of Fort Knox, a lifetime of perfect health, and eternal salvation too. But Kraft macaroni and cheese eaters can defend their packet vs. powder positions fairly vehemently, from what I’ve found.
Although I haven’t had it since I was about 12 years old, I’m pretty sure I’d still adore Oscar Mayer bologna on white bread with mayonnaise or mustard. It used to be a staple lunch of mine in elementary school. I think there’s a law that if you put lettuce on that sandwich, it must be iceberg, and you must serve the sandwich with Ruffles potato chips, and Oreos for dessert. Or possibly Chips Ahoy! which are the only chocolate chip cookie I think I’ve ever eaten where the bag tastes better than the contents. The thing about Oscar Mayer bologna is that you have to peel the plasticy ring off the outside before you make the sandwich. God knows what that plasticy ring is—plastic, most likely, since I highly doubt they go to the expense of making Oscar Mayer bologna in actual pork intestines and slicing it up.
Another great lunch is Chef-Boyardee Spaghetti and Meatballs. When I was a kid I’d also eat the ravioli, but now those don’t appeal, somehow. But the spaghetti and meatballs I can still eat. That supersweet tomato sauce. Those meatballs made of god knows what kind of meat. The noodles that have been in the can so long that they practically dissolve in your mouth. Clearly the people at Chef Boyardee are under the impression that "al dente" is the guy who runs the auto parts shop down the block. Bought two cans of that, too, I’m ashamed to admit.
As we moved around the grocery store, we stopped to get milk, and of course came up against the most tempting, yet embarrassing, display of all: Hostess cakes. It was all I could do to stop myself from grabbing a box of cupcakes AND a box of the new caramel HoHos. Plus now Hostess makes Zingers, which are pretty much just HoHos and cupcakes in a different shape, but which were made by Dolley Madison when I was a kid. They always sponsored the Charlie Brown specials on TV every fall and winter (unless Peter Paul beat them to it). And for years the packages of Zingers had Peanuts characters on them. They’re a little different now that Hostess makes them—something in the texture has changed, probably because what Hostess bought was the rights to the name, not the actual recipe for the cakes. Still, I’d eat a Zinger any day (chocolate or vanilla—I’ve never cared for the strawberry ones with flaked coconut on them).
There are other ghastly foods that come to mind, but many of them have vanished. I used to eat Pepperidge Farm frozen blueberry muffins, but they’ve disappeared. Microwaved for a few seconds, and spread with Fleischman’s margarine (again, no wasting butter on them), they were fantastic. Stouffer’s used to make both a frozen vegetarian lasagna (spinach and shredded carrots), and a broccoli with cheese sauce that came in a plastic bag that you thawed in boiling water. I think they still make the lasagna, but like everything these days, it’s had to be reformulated to go in the microwave, so it tastes different. The broccoli with cheese sauce just disappeared off the face of the earth. For awhile Green Giant made one (and may still, for all I know), but the broccoli was in little pieces—Stouffer’s were big spears—and the cheese sauce was American-y tasting, where Stouffer’s was more of a cheddar flavor.
Of course, all of these things are highly processed, loaded with sodium, fat, sugar and preservatives. And when you come down to it, they’re horrible in comparison to the “real” thing (a Hostess cupcake versus a homemade chocolate cake, or broccoli with homemade cheese sauce), but they’re what I grew up with, so they’re what I love. I like to think my kids won’t have an affinity for that kind of thing when they get older, but I’m sure they will. It’s the nature of American food society. Italians grow up longing for a nice plate of pasta with a fresh tomato sauce, and Americans grow up revering Chef Boyardee.
It’s a sad truth, but one we’re not going to escape any time soon. Until we as a society have a more refined palate, we’re going to have kids growing up thinking Hostess cakes are terrific. And that refined palate is only going to be developed if we have more time to cook and devote to food in general, which seems unlikely at this point. Part of our problem seems to be that as a society we want to appear to be familiar with good food, but we don’t want to take the time to make good food. We’ll spend $175 for two on a really good restaurant meal which we could have made at home for a quarter of the price, and served three more people into the bargain. And it’s not about buying organic this or free range that, it’s about just buying real food instead of cans and jars and things that are halfway made already. I’m as guilty as the next person of giving my kids frozen chicken nuggets, but I also feel guilty doing it.
It also doesn’t help that in this country, it is cheaper to buy a bag of frozen chicken nuggets at Costco than it is to buy frozen chicken tenders (or unfrozen chicken breasts), bread them and fry (or bake) them yourself. When you’re up against that kind of convenience plus the cost savings, it almost seems foolhardy to make chicken nuggets. And the ones from Costco are baked, not fried, and don’t have a whole lot of ingredients that look like nothing more than cancer-causing initials. This drives me crazy, but it’s difficult to justify making chicken nuggets when the alternative doesn’t seem too horrible, at least in the short term.
Clearly, I’m as much of a victim of agribusiness as the rest of the world, I just wish the rest of the world would realize their victimization. I think it’s OK to like the crap as long as you recognize it as crap, and try to reduce your crap intake, improve your palate, and step up to better things. I doubt there will ever be a day when I’ll truly turn up my nose at a Zinger, but I like to think there’ll be a day when I’ll eat the Zinger and know that it’ll be a long, long time before I ever eat another one, and that between Zingers I’ll be eating really good homemade chocolate cake.
Because of this (and because other people in our house need to eat), we were at the grocery store the other day. And as I wandered the aisles (as I am apt to do at the grocery store, going up and down and just browsing), I realized that there are lots of foods that I just adore, but that I wouldn’t admit to liking publicly on a bet. (Although isn’t that what I’m doing in this blog? Oh well, so much for winning that bet.)
I bought two boxes of chicken flavored rice-a-roni. I still remember the jingle they had when I was a kid and the stuff was pretty new—“Rice-a-roni: the San Francisco treat/Rice-a-roni: the flavor can’t be beat/One pan, no boiling, cooking ease/A flavor that is sure to please/Rice-a-roni: the San Francisco treat!” Of course you do bring the water in rice-a-roni to a boil, but really, who cares? I suppose in some way it violates the truth in advertising laws, but I’m not a lawyer. I remember making this stuff as a kid and thinking that it took the vermicelli hours to brown, so anxious was I to dig in to a plate of rice cooked in powdered chicken bouillon.
In fact, pretty much anything cooked with excessively fake chicken flavored anything is high on my list of favorites. Chicken flavored Stove Top stuffing comes to mind. Soggy bread with super salty chicken flavoring in it. Yum. Their big push when I was a kid was “Stove Top instead of potatoes.” Even when we started hearing that meat should be more of a flavoring or a condiment than the center of a meal, (and suggesting that meat be a condiment has to be about the most half-assed idea any nutritionist has ever come up with—stupider, even, than suggesting that we eat baby carrots instead of potato chips when we crave “something crunchy”) Stove Top was still plainly in favor of the meat/vegetable/starch meal configuration.
Sometimes the starchy thing is the whole meal. Kraft macaroni and cheese is a lunch. NOT that horrible thing with the packet of Velveeta. The even worse one with the packet of cheese powder that you mix with milk and margarine (don’t waste butter on it) and it makes a “cheese sauce.” I’ve come to realize that the world can be divided into two groups of people: Velveeta packet people, and powder people. Well, technically it can be divided into three groups, with the third group being headed by my aunt, who wouldn’t eat boxed macaroni and cheese if you offered her the contents of Fort Knox, a lifetime of perfect health, and eternal salvation too. But Kraft macaroni and cheese eaters can defend their packet vs. powder positions fairly vehemently, from what I’ve found.
Although I haven’t had it since I was about 12 years old, I’m pretty sure I’d still adore Oscar Mayer bologna on white bread with mayonnaise or mustard. It used to be a staple lunch of mine in elementary school. I think there’s a law that if you put lettuce on that sandwich, it must be iceberg, and you must serve the sandwich with Ruffles potato chips, and Oreos for dessert. Or possibly Chips Ahoy! which are the only chocolate chip cookie I think I’ve ever eaten where the bag tastes better than the contents. The thing about Oscar Mayer bologna is that you have to peel the plasticy ring off the outside before you make the sandwich. God knows what that plasticy ring is—plastic, most likely, since I highly doubt they go to the expense of making Oscar Mayer bologna in actual pork intestines and slicing it up.
Another great lunch is Chef-Boyardee Spaghetti and Meatballs. When I was a kid I’d also eat the ravioli, but now those don’t appeal, somehow. But the spaghetti and meatballs I can still eat. That supersweet tomato sauce. Those meatballs made of god knows what kind of meat. The noodles that have been in the can so long that they practically dissolve in your mouth. Clearly the people at Chef Boyardee are under the impression that "al dente" is the guy who runs the auto parts shop down the block. Bought two cans of that, too, I’m ashamed to admit.
As we moved around the grocery store, we stopped to get milk, and of course came up against the most tempting, yet embarrassing, display of all: Hostess cakes. It was all I could do to stop myself from grabbing a box of cupcakes AND a box of the new caramel HoHos. Plus now Hostess makes Zingers, which are pretty much just HoHos and cupcakes in a different shape, but which were made by Dolley Madison when I was a kid. They always sponsored the Charlie Brown specials on TV every fall and winter (unless Peter Paul beat them to it). And for years the packages of Zingers had Peanuts characters on them. They’re a little different now that Hostess makes them—something in the texture has changed, probably because what Hostess bought was the rights to the name, not the actual recipe for the cakes. Still, I’d eat a Zinger any day (chocolate or vanilla—I’ve never cared for the strawberry ones with flaked coconut on them).
There are other ghastly foods that come to mind, but many of them have vanished. I used to eat Pepperidge Farm frozen blueberry muffins, but they’ve disappeared. Microwaved for a few seconds, and spread with Fleischman’s margarine (again, no wasting butter on them), they were fantastic. Stouffer’s used to make both a frozen vegetarian lasagna (spinach and shredded carrots), and a broccoli with cheese sauce that came in a plastic bag that you thawed in boiling water. I think they still make the lasagna, but like everything these days, it’s had to be reformulated to go in the microwave, so it tastes different. The broccoli with cheese sauce just disappeared off the face of the earth. For awhile Green Giant made one (and may still, for all I know), but the broccoli was in little pieces—Stouffer’s were big spears—and the cheese sauce was American-y tasting, where Stouffer’s was more of a cheddar flavor.
Of course, all of these things are highly processed, loaded with sodium, fat, sugar and preservatives. And when you come down to it, they’re horrible in comparison to the “real” thing (a Hostess cupcake versus a homemade chocolate cake, or broccoli with homemade cheese sauce), but they’re what I grew up with, so they’re what I love. I like to think my kids won’t have an affinity for that kind of thing when they get older, but I’m sure they will. It’s the nature of American food society. Italians grow up longing for a nice plate of pasta with a fresh tomato sauce, and Americans grow up revering Chef Boyardee.
It’s a sad truth, but one we’re not going to escape any time soon. Until we as a society have a more refined palate, we’re going to have kids growing up thinking Hostess cakes are terrific. And that refined palate is only going to be developed if we have more time to cook and devote to food in general, which seems unlikely at this point. Part of our problem seems to be that as a society we want to appear to be familiar with good food, but we don’t want to take the time to make good food. We’ll spend $175 for two on a really good restaurant meal which we could have made at home for a quarter of the price, and served three more people into the bargain. And it’s not about buying organic this or free range that, it’s about just buying real food instead of cans and jars and things that are halfway made already. I’m as guilty as the next person of giving my kids frozen chicken nuggets, but I also feel guilty doing it.
It also doesn’t help that in this country, it is cheaper to buy a bag of frozen chicken nuggets at Costco than it is to buy frozen chicken tenders (or unfrozen chicken breasts), bread them and fry (or bake) them yourself. When you’re up against that kind of convenience plus the cost savings, it almost seems foolhardy to make chicken nuggets. And the ones from Costco are baked, not fried, and don’t have a whole lot of ingredients that look like nothing more than cancer-causing initials. This drives me crazy, but it’s difficult to justify making chicken nuggets when the alternative doesn’t seem too horrible, at least in the short term.
Clearly, I’m as much of a victim of agribusiness as the rest of the world, I just wish the rest of the world would realize their victimization. I think it’s OK to like the crap as long as you recognize it as crap, and try to reduce your crap intake, improve your palate, and step up to better things. I doubt there will ever be a day when I’ll truly turn up my nose at a Zinger, but I like to think there’ll be a day when I’ll eat the Zinger and know that it’ll be a long, long time before I ever eat another one, and that between Zingers I’ll be eating really good homemade chocolate cake.
Friday, November 03, 2006
Oh JOY
First an apology for my long hiatus. I got a new job, and just had a baby, so I was a little preoccupied. But now that I’m on maternity leave for three months, and have very little to do while feeding a new baby but think about food, I’m back.
And today’s topic is the new Joy of Cooking that’s come out. I just read the New York Times review of it, and the reaction was lukewarm at best. Yeah, me too. But I’ve always felt this way about Joy of Cooking. They didn’t have to revise it to make me think differently about it.
Brief history of Joy for those who care: Irma Rombauer evidently put together the first edition in the 1930s as a way of coping with her husband’s suicide. Since then, it’s become a family affair, with her daughter, and grandson getting in on the “family business” as it was expanded and updated. I once read something that compared followers of JOC to wine connoisseurs, with various factions having their favorite “vintages.” Some are devoted to the edition published in the 1940s, others to the updated edition from the 1970s. It was reworked again in 1997, and is now being reissued for a 75th anniversary celebration (along with—ta da!—a line of cooking utensils…more caustic words on that topic another time).
In 1997, the overwhelming reaction from the cookbook world to the overhaul was “This stinks.” Too many things had been removed for the devoted masses (although I kind of wonder just how many of those devoted masses really used the sections on canning and freezing foods). The masses also felt that Mrs. Rombauer’s conversational tone was overwhelmed. The 1975 edition remains the favorite, according to the New York Times article.
That’s the one I believe we have. Correction: that my husband has. I refuse to admit ownership to JOC. It’s on our bookshelf, but if the topic comes up in conversation, I point out that it belongs to my husband, not to me. Better Homes & Gardens? Mine. James Beard anything? Mine. Mastering the Art of French Cooking (vols. I and II). Mine. Fannie Farmer? Mine. Joy? HIS.
Why this prejudice against something so basic? you may ask. Why this choleric attitude toward a mere cookbook? Simple answer: because I find it to be vastly user-unfriendly, and thus resent the iconic status it has in our society above other, more deserving works. It’s the same feeling that celebrity watchers have (I suppose) when an actor or actress who has, to their mind, minimal talent and appeal seems to be grabbing attention away from those more deserving. Maybe to me, Joy of Cooking is the Paris Hilton of cookbooks.
The format of recipes is my primary objection to JOC. Most cookbooks follow a format of listing ingredients at the top of the recipe. They’re generally listed in the order in which they’re used, and described by what needs to be done to them (e.g. 1 cup flour, sifted). Joy uses what I suppose could be perceived as a more conversational format, but I find it very difficult to use. Instead of listing ingredients out, the ingredients are part of the recipe instructions. Thus you get something that resembles this:
“To
1 cup flour, sifted
add
1 tsp salt
Stir to combine. Then add
1 large egg, lightly beaten and
1 cup cold milk
Stir until mixture is barely combined. Then add
1 tsp finely chopped orange zest…”
I find this maddening. In order to recognize that I need to sift a cup of flour, measure out the salt and milk, have a lightly beaten egg ready to add to the mixture, and prep a teaspoon of orange zest, I have to read through the whole recipe and pick things out. It’s not a recipe, it’s a cookbook version of those word puzzle books you buy in drugstores that have you find words in a jumble of letters.
I’m all for the instruction of reading a recipe through and understanding what needs to be done prior to beginning, but to have to read through it and concentrate once on the ingredients, then read through it again and concentrate once on the order of ingredient combination and equipment, then read through it AGAIN to concentrate on technique seems to me a colossal waste of time.
When I go through a recipe the first time, I’m generally checking for sequence—when this gets added, what things might be combined separately and then added later. Then I run through it and make sure I understand what kinds of bowls, spoons, and cooking equipment I’ll need, and also what I’m doing to the various ingredients. OK so I know I’m separating eggs (two bowls), but are the whites then being beaten stiff and added to a mixture at a later time? Great, hand mixer is ready, etc. I prefer the ingredients all at the top of the recipe so when I see to add the dried sage, it’s not a surprise. Dried sage—yep, knew I needed it.
I really have no beef with Joy’s content. I’m sure it’s just as much a combination of useful basics and slightly out there “differentiator” recipes as any of the other “icon” cookbooks. My issue of Fannie Farmer will tell you how to make basic things like chicken stock or bread, but also offers preparations for pork chops and ground beef that pretend that anyone actually uses it to make dinner for their families. That’s the thing about the icon cookbooks—they would like to believe that people plan meals out of them, but they’re kidding themselves. You turn to them for recipes for white sauce and how long to roast a chicken. You don’t actually use their tuna noodle casserole recipe to make dinner. Evidently this new Joy has a section of “Joy Classics” from the older editions that include something called Shrimp Wiggle, which sounds like a real winner—shrimp in white sauce with peas served over toast. Welcome to 1952. Hurry up and wash your hands, Beaver; supper is ready and it’s Shrimp Wiggle. Gee, Mom.
But Joy’s recipe format is enough to drive me away from it for any use at all (that Shrimp Wiggle thing doesn’t exactly add to the appeal either, I must say). Every Christmas my husband makes peanut butter cookies out of Joy, and I can’t see how he manages it. It’s all choppy—you have to read each recipe 5 times to extract every morsel of information you need. It’s too labor-intensive for me.
So now we have a new version of Joy. I’ll probably flip through it at the bookstore, but you’ll still find the 1975 edition on my bookshelf, and I’ll continue to point out to anyone who might ask that it’s HIS. He brought it to the marriage, and if we should ever part (we won’t), it’ll go with him. Until then I’ll tolerate it on my bookshelf, but I don’t have to like it.
And today’s topic is the new Joy of Cooking that’s come out. I just read the New York Times review of it, and the reaction was lukewarm at best. Yeah, me too. But I’ve always felt this way about Joy of Cooking. They didn’t have to revise it to make me think differently about it.
Brief history of Joy for those who care: Irma Rombauer evidently put together the first edition in the 1930s as a way of coping with her husband’s suicide. Since then, it’s become a family affair, with her daughter, and grandson getting in on the “family business” as it was expanded and updated. I once read something that compared followers of JOC to wine connoisseurs, with various factions having their favorite “vintages.” Some are devoted to the edition published in the 1940s, others to the updated edition from the 1970s. It was reworked again in 1997, and is now being reissued for a 75th anniversary celebration (along with—ta da!—a line of cooking utensils…more caustic words on that topic another time).
In 1997, the overwhelming reaction from the cookbook world to the overhaul was “This stinks.” Too many things had been removed for the devoted masses (although I kind of wonder just how many of those devoted masses really used the sections on canning and freezing foods). The masses also felt that Mrs. Rombauer’s conversational tone was overwhelmed. The 1975 edition remains the favorite, according to the New York Times article.
That’s the one I believe we have. Correction: that my husband has. I refuse to admit ownership to JOC. It’s on our bookshelf, but if the topic comes up in conversation, I point out that it belongs to my husband, not to me. Better Homes & Gardens? Mine. James Beard anything? Mine. Mastering the Art of French Cooking (vols. I and II). Mine. Fannie Farmer? Mine. Joy? HIS.
Why this prejudice against something so basic? you may ask. Why this choleric attitude toward a mere cookbook? Simple answer: because I find it to be vastly user-unfriendly, and thus resent the iconic status it has in our society above other, more deserving works. It’s the same feeling that celebrity watchers have (I suppose) when an actor or actress who has, to their mind, minimal talent and appeal seems to be grabbing attention away from those more deserving. Maybe to me, Joy of Cooking is the Paris Hilton of cookbooks.
The format of recipes is my primary objection to JOC. Most cookbooks follow a format of listing ingredients at the top of the recipe. They’re generally listed in the order in which they’re used, and described by what needs to be done to them (e.g. 1 cup flour, sifted). Joy uses what I suppose could be perceived as a more conversational format, but I find it very difficult to use. Instead of listing ingredients out, the ingredients are part of the recipe instructions. Thus you get something that resembles this:
“To
1 cup flour, sifted
add
1 tsp salt
Stir to combine. Then add
1 large egg, lightly beaten and
1 cup cold milk
Stir until mixture is barely combined. Then add
1 tsp finely chopped orange zest…”
I find this maddening. In order to recognize that I need to sift a cup of flour, measure out the salt and milk, have a lightly beaten egg ready to add to the mixture, and prep a teaspoon of orange zest, I have to read through the whole recipe and pick things out. It’s not a recipe, it’s a cookbook version of those word puzzle books you buy in drugstores that have you find words in a jumble of letters.
I’m all for the instruction of reading a recipe through and understanding what needs to be done prior to beginning, but to have to read through it and concentrate once on the ingredients, then read through it again and concentrate once on the order of ingredient combination and equipment, then read through it AGAIN to concentrate on technique seems to me a colossal waste of time.
When I go through a recipe the first time, I’m generally checking for sequence—when this gets added, what things might be combined separately and then added later. Then I run through it and make sure I understand what kinds of bowls, spoons, and cooking equipment I’ll need, and also what I’m doing to the various ingredients. OK so I know I’m separating eggs (two bowls), but are the whites then being beaten stiff and added to a mixture at a later time? Great, hand mixer is ready, etc. I prefer the ingredients all at the top of the recipe so when I see to add the dried sage, it’s not a surprise. Dried sage—yep, knew I needed it.
I really have no beef with Joy’s content. I’m sure it’s just as much a combination of useful basics and slightly out there “differentiator” recipes as any of the other “icon” cookbooks. My issue of Fannie Farmer will tell you how to make basic things like chicken stock or bread, but also offers preparations for pork chops and ground beef that pretend that anyone actually uses it to make dinner for their families. That’s the thing about the icon cookbooks—they would like to believe that people plan meals out of them, but they’re kidding themselves. You turn to them for recipes for white sauce and how long to roast a chicken. You don’t actually use their tuna noodle casserole recipe to make dinner. Evidently this new Joy has a section of “Joy Classics” from the older editions that include something called Shrimp Wiggle, which sounds like a real winner—shrimp in white sauce with peas served over toast. Welcome to 1952. Hurry up and wash your hands, Beaver; supper is ready and it’s Shrimp Wiggle. Gee, Mom.
But Joy’s recipe format is enough to drive me away from it for any use at all (that Shrimp Wiggle thing doesn’t exactly add to the appeal either, I must say). Every Christmas my husband makes peanut butter cookies out of Joy, and I can’t see how he manages it. It’s all choppy—you have to read each recipe 5 times to extract every morsel of information you need. It’s too labor-intensive for me.
So now we have a new version of Joy. I’ll probably flip through it at the bookstore, but you’ll still find the 1975 edition on my bookshelf, and I’ll continue to point out to anyone who might ask that it’s HIS. He brought it to the marriage, and if we should ever part (we won’t), it’ll go with him. Until then I’ll tolerate it on my bookshelf, but I don’t have to like it.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Trade Off
There’s an article in the Washington Post food section this week about Trader Joe’s. The author had tried one of the D.C. area stores years ago after listening to his California friends rave about it, and decided it wasn’t worth it. Now that they’d opened one in his D.C. neighborhood, he was ready to see if maybe he’d been mistaken about it (to end the suspense, he’d decided he had been).
I too explored Trader Joe’s when I first moved near one. Prior to that I had been in one once to buy mascarpone cheese, which at the time I hadn’t been able to find anywhere else (now, of course, the mascarpone is next to the American slices in most grocery stores…OK, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but it’s much easier to find now than it was in the early 90s).
Trader Joe’s, for those not familiar, sells largely packaged foods. They have a little meat, a little produce, some decent cheese, but mostly they sell frozen foods and pantry items, along with fresh bread and a little dairy. According to the article in the Post, they carry products based on availability directly from the suppliers, which means that products may come and go with no warning at all.
When I lived in the D.C. area, I too had friends who raved about Trader Joe’s. One particularly enthusiastic group was the mothers in my son’s playgroup. Many of them were devotees of organic and minimally processed foods, and Trader Joe’s frozen products often fit those guidelines.
I tried to love Trader Joe’s. I really, really did. I bought frozen pot stickers, and organic cookies, and whole grain crumpets, and soy nut butter (BIG mistake there). When my son was born and started eating solid foods I offered him spring rolls and frozen fried rice and various other products. There was nothing that he (or I, for that matter) welcomed so enthusiastically that I felt I had to rush out and buy more.
And it was so expensive. A quick trip for a couple of things still set me back $35. And that was in addition to our usual grocery bill. A really extensive shopping trip there could be upwards of $50, and none of the things I was buying were in any way staples or “critical” recipe components. In fact, the only thing I did find there that I couldn’t find anywhere else (at the time) was almond meal. Now I can find almond meal in any of three grocery stores near me, so I don’t need Trader Joe’s for that.
As I think I’ve prattled about before, I love going to the grocery store, and at one point we used to go to two grocery stores to fulfill our comestible needs. One was the “primary” store, and the other was a supplementary store that filled in where the primary store fell a little short (our particular brand of cat food, a breakfast cereal my husband really liked, etc). So to add a stop at Trader Joe’s meant that our grocery shopping trip was over two hours. This, I think, was what really soured me on Trader Joe’s. It was a third stop, it didn’t really offer me anything my other stores couldn’t, and it added extra time on to our trip. And, it seemed, that extra 20 minutes or so was the space of time in which my then-infant son went from grouchily tolerating this whole grocery store thing, to protesting in a very loud, insistent voice that it was time to go home, dammit.
If I could have gotten something different and wonderful, or gotten better [fill in staple item here] than I could have gotten at one of my other two grocery stores, I might have been more enthusiastic. Somehow, even though I’m a grocery store fanatic, the allure of Trader Joe’s eludes me. This actually saddens me somewhat, because I always want to love grocery stores. I love knowing that on a day I’m feeling grouchy, or fat, or uninspired, I can go to a grocery store and feel like I’m taking a step in the right direction—I can buy the ingredients for a really great meal, or some healthy snacks to make me feel like I’m making a change for the better, or some new ingredient that I remember having read about in one of my cookbooks that I can experiment with.
In the case of Trader Joe’s, I feel like we’ve kind of let each other down. However, since the nearest one is a 35 minute ferry ride plus a car trip away from me, my guilt is somewhat moderated. I couldn’t go that far for a third stop, no matter how terrific the store was. Perhaps like the Washington Post columnist, someday I’ll meet up with Trader Joe’s again and find my opinion has changed. But until then, I’ll just remember that I really tried, and they really tried, and it just must not have been meant to be.
I too explored Trader Joe’s when I first moved near one. Prior to that I had been in one once to buy mascarpone cheese, which at the time I hadn’t been able to find anywhere else (now, of course, the mascarpone is next to the American slices in most grocery stores…OK, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but it’s much easier to find now than it was in the early 90s).
Trader Joe’s, for those not familiar, sells largely packaged foods. They have a little meat, a little produce, some decent cheese, but mostly they sell frozen foods and pantry items, along with fresh bread and a little dairy. According to the article in the Post, they carry products based on availability directly from the suppliers, which means that products may come and go with no warning at all.
When I lived in the D.C. area, I too had friends who raved about Trader Joe’s. One particularly enthusiastic group was the mothers in my son’s playgroup. Many of them were devotees of organic and minimally processed foods, and Trader Joe’s frozen products often fit those guidelines.
I tried to love Trader Joe’s. I really, really did. I bought frozen pot stickers, and organic cookies, and whole grain crumpets, and soy nut butter (BIG mistake there). When my son was born and started eating solid foods I offered him spring rolls and frozen fried rice and various other products. There was nothing that he (or I, for that matter) welcomed so enthusiastically that I felt I had to rush out and buy more.
And it was so expensive. A quick trip for a couple of things still set me back $35. And that was in addition to our usual grocery bill. A really extensive shopping trip there could be upwards of $50, and none of the things I was buying were in any way staples or “critical” recipe components. In fact, the only thing I did find there that I couldn’t find anywhere else (at the time) was almond meal. Now I can find almond meal in any of three grocery stores near me, so I don’t need Trader Joe’s for that.
As I think I’ve prattled about before, I love going to the grocery store, and at one point we used to go to two grocery stores to fulfill our comestible needs. One was the “primary” store, and the other was a supplementary store that filled in where the primary store fell a little short (our particular brand of cat food, a breakfast cereal my husband really liked, etc). So to add a stop at Trader Joe’s meant that our grocery shopping trip was over two hours. This, I think, was what really soured me on Trader Joe’s. It was a third stop, it didn’t really offer me anything my other stores couldn’t, and it added extra time on to our trip. And, it seemed, that extra 20 minutes or so was the space of time in which my then-infant son went from grouchily tolerating this whole grocery store thing, to protesting in a very loud, insistent voice that it was time to go home, dammit.
If I could have gotten something different and wonderful, or gotten better [fill in staple item here] than I could have gotten at one of my other two grocery stores, I might have been more enthusiastic. Somehow, even though I’m a grocery store fanatic, the allure of Trader Joe’s eludes me. This actually saddens me somewhat, because I always want to love grocery stores. I love knowing that on a day I’m feeling grouchy, or fat, or uninspired, I can go to a grocery store and feel like I’m taking a step in the right direction—I can buy the ingredients for a really great meal, or some healthy snacks to make me feel like I’m making a change for the better, or some new ingredient that I remember having read about in one of my cookbooks that I can experiment with.
In the case of Trader Joe’s, I feel like we’ve kind of let each other down. However, since the nearest one is a 35 minute ferry ride plus a car trip away from me, my guilt is somewhat moderated. I couldn’t go that far for a third stop, no matter how terrific the store was. Perhaps like the Washington Post columnist, someday I’ll meet up with Trader Joe’s again and find my opinion has changed. But until then, I’ll just remember that I really tried, and they really tried, and it just must not have been meant to be.
Monday, September 25, 2006
10 Things
I was browsing in the bookstore when I noticed yet another “1,001 Things to Do Before You Die” type book. There seems to be a “Things to Do Before You Die” book for just about any aspect of life you can think of. They’re kind of like Dummies books for those who fear their own mortality. Places to see, golf courses to play, books to read. But so far I haven’t seen a “1,000 Recipes to Make Before You Die.” I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. However, in the interim, I would like to offer 10 things to make before you die, along with my own commentary (you knew there was a catch). I could probably slice and dice this into a thousand subcategories: 10 kinds of cookies to make before you die, 10 desserts to make before you die, 10 dinner recipes to master before you die, 10 basics to master before you die, etc. And I may do that (hey, sometimes it’s hard to come up with something to blog about, even when you think about food as much as I do). And so here, in no particular order, I offer 10 things I think everyone should make at least one time before they die.
1. Real Mayonnaise: About 15 years ago, for reasons that I can no longer recall, I decided to make “real” mayonnaise. This was after the salmonella warnings, but I was still young enough to have that “It won’t happen to me” attitude (and in case you're curious, it didn’t). I used a recipe out of Craig Claiborne’s "Kitchen Primer." It was, I decided, yummy, but kind of funny-tasting. I later realized that the reason was because I was using olive oil with garlic in it. I should clarify that for as long as I could remember, my mother had tossed a couple of cloves of garlic into the jar of olive oil that she kept out on the counter for cooking (my mother was ahead of her time in using olive oil almost exclusively for cooking in an age when most people used butter, margarine, or what was then called “salad oil” but which we now call corn oil). This garlic-in-olive-oil thing was something she did without realizing that she could have killed us all—she created a perfect breeding ground for botulism. We never got sick, but she did use it without heating it (to make salad dressings and the like).
But, as usual, I digress. Anyway, in later years I’ve come to realize that olive oil of any kind is just too strong for mayonnaise. The garlic was OK, but the olive oil was just too much. For mayonnaise you really need to use…well, salad oil. I use canola today. I also use pasteurized eggs. There’s only one company that makes these that I’m aware of, but boy are they a great concept. You use them just like you use regular eggs, and they taste just like regular eggs. If you live in the Northeast I know for a fact you can buy them at pretty much any grocery store. If you live in the Northwest (as I now do), you’re on your own. I mail order them from the company that makes them. But then, I’m weird. However, using them means you can make cookie dough, and still let your kid lick the spoon, just like we always did. You can make a fried egg and not have to worry that you didn’t get it quite cooked all the way through. But this wasn’t supposed to be an ad for pasteurized eggs.
I believe that everyone should know how to make real mayonnaise, even if they do it only once. Understanding how the egg and the oil emulsify, and getting that to actually happen, is very gratifying and crosses over into many other areas of cooking, such as sauce and salad dressing making, which most people do on a fairly regular basis (unless all of their sauces are powdered out of a packet, and all of their salad dressings are Kraft, in which case my own opinion is that their culinary lives could be enriched a thousand times over with very little effort).
2. Apple Pie: Everyone should make a real apple pie from start to finish at some point in their lifetime. Make the dough for the crust (even in the food processor—it’s not cheating, it’s just smarter and easier). Slice up the apples, season everything, bake it. I’ve made lots and lots of pies, including apple, and again it’s one of those very gratifying experiences to take this beautiful golden oozy bubbly creation out of the oven and know that you did it yourself (with no help from Mrs. Smith!) and it wasn’t really that hard. Under the category of apple pie also falls everything apple—turnovers (if you’re using puff pastry, frozen is just fine; if you’re making them with short crust dough, go the food processor route), tarte tatin, and the like. Just make something apple, just once.
Sure, all of these things take awhile, but I’m not suggesting this is a weekly occurrence. But every fall I get an unquenchable urge to make an apple pie. I also go out and buy packets of #2 pencils and new spiral bound notebooks. I believe I mentioned that I’m weird.
3. Beef Stew: One year sometime in February I made a boeuf bourguignon (that is, a beef stew with a lot of red wine in it). The recipe came out of a Martha Stewart Living magazine, and it took about five hours to make (admittedly, a lot of that time spent in the oven unattended—the stew, not me) and used an entire bottle of wine. It was fantastic. I served it over mashed potatoes (see below), and while it’s not something I’d serve to my friends who were dieting, or concerned about cholesterol (it had about half a pound of bacon in it), it was truly a magnificent thing to have made one time. Was it authentic French boeuf bourguignon? I seriously doubt it. But it sure was tasty. I highly recommend this project for a weekend when the weather forecast is calling for a 100% chance of precipitation (rain is OK, snow is better), and you can get to the grocery store before the toilet paper-milk-bread crowd, and you have absolutely nothing else you must (or even want to) do. While it’s in the oven, you can amuse yourself with another bottle of red wine, and some Jane Austen, or Edith Wharton, or even someone like Tolstoy (although I always say the Russian writers are summertime reading…but that’s a topic for another time).
4. Bread: I can’t remember the first loaf of bread I baked, but I do remember being very intimidated by yeast. It’s amazing how many people are. Even though we’re talking about a single-celled organism, people are still cowed by the idea of it—what if the liquid I put it in is too hot and it all dies? What if it doesn’t have enough to “eat” and doesn’t work? What if it’s too old and doesn’t work? Yeast seems so temperamental and picky. I can only say that if you’re really concerned about it, go out and buy fresh yeast, an instant-read thermometer, and “proof” the yeast first. Mix up the warm liquid (milk, water, whatever—just use that instant-read thermometer to confirm that it’s not so hot that it’s going to kill your yeast, but that it’s not so cool that your yeast will catch a chill and not work—110 degrees is about right), add a tiny bit of sugar (most recipes say a teaspoon, but even less will work), then add the yeast. You don’t even really have to mix it. Just swirl it around and let it sit for five or so minutes and you’ll see it start to swell—kind of like that puffy craft paint you can buy, only instead of being an interesting color, it’ll be kind of a dull putty shade. That’s it—it’s working. Proceed with the recipe.
And if you’re really uncomfortable with the idea of yeast, you can use a recipe for beer bread I found once in a magazine. It is totally, 100% idiotproof. Mix 2 2/3 cups of self-rising flour with one 12oz. can of the very cheapest beer you can find. Seriously, if your grocery store sells that stuff in the white can labeled “Beer,” buy it. I usually use something like Pabst Blue Ribbon or Coors Light (whatever is cheap to start with and on sale on top of that). Decent beer—anything that has a description of its flavor on the label and doesn’t just stop with adjectives like “crisp” or “smooth” and leave it at that—will be too strong for this bread. Mix the flour and the beer together. Go ahead, mix the daylights out of it—you can’t hurt this bread. Add grated cheese, or herbs, or whatever you feel like, if you want to. It’s good plain or flavored. However, do NOT add salt—self-rising flour has enough salt in it, I promise. Dump the batter into a 9x5x3 bread pan sprayed with cooking spray. The recipe I have says to bake it at 375 for 50 to 55 minutes, but I’ve also had success with baking it for about 40 minutes at 425 degrees. It’s done when it’s golden-y brown, and pretty much looks done. This bread is perfect with chili or soup on a cold weeknight when you don’t have time to make “real” bread that calls for two rises and the whole deal.
I still think everyone should attempt real yeast bread (James Beard’s "Beard on Bread" has a great basic recipe for white sandwich bread), but if you want bread fast, the two-ingredient beer bread is the way to go.
5. Chocolate Chip Cookies: Every now and then when I’m in the dairy aisle, I notice that they’ve simplified yet again the process for “making” chocolate chip cookies. When I was in high school, they came out with the tubes of dough. You sliced them, cut them in quarters, and baked them. Then they came out with the little squares that you broke apart and baked. Now it’s just a gigantic cookie in a pan that you stick in the oven. All this to simplify chocolate chip cookies? How low does your IQ have to be not to be able to make chocolate chip cookies?
And spare me the “time” excuse. I don’t believe for one second that Busy Betty Workingmom is saying to herself “Gosh, I’m sure rushed this morning—good thing I have these little squares of cookie dough so I can make fresh cookies for the kids’ lunches!” People use all those cookie “shortcuts” on weekends so they can have their cookies without any trouble, not so they can make them in a shorter amount of time and hurry off to do other errands. When was the last time you saw an ad for those Pillsbury cookies that had Mom saying “C’mon kids—let’s make some cookies real quick and then hurry off to the post office! With these new Pillsbury Break-n-Bake Squares, we can have hot cookies and still get there before the main lobby closes!” No, they’re sold as a convenience so that Mom doesn’t have to drag out the mixer, soften the butter and go to the store for a bag of chips on Saturday afternoon.
Even if you mostly use those convenience cookie products, you should still be able to make chocolate chip cookies from scratch and (this is more critical) you should always have the ingredients on hand. Sure, sure, we all run out of eggs and butter now and then, but for the most part, the really basic ingredients that chocolate chip cookies call for should always be around. The chips keep pretty much indefinitely, so there’s really no reason not to. Plus, for those using cookie-making as a way to occupy a couple of hours with a kid who’s begging to go to the playground in the pouring rain, I would point out that making them “from scratch” eats up a lot more of that afternoon than opening a package, breaking up little squares of dough, and sticking them in the oven.
6. Scrambled Eggs: Often this is the first thing anyone cooks. I personally am annoyed by recipes I read for scrambled eggs that insist that they be puffy, soft, and slightly underdone. While I don’t mind a fried egg with a somewhat runny yolk (as long as I have a decent piece of toast to eat with said yolk), I find runny scrambled eggs to be repulsive. I like mine to actually be browning slightly. I think everyone should know how to make scrambled eggs the way they like them, so that if they’re starving and can’t think of anything else to eat, they can make a couple. Scrambled eggs are pretty nasty when made for large numbers of people anyway. In my opinion, if you want to make eggs for large numbers of people, find a good recipe for a strata and learn to make that.
However, I also include in the category of scrambled eggs things like frittata, omelets, and the Spanish tortilla (which are all pretty much the same thing). These things take a little more skill than scrambled eggs, because you can’t just shove them around in the pan until they’re all done. You have to learn the trick of pulling the cooked edge away from the side of the pan, and letting some of the raw egg run down underneath. Then you have to master the technique of broiling the top until it’s just done, and flipping the whole thing out on a plate (either folded or flat as appropriate, depending on whether you’re making an omelet or a frittata/tortilla, respectively). Scrambled eggs have a kind of breakfast stigma, whereas all these other things can also fill in at lunch, dinner, or even as an hors d’oeuvre.
7. Mashed Potatoes: This was one of the first things I cooked. And from that experience I can pass on a piece of advice that will save you from having to throw out a whole batch of mashed potatoes and start over: DO NOT make them in a food processor. You may already know this, or it may just not have occurred to you to try it yet. If the latter, just don’t. For those who care, the supersharp steel blade of a food processor cuts the cell walls of the cooked potato to ribbons, and all the starch escapes and turns your potatoes into a gluey mess. Of all the things that can be described using the old “library paste” cliché, mashed potatoes made in a food processor must be the most accurate. But you don’t know these things when you’re 14, so you do them, and you learn never to do them again.
Mashed potatoes is another food that has been taken over by the “convenience” trend. It’s a takeover that occurred years and years ago, when the first person thought of dehydrating potato flakes and selling them to be reconstituted with water or milk or whatever, and has been carried on by the “pre-made” mashed potatoes you can buy in the same area as the eggs in most grocery stores. My dad used to make me instant mashed potatoes, and we used to serve them as a side dish when I worked in my mother’s catering company and carry out. Here’s a tip—you can always tell instant mashed potatoes (I’m speaking now of the commercial ones, which are actually a lot better than the home product, but are still instant mashed potatoes) by how they “melt” when gravy is poured on them. They’re a product meant to be mixed with a liquid to create a semi-solid mass. While you’re making them, if you put too much liquid in them, they become more “liquidy” and you’d have to add more of the powder to tighten them up. However, when they’re on your plate, if you put gravy on them (really just another liquid), they’ll do the same thing they would have done while they were being made—they’ll become too liquid, and the gravy and the potatoes will seem to “melt” together. Don’t say you never learned anything from me.
At any rate, I think everyone should be able to make “real” mashed potatoes, and if they serve them, they should make them from scratch and never use either of the “convenience” products. The only thing I’ve ever heard of using mashed potato “flakes” for that sounds even semi-useful is as a coating on meats that were to be cooked. I’ve never tried this, but it sounds like it might be kind of tasty. However, those nasty little flakes should never be used for their manufacturer-intended purpose, in my snot-nosed opinion. And it’s just too easy to make really good mashed potatoes to use the ones in the refrigerated packet.
8. Fried Chicken: I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I’ve never had much luck with “real” fried chicken. The only times I’ve ever made it (maybe twice), it’s been raw in the middle and burnt on the outside. I know my mistake, but I also know that it’s such a pain in the ass to actually make fried chicken that I’m not going to make a batch just to confirm that if I’d let the chicken come to room temperature before frying it, it would have turned out fine. However, I think it’s important to be able to make it. If pressed, I can make it—I know how to coat it, and how hot the oil should be, and that sort of detail. I think everyone should know the ins and outs of making fried chicken, even if they never do. It’s just one of those classic American dishes that anyone who labels themselves as a cook should understand.
9. Thanksgiving (or other major holiday) dinner: When I say “major holiday dinner” I mean the all-American one with a roast turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, vegetables, rolls, and pie for dessert. Nothing against a Passover Seder, and if that’s the major holiday meal you most identify with, then that’s the one you should be able to make. But for me, it’s Thanksgiving dinner. Our Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Easter menus vary too much to be the “before I die” meals. Thanksgiving is always the same.
When I say I think everyone should be able to make this, I really don’t mean solo. As long as you can roast the turkey and do the stuffing yourself, and you know how to make the rest of the meal, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to call in reinforcements to actually provide the various side dishes and dessert. I was always responsible for the mashed potatoes when I was a kid (this was long after the food processor incident). I remember once opening a stick of butter, standing it up on end and giving it a good push down into that huge pile of potatoes, much to the horror of the woman at whose house we were eating. Her concern was not for herself, but for a couple of the other guests who were pretty fanatical about their diets, apparently. My reaction then (as it is now) was “If you’re not going to go all out on Thanksgiving, when are you??”
So I say, learn to do the bulk of it yourself, get everyone else to bring something, and ease up about what they may or may not have put in what they bring. It’s one meal on one day. Live a little.
10. Cheesecake: The Cheesecake Factory makes fabulous cheesecake, but it’s really not any better than what you can make at home. It’s just easier. Find a good basic vanilla cheesecake recipe and know how to make it. Yes, it’s probably going to crack when it’s cooked. So what? Eat it with your eyes closed. The great thing about cheesecake is that there are twenty million variations on it, all of them outstanding. I once made a crust for a chocolate chip cheesecake out of ground up Toll House cookies. I made the cookie dough without the chips, then cooked the cookies until they were just a tiny bit overdone, and therefore a little dried out, then used them in place of the traditional graham crackers (or Nilla wafers) that most crust recipes call for. I don’t recommend this unless you have a guest who can’t go more than 48 hours without a chocolate chip cookie, and you’re trying to get him to propose (because frankly, making a crust that way is a colossal pain in the ass that takes three times as long as grinding up some Keebler Honey Grahams) but just once, it’s yummy. And cheesecake lends itself to that kind of creativity, even for those who haven’t got a creative bone in their bodies (such as myself).
I should clarify that for all of these things, I don’t mean to imply that you should make them on a regular basis (unless you want to), or that you should have the recipes for these things memorized (some things, like mashed potatoes, you wouldn’t be able to help “memorizing” the recipes for, because they’re so basic). But I think everyone should attempt to make these things just once. They may not turn out, they may be fabulous, but either way, you’ll probably develop a new respect for people who make these things and serve them to you. When you understand the work that goes into making a cheesecake, your appreciation for the one you’re served at a dinner party goes beyond the thought of someone taking the trouble to make you a dessert. If you haven’t already got a feel for it, you move closer to the understanding of how the making and serving of food equates to the expression of love. And if you have already got a feel for it, you just deepen your understanding. Either way, you come out of the experience a more well-rounded and better-fed person.
1. Real Mayonnaise: About 15 years ago, for reasons that I can no longer recall, I decided to make “real” mayonnaise. This was after the salmonella warnings, but I was still young enough to have that “It won’t happen to me” attitude (and in case you're curious, it didn’t). I used a recipe out of Craig Claiborne’s "Kitchen Primer." It was, I decided, yummy, but kind of funny-tasting. I later realized that the reason was because I was using olive oil with garlic in it. I should clarify that for as long as I could remember, my mother had tossed a couple of cloves of garlic into the jar of olive oil that she kept out on the counter for cooking (my mother was ahead of her time in using olive oil almost exclusively for cooking in an age when most people used butter, margarine, or what was then called “salad oil” but which we now call corn oil). This garlic-in-olive-oil thing was something she did without realizing that she could have killed us all—she created a perfect breeding ground for botulism. We never got sick, but she did use it without heating it (to make salad dressings and the like).
But, as usual, I digress. Anyway, in later years I’ve come to realize that olive oil of any kind is just too strong for mayonnaise. The garlic was OK, but the olive oil was just too much. For mayonnaise you really need to use…well, salad oil. I use canola today. I also use pasteurized eggs. There’s only one company that makes these that I’m aware of, but boy are they a great concept. You use them just like you use regular eggs, and they taste just like regular eggs. If you live in the Northeast I know for a fact you can buy them at pretty much any grocery store. If you live in the Northwest (as I now do), you’re on your own. I mail order them from the company that makes them. But then, I’m weird. However, using them means you can make cookie dough, and still let your kid lick the spoon, just like we always did. You can make a fried egg and not have to worry that you didn’t get it quite cooked all the way through. But this wasn’t supposed to be an ad for pasteurized eggs.
I believe that everyone should know how to make real mayonnaise, even if they do it only once. Understanding how the egg and the oil emulsify, and getting that to actually happen, is very gratifying and crosses over into many other areas of cooking, such as sauce and salad dressing making, which most people do on a fairly regular basis (unless all of their sauces are powdered out of a packet, and all of their salad dressings are Kraft, in which case my own opinion is that their culinary lives could be enriched a thousand times over with very little effort).
2. Apple Pie: Everyone should make a real apple pie from start to finish at some point in their lifetime. Make the dough for the crust (even in the food processor—it’s not cheating, it’s just smarter and easier). Slice up the apples, season everything, bake it. I’ve made lots and lots of pies, including apple, and again it’s one of those very gratifying experiences to take this beautiful golden oozy bubbly creation out of the oven and know that you did it yourself (with no help from Mrs. Smith!) and it wasn’t really that hard. Under the category of apple pie also falls everything apple—turnovers (if you’re using puff pastry, frozen is just fine; if you’re making them with short crust dough, go the food processor route), tarte tatin, and the like. Just make something apple, just once.
Sure, all of these things take awhile, but I’m not suggesting this is a weekly occurrence. But every fall I get an unquenchable urge to make an apple pie. I also go out and buy packets of #2 pencils and new spiral bound notebooks. I believe I mentioned that I’m weird.
3. Beef Stew: One year sometime in February I made a boeuf bourguignon (that is, a beef stew with a lot of red wine in it). The recipe came out of a Martha Stewart Living magazine, and it took about five hours to make (admittedly, a lot of that time spent in the oven unattended—the stew, not me) and used an entire bottle of wine. It was fantastic. I served it over mashed potatoes (see below), and while it’s not something I’d serve to my friends who were dieting, or concerned about cholesterol (it had about half a pound of bacon in it), it was truly a magnificent thing to have made one time. Was it authentic French boeuf bourguignon? I seriously doubt it. But it sure was tasty. I highly recommend this project for a weekend when the weather forecast is calling for a 100% chance of precipitation (rain is OK, snow is better), and you can get to the grocery store before the toilet paper-milk-bread crowd, and you have absolutely nothing else you must (or even want to) do. While it’s in the oven, you can amuse yourself with another bottle of red wine, and some Jane Austen, or Edith Wharton, or even someone like Tolstoy (although I always say the Russian writers are summertime reading…but that’s a topic for another time).
4. Bread: I can’t remember the first loaf of bread I baked, but I do remember being very intimidated by yeast. It’s amazing how many people are. Even though we’re talking about a single-celled organism, people are still cowed by the idea of it—what if the liquid I put it in is too hot and it all dies? What if it doesn’t have enough to “eat” and doesn’t work? What if it’s too old and doesn’t work? Yeast seems so temperamental and picky. I can only say that if you’re really concerned about it, go out and buy fresh yeast, an instant-read thermometer, and “proof” the yeast first. Mix up the warm liquid (milk, water, whatever—just use that instant-read thermometer to confirm that it’s not so hot that it’s going to kill your yeast, but that it’s not so cool that your yeast will catch a chill and not work—110 degrees is about right), add a tiny bit of sugar (most recipes say a teaspoon, but even less will work), then add the yeast. You don’t even really have to mix it. Just swirl it around and let it sit for five or so minutes and you’ll see it start to swell—kind of like that puffy craft paint you can buy, only instead of being an interesting color, it’ll be kind of a dull putty shade. That’s it—it’s working. Proceed with the recipe.
And if you’re really uncomfortable with the idea of yeast, you can use a recipe for beer bread I found once in a magazine. It is totally, 100% idiotproof. Mix 2 2/3 cups of self-rising flour with one 12oz. can of the very cheapest beer you can find. Seriously, if your grocery store sells that stuff in the white can labeled “Beer,” buy it. I usually use something like Pabst Blue Ribbon or Coors Light (whatever is cheap to start with and on sale on top of that). Decent beer—anything that has a description of its flavor on the label and doesn’t just stop with adjectives like “crisp” or “smooth” and leave it at that—will be too strong for this bread. Mix the flour and the beer together. Go ahead, mix the daylights out of it—you can’t hurt this bread. Add grated cheese, or herbs, or whatever you feel like, if you want to. It’s good plain or flavored. However, do NOT add salt—self-rising flour has enough salt in it, I promise. Dump the batter into a 9x5x3 bread pan sprayed with cooking spray. The recipe I have says to bake it at 375 for 50 to 55 minutes, but I’ve also had success with baking it for about 40 minutes at 425 degrees. It’s done when it’s golden-y brown, and pretty much looks done. This bread is perfect with chili or soup on a cold weeknight when you don’t have time to make “real” bread that calls for two rises and the whole deal.
I still think everyone should attempt real yeast bread (James Beard’s "Beard on Bread" has a great basic recipe for white sandwich bread), but if you want bread fast, the two-ingredient beer bread is the way to go.
5. Chocolate Chip Cookies: Every now and then when I’m in the dairy aisle, I notice that they’ve simplified yet again the process for “making” chocolate chip cookies. When I was in high school, they came out with the tubes of dough. You sliced them, cut them in quarters, and baked them. Then they came out with the little squares that you broke apart and baked. Now it’s just a gigantic cookie in a pan that you stick in the oven. All this to simplify chocolate chip cookies? How low does your IQ have to be not to be able to make chocolate chip cookies?
And spare me the “time” excuse. I don’t believe for one second that Busy Betty Workingmom is saying to herself “Gosh, I’m sure rushed this morning—good thing I have these little squares of cookie dough so I can make fresh cookies for the kids’ lunches!” People use all those cookie “shortcuts” on weekends so they can have their cookies without any trouble, not so they can make them in a shorter amount of time and hurry off to do other errands. When was the last time you saw an ad for those Pillsbury cookies that had Mom saying “C’mon kids—let’s make some cookies real quick and then hurry off to the post office! With these new Pillsbury Break-n-Bake Squares, we can have hot cookies and still get there before the main lobby closes!” No, they’re sold as a convenience so that Mom doesn’t have to drag out the mixer, soften the butter and go to the store for a bag of chips on Saturday afternoon.
Even if you mostly use those convenience cookie products, you should still be able to make chocolate chip cookies from scratch and (this is more critical) you should always have the ingredients on hand. Sure, sure, we all run out of eggs and butter now and then, but for the most part, the really basic ingredients that chocolate chip cookies call for should always be around. The chips keep pretty much indefinitely, so there’s really no reason not to. Plus, for those using cookie-making as a way to occupy a couple of hours with a kid who’s begging to go to the playground in the pouring rain, I would point out that making them “from scratch” eats up a lot more of that afternoon than opening a package, breaking up little squares of dough, and sticking them in the oven.
6. Scrambled Eggs: Often this is the first thing anyone cooks. I personally am annoyed by recipes I read for scrambled eggs that insist that they be puffy, soft, and slightly underdone. While I don’t mind a fried egg with a somewhat runny yolk (as long as I have a decent piece of toast to eat with said yolk), I find runny scrambled eggs to be repulsive. I like mine to actually be browning slightly. I think everyone should know how to make scrambled eggs the way they like them, so that if they’re starving and can’t think of anything else to eat, they can make a couple. Scrambled eggs are pretty nasty when made for large numbers of people anyway. In my opinion, if you want to make eggs for large numbers of people, find a good recipe for a strata and learn to make that.
However, I also include in the category of scrambled eggs things like frittata, omelets, and the Spanish tortilla (which are all pretty much the same thing). These things take a little more skill than scrambled eggs, because you can’t just shove them around in the pan until they’re all done. You have to learn the trick of pulling the cooked edge away from the side of the pan, and letting some of the raw egg run down underneath. Then you have to master the technique of broiling the top until it’s just done, and flipping the whole thing out on a plate (either folded or flat as appropriate, depending on whether you’re making an omelet or a frittata/tortilla, respectively). Scrambled eggs have a kind of breakfast stigma, whereas all these other things can also fill in at lunch, dinner, or even as an hors d’oeuvre.
7. Mashed Potatoes: This was one of the first things I cooked. And from that experience I can pass on a piece of advice that will save you from having to throw out a whole batch of mashed potatoes and start over: DO NOT make them in a food processor. You may already know this, or it may just not have occurred to you to try it yet. If the latter, just don’t. For those who care, the supersharp steel blade of a food processor cuts the cell walls of the cooked potato to ribbons, and all the starch escapes and turns your potatoes into a gluey mess. Of all the things that can be described using the old “library paste” cliché, mashed potatoes made in a food processor must be the most accurate. But you don’t know these things when you’re 14, so you do them, and you learn never to do them again.
Mashed potatoes is another food that has been taken over by the “convenience” trend. It’s a takeover that occurred years and years ago, when the first person thought of dehydrating potato flakes and selling them to be reconstituted with water or milk or whatever, and has been carried on by the “pre-made” mashed potatoes you can buy in the same area as the eggs in most grocery stores. My dad used to make me instant mashed potatoes, and we used to serve them as a side dish when I worked in my mother’s catering company and carry out. Here’s a tip—you can always tell instant mashed potatoes (I’m speaking now of the commercial ones, which are actually a lot better than the home product, but are still instant mashed potatoes) by how they “melt” when gravy is poured on them. They’re a product meant to be mixed with a liquid to create a semi-solid mass. While you’re making them, if you put too much liquid in them, they become more “liquidy” and you’d have to add more of the powder to tighten them up. However, when they’re on your plate, if you put gravy on them (really just another liquid), they’ll do the same thing they would have done while they were being made—they’ll become too liquid, and the gravy and the potatoes will seem to “melt” together. Don’t say you never learned anything from me.
At any rate, I think everyone should be able to make “real” mashed potatoes, and if they serve them, they should make them from scratch and never use either of the “convenience” products. The only thing I’ve ever heard of using mashed potato “flakes” for that sounds even semi-useful is as a coating on meats that were to be cooked. I’ve never tried this, but it sounds like it might be kind of tasty. However, those nasty little flakes should never be used for their manufacturer-intended purpose, in my snot-nosed opinion. And it’s just too easy to make really good mashed potatoes to use the ones in the refrigerated packet.
8. Fried Chicken: I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I’ve never had much luck with “real” fried chicken. The only times I’ve ever made it (maybe twice), it’s been raw in the middle and burnt on the outside. I know my mistake, but I also know that it’s such a pain in the ass to actually make fried chicken that I’m not going to make a batch just to confirm that if I’d let the chicken come to room temperature before frying it, it would have turned out fine. However, I think it’s important to be able to make it. If pressed, I can make it—I know how to coat it, and how hot the oil should be, and that sort of detail. I think everyone should know the ins and outs of making fried chicken, even if they never do. It’s just one of those classic American dishes that anyone who labels themselves as a cook should understand.
9. Thanksgiving (or other major holiday) dinner: When I say “major holiday dinner” I mean the all-American one with a roast turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, vegetables, rolls, and pie for dessert. Nothing against a Passover Seder, and if that’s the major holiday meal you most identify with, then that’s the one you should be able to make. But for me, it’s Thanksgiving dinner. Our Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Easter menus vary too much to be the “before I die” meals. Thanksgiving is always the same.
When I say I think everyone should be able to make this, I really don’t mean solo. As long as you can roast the turkey and do the stuffing yourself, and you know how to make the rest of the meal, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to call in reinforcements to actually provide the various side dishes and dessert. I was always responsible for the mashed potatoes when I was a kid (this was long after the food processor incident). I remember once opening a stick of butter, standing it up on end and giving it a good push down into that huge pile of potatoes, much to the horror of the woman at whose house we were eating. Her concern was not for herself, but for a couple of the other guests who were pretty fanatical about their diets, apparently. My reaction then (as it is now) was “If you’re not going to go all out on Thanksgiving, when are you??”
So I say, learn to do the bulk of it yourself, get everyone else to bring something, and ease up about what they may or may not have put in what they bring. It’s one meal on one day. Live a little.
10. Cheesecake: The Cheesecake Factory makes fabulous cheesecake, but it’s really not any better than what you can make at home. It’s just easier. Find a good basic vanilla cheesecake recipe and know how to make it. Yes, it’s probably going to crack when it’s cooked. So what? Eat it with your eyes closed. The great thing about cheesecake is that there are twenty million variations on it, all of them outstanding. I once made a crust for a chocolate chip cheesecake out of ground up Toll House cookies. I made the cookie dough without the chips, then cooked the cookies until they were just a tiny bit overdone, and therefore a little dried out, then used them in place of the traditional graham crackers (or Nilla wafers) that most crust recipes call for. I don’t recommend this unless you have a guest who can’t go more than 48 hours without a chocolate chip cookie, and you’re trying to get him to propose (because frankly, making a crust that way is a colossal pain in the ass that takes three times as long as grinding up some Keebler Honey Grahams) but just once, it’s yummy. And cheesecake lends itself to that kind of creativity, even for those who haven’t got a creative bone in their bodies (such as myself).
I should clarify that for all of these things, I don’t mean to imply that you should make them on a regular basis (unless you want to), or that you should have the recipes for these things memorized (some things, like mashed potatoes, you wouldn’t be able to help “memorizing” the recipes for, because they’re so basic). But I think everyone should attempt to make these things just once. They may not turn out, they may be fabulous, but either way, you’ll probably develop a new respect for people who make these things and serve them to you. When you understand the work that goes into making a cheesecake, your appreciation for the one you’re served at a dinner party goes beyond the thought of someone taking the trouble to make you a dessert. If you haven’t already got a feel for it, you move closer to the understanding of how the making and serving of food equates to the expression of love. And if you have already got a feel for it, you just deepen your understanding. Either way, you come out of the experience a more well-rounded and better-fed person.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Time Out
I’ve just been having a go around in email with a friend about cookbook authors and recipe times. We were kvetching about Food Network celebrity chefs and how phony they are (more on that topic another time—I could go on for DAYS about my loathing of Food Network shows and their celebrity chefs). But the thing I think I find most aggravating about a lot of cookbook authors is that they vastly underestimate the amount of time it takes to make the recipe.
Let’s start with that darling of speed cooking, Rachel Ray. I’ll spare you my catalog of her various other sins—looking like she's twelve years old, saying “yum-O,” calling extra-virgin olive oil “E-V-O-O” and the like. She’s made her name on “30 minute meals.” I believe I’ve made two or three of her recipes (way back when I was duped into buying one of her cookbooks—never again!) and they took at least 45 minutes to make. A thirty minute recipe should not take forty five minutes. If the premise of your book is 30 minute meals, then you should deliver just that. And what's more, the recipe produced a meal that wasn't even very good. I guess she feels that if dinner is going to be ready in 30 minutes, you'll eat it and you'll like it, by golly.
I read an interview with her in the Washington Post some years ago, and when quizzed on the timing issue, her rather lame response was that some people might not chop as fast as she does. Yeah, and I’d like to add that some people may not have little Food Network kitchen fairies chopping for them, either. I’ve been told there are thousands of websites the gist of which is “I hate Rachel Ray” and that these sites point out that her 30 minute meals are miraculously made in exactly 30 minutes on her show. Right, that’s the idea, you say. No, no, I mean she puts an uncooked item in the oven, and twenty seconds later she removes the finished product. I’ve never seen her show (I’d rather give myself a lobotomy with an electric carving knife), but this is what I’ve heard the “We hate her” sites go on about (among other things). And I can believe it—it’s TV after all—but it’s not doable in a home setting. And yet people snap up her cookbooks and buy her line. And for not-very-good food, too.
There’s also the “Desperation Dinners” pair. These women, if you’ve never heard of them, promise a complete dinner in twenty minutes. They tell you straight up that you’ll be cooking for the whole 20 minutes—no time to sit down and put your feet up while something simmers or bakes—but you’ll have dinner pretty fast. I’ve made quite a few more of their selections (they’re not terminally perky like Rachel Ray, so I was willing to give their book more of a chance, I guess) and these recipes take more like 30 minutes to make. Plus again we have a similar situation to that which I encountered with Ms. Ray. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest rating, I would have to give these recipes a 10 for Most Boring Meals Ever. Maybe even an 11.
I must even (lightly) slam my dear, beloved Donna Hay for doing the same thing. She has several books that promise meals quickly. Most of them don’t guarantee a time, but there’s one that offers 10 minute, 20 minute, and 30 minute meals. Again, I’ve found that the 10 minute ones are more like 20, the 20 more like 30, and the 30 more like 45. In Ms. Hay’s case I’m way more apt to be charitable (amazing how much easier it is when the person is likeable, and not an irksome TV personality), and I know I probably don’t execute the prep as fast as she does. I also know from pictures I’ve seen that she has a 20 gazillion megaBTU stove that probably puts out 9,000 times more heat than the Kenmore in my rented house. And she may also cut things into smaller or thinner pieces than I do, thus reducing cooking time. Still, since Ms. Hay’s food is absolutely outstanding (99.9% of the time—she’s had her duds), I’m prepared to continue making her recipes, even if they do take a little longer than she says they will. The additional time is worth it for really good food.
The thing that I think sends me most around the bend about all of this is our national obsession with speed. It has to be faster, quicker, take less of my life. Why? No, I don’t have three hours every night to make dinner. But for something as important as eating, I can come up with an hour or forty five minutes to make something. We look at the process as something to be gotten through quickly so we can get on with life. But what’s more important in life than sitting down and enjoying your family and friends? You chose to spend the rest of your life with someone, or you’ve invested the time in developing a friendship bond with someone, why not take the time to create a pleasant meal and sit down and enjoy it with them? We’re in such a hurry to move on to the next thing that we don’t enjoy where we are and what we have. If we could slow down and derive some enjoyment from planning what to have, buying the ingredients for it, making it, and eating it with our friends and family, we’d all be better for it. We probably wouldn’t eat as much, nor as much of the food that has been labeled as “bad” by society. And as an added benefit, Rachel Ray would be out of a job, and therefore out of my face.
It pains me that right now my kids get microwaved food because I have to come up with dinner for them in under 10 minutes (you bring two 15 month olds home from daycare and see how long it takes before they want dinner—no, don’t, I can tell you; it’s 7 minutes, tops). But I refuse to have it always be so. I’m not saying that I have any fantasy that my kids will, at age 8, willingly dig in to seared duck breast with dried cherry-port sauce over gorgonzola polenta or anything like that, but I do like to think that someday we’ll all be able to sit down to something like roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and a vegetable, and I won’t have resorted to some Rachel Rayified version of it that uses commercial bottled seasoning because I don’t have “time” to measure out and mix up a combination of half a dozen herbs. Am I dreaming? Maybe. But if I have a goal, I have something for which to strive, at least.
Let’s start with that darling of speed cooking, Rachel Ray. I’ll spare you my catalog of her various other sins—looking like she's twelve years old, saying “yum-O,” calling extra-virgin olive oil “E-V-O-O” and the like. She’s made her name on “30 minute meals.” I believe I’ve made two or three of her recipes (way back when I was duped into buying one of her cookbooks—never again!) and they took at least 45 minutes to make. A thirty minute recipe should not take forty five minutes. If the premise of your book is 30 minute meals, then you should deliver just that. And what's more, the recipe produced a meal that wasn't even very good. I guess she feels that if dinner is going to be ready in 30 minutes, you'll eat it and you'll like it, by golly.
I read an interview with her in the Washington Post some years ago, and when quizzed on the timing issue, her rather lame response was that some people might not chop as fast as she does. Yeah, and I’d like to add that some people may not have little Food Network kitchen fairies chopping for them, either. I’ve been told there are thousands of websites the gist of which is “I hate Rachel Ray” and that these sites point out that her 30 minute meals are miraculously made in exactly 30 minutes on her show. Right, that’s the idea, you say. No, no, I mean she puts an uncooked item in the oven, and twenty seconds later she removes the finished product. I’ve never seen her show (I’d rather give myself a lobotomy with an electric carving knife), but this is what I’ve heard the “We hate her” sites go on about (among other things). And I can believe it—it’s TV after all—but it’s not doable in a home setting. And yet people snap up her cookbooks and buy her line. And for not-very-good food, too.
There’s also the “Desperation Dinners” pair. These women, if you’ve never heard of them, promise a complete dinner in twenty minutes. They tell you straight up that you’ll be cooking for the whole 20 minutes—no time to sit down and put your feet up while something simmers or bakes—but you’ll have dinner pretty fast. I’ve made quite a few more of their selections (they’re not terminally perky like Rachel Ray, so I was willing to give their book more of a chance, I guess) and these recipes take more like 30 minutes to make. Plus again we have a similar situation to that which I encountered with Ms. Ray. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest rating, I would have to give these recipes a 10 for Most Boring Meals Ever. Maybe even an 11.
I must even (lightly) slam my dear, beloved Donna Hay for doing the same thing. She has several books that promise meals quickly. Most of them don’t guarantee a time, but there’s one that offers 10 minute, 20 minute, and 30 minute meals. Again, I’ve found that the 10 minute ones are more like 20, the 20 more like 30, and the 30 more like 45. In Ms. Hay’s case I’m way more apt to be charitable (amazing how much easier it is when the person is likeable, and not an irksome TV personality), and I know I probably don’t execute the prep as fast as she does. I also know from pictures I’ve seen that she has a 20 gazillion megaBTU stove that probably puts out 9,000 times more heat than the Kenmore in my rented house. And she may also cut things into smaller or thinner pieces than I do, thus reducing cooking time. Still, since Ms. Hay’s food is absolutely outstanding (99.9% of the time—she’s had her duds), I’m prepared to continue making her recipes, even if they do take a little longer than she says they will. The additional time is worth it for really good food.
The thing that I think sends me most around the bend about all of this is our national obsession with speed. It has to be faster, quicker, take less of my life. Why? No, I don’t have three hours every night to make dinner. But for something as important as eating, I can come up with an hour or forty five minutes to make something. We look at the process as something to be gotten through quickly so we can get on with life. But what’s more important in life than sitting down and enjoying your family and friends? You chose to spend the rest of your life with someone, or you’ve invested the time in developing a friendship bond with someone, why not take the time to create a pleasant meal and sit down and enjoy it with them? We’re in such a hurry to move on to the next thing that we don’t enjoy where we are and what we have. If we could slow down and derive some enjoyment from planning what to have, buying the ingredients for it, making it, and eating it with our friends and family, we’d all be better for it. We probably wouldn’t eat as much, nor as much of the food that has been labeled as “bad” by society. And as an added benefit, Rachel Ray would be out of a job, and therefore out of my face.
It pains me that right now my kids get microwaved food because I have to come up with dinner for them in under 10 minutes (you bring two 15 month olds home from daycare and see how long it takes before they want dinner—no, don’t, I can tell you; it’s 7 minutes, tops). But I refuse to have it always be so. I’m not saying that I have any fantasy that my kids will, at age 8, willingly dig in to seared duck breast with dried cherry-port sauce over gorgonzola polenta or anything like that, but I do like to think that someday we’ll all be able to sit down to something like roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and a vegetable, and I won’t have resorted to some Rachel Rayified version of it that uses commercial bottled seasoning because I don’t have “time” to measure out and mix up a combination of half a dozen herbs. Am I dreaming? Maybe. But if I have a goal, I have something for which to strive, at least.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Let's (Don't) Do Lunch
I really don’t like lunch. Not that I don’t like to eat it, but I have problems with the concept of it. I can never think of anything good to have. I see suggestions and meal plans on websites and in magazines and I think “Who the hell has the facilities to broil a pork chop at the office?”
Going out for lunch on weekdays is a problem for me too. My tastes run to sit-down table service, but my budget is generally in the Wendy’s 99 cent Value Menu range. If I’m going alone, I often wind up at a fast food place. If someone is going with me (and I can persuade them) we’ll go somewhere they have waitresses, and a menu that doesn’t have fluorescent lights behind it.
I think a lot of my problem stems from the fact that I really don’t care much for sandwiches. I like hot sandwiches OK, but not cold ones. Lunch meat just doesn’t do it for me. Tuna, chicken, and egg salad are good, but they’re fattening, and how many times a week can you eat tuna salad before you start to turn into Charlie? My brother-in-law and his wife love sandwiches. Their idea of a terrific lunch is one that comes from a sandwich shop with creative combinations. I wish I had that mindset, but I find that creative combinations tend to strike me as weird or unpalatable or both. I don’t like anything with avocado or sprouts, and I really don’t like bread that has seeds or bits of oatmeal or something like that clinging to it.
To me the perfect lunch is one that consists of at least two courses (salad and main, plus dessert, if I’m feeling splurgy). It’s served someplace with an interesting or spectacular view (sidewalk café, or something overlooking the ocean), is accompanied by a glass or two of wine, takes an hour or so to eat, and is paid for by someone else. This combination of circumstances occurs rather less often than one might wish.
I suspect a lot of my reluctance to embrace lunch stems from my childhood experiences. In elementary school, my dad packed my lunch every day. I know I had more than one over the years, but the lunchbox that stands out in my mind is my Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs one. I would say that should raise a red flag right there: that the design on my lunchbox was inspired by a story in which the main character eats a poisoned apple. I was doomed. It didn’t help that my dad was as uncreative as I am when it comes to serving lunch.
Oh, to be fair this was in the days before packaged foods really took off, and everything had to be able to be eaten at room temperature because we had no microwaves. We had packaged foods, of course, but they were pretty much limited to things like little bags of chips, and cans of juice. There were no juice boxes, no tuna packaged with a little squeezy thing of mayo and some crackers, no premade Rice Krispy Treats or cups of Jello pudding. I remember one occasion when my father made me what turned out to be a chicken salad sandwich, but he used canned chicken (it took me years to realize this was the problem) and after one bite I thought that he’d actually made my sandwich with cat food. I think that pretty well sums up what my lunches were like, and also provides a rock solid reason why I’ve never eaten canned chicken again.
In high school things didn’t get much better for me. Now I was in charge of my own lunches, but because of my aforementioned lack of creativity, and the fact that my parents weren’t very helpful in buying me “lunch box” type foods to keep around, my midday meal tended toward chips, a soda and a candy bar. I’m not kidding. For years noon would find me with a bag of potato chips (or Fritos or Doritos—this was when they first introduced such wonders as Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch flavored Doritos), a Coke (because this was BDC—Before Diet Coke), and a Snickers or a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. And to answer the obvious question: I wore about a size 8 all through high school. Thank you, oh benevolent God of Metabolism (and by the way, what HAPPENED?)
If I happened to come into money, lunch went upscale to Roy Rogers or Burger King. I attended a private school in the middle of a city. The administrators realized that it was impossible to keep 150 teenagers in a school building for an hour every day without driving the teachers insane. Thus, we were permitted to leave “campus” for lunch and venture out to patronize the local businesses. For many years this meant The Liquor Store, or Giant. The Liquor Store was the closest establishment that sold comestibles (I think its real name was Van Ness Liquors, but I never really bothered to confirm this—we always called it The Liquor Store). It also happened to sell liquor, but knowing that there was a high school within walking distance, they were pretty sharp about carding people and none of us ever bothered to try to buy anything stronger than a grape soda from them. They also sold the chips and candy bars that were the foundations of my personal food pyramid, and a tuna fish salad sandwich that I liked, but which was a little pricey (hey, when a buck will get you a soda, chips and a candy bar, a $3 tuna sandwich is high living).
Giant (for those unfamiliar with it) is a grocery store and so of course you could buy the usual grocery-type foods, plus they had a bakery where you could get a seasonally decorated cupcake or two (nutrition seldom entered into our food choices, as you may gather). This was also the start of the salad bar era, and Giant had one, so sometimes lunch would be a salad with far too much Ranch dressing. This was about ten years before researchers would announce that the majority of fat in the average American woman’s diet came from salad dressings.
But in my tenth grade year, a local shopping center added a Roy Rogers to their array of stores. It happened that this particular shopping center was at a stop on the subway, so a fast food restaurant was a logical choice. The Burger King was further away, and technically we weren’t allowed to go there because the powers that be felt we couldn’t get down there, eat, and get back in the time allotted to us for lunch. As we got older and more willing to question authority (and, not incidentally, had “free periods” around lunchtime) we would sometimes walk down there anyway. We never got in any trouble for doing it, as I recall, and the directors of the school didn’t really care if we went, so long as we got back in time for our next class. They just had to set some kind of guideline.
So you can see that the nutritional and psychological foundations of my opinions about lunch were shaky at best. It didn’t get any better as I got older. When I went to work in an office, I found that I preferred “table service” restaurants to delis and the like (see aforementioned feelings on sandwiches). However, a proper restaurant meal costs about twice what a deli costs, and about five times what it costs to bring lunch from home. And of course, fat and calories are proportionally higher as well (generally speaking). My first job out of college paid $25,000 a year. A princely sum, but not enough to pay for my car, gas, clothes, rent, etc, etc, etc, oh and fifteen bucks a day, five days a week for lunch. I found myself deciding between turkey and roast beef far more often than I found myself asking for my check.
When I got married and started making dinners, I was making recipes that served four. My husband and I would generally eat our portions and then bundle up the rest in one of an increasing collection of Tupperware-type containers and take it for lunch the next day. To date this is the most successful means of providing myself with lunch. Oh sure, leftovers suffer somewhat in the microwave—their texture is often of a lesser quality than it was the previous night—but I do get a decent meal, and I don’t have to make myself a cold sandwich.
But now I have a new challenge confronting me. I have three children who require lunch on weekends (daycare provides their lunches Monday through Friday), and I am morally opposed to feeding them fast food both days (one day, perhaps, but not both). And of course, the day is fast approaching when they’ll require lunches to take to school. Of course, packaged foods are now widely available, and you can get just about anything in a pre-packaged form, but I dislike the idea of giving my kids Lunchables every day, so my dilemma is great. But as with every food quandary that I face, I can always use this one as a reason to investigate more cookbooks. Every handout of lemons is another chance to make lemonade, if you will.
Going out for lunch on weekdays is a problem for me too. My tastes run to sit-down table service, but my budget is generally in the Wendy’s 99 cent Value Menu range. If I’m going alone, I often wind up at a fast food place. If someone is going with me (and I can persuade them) we’ll go somewhere they have waitresses, and a menu that doesn’t have fluorescent lights behind it.
I think a lot of my problem stems from the fact that I really don’t care much for sandwiches. I like hot sandwiches OK, but not cold ones. Lunch meat just doesn’t do it for me. Tuna, chicken, and egg salad are good, but they’re fattening, and how many times a week can you eat tuna salad before you start to turn into Charlie? My brother-in-law and his wife love sandwiches. Their idea of a terrific lunch is one that comes from a sandwich shop with creative combinations. I wish I had that mindset, but I find that creative combinations tend to strike me as weird or unpalatable or both. I don’t like anything with avocado or sprouts, and I really don’t like bread that has seeds or bits of oatmeal or something like that clinging to it.
To me the perfect lunch is one that consists of at least two courses (salad and main, plus dessert, if I’m feeling splurgy). It’s served someplace with an interesting or spectacular view (sidewalk café, or something overlooking the ocean), is accompanied by a glass or two of wine, takes an hour or so to eat, and is paid for by someone else. This combination of circumstances occurs rather less often than one might wish.
I suspect a lot of my reluctance to embrace lunch stems from my childhood experiences. In elementary school, my dad packed my lunch every day. I know I had more than one over the years, but the lunchbox that stands out in my mind is my Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs one. I would say that should raise a red flag right there: that the design on my lunchbox was inspired by a story in which the main character eats a poisoned apple. I was doomed. It didn’t help that my dad was as uncreative as I am when it comes to serving lunch.
Oh, to be fair this was in the days before packaged foods really took off, and everything had to be able to be eaten at room temperature because we had no microwaves. We had packaged foods, of course, but they were pretty much limited to things like little bags of chips, and cans of juice. There were no juice boxes, no tuna packaged with a little squeezy thing of mayo and some crackers, no premade Rice Krispy Treats or cups of Jello pudding. I remember one occasion when my father made me what turned out to be a chicken salad sandwich, but he used canned chicken (it took me years to realize this was the problem) and after one bite I thought that he’d actually made my sandwich with cat food. I think that pretty well sums up what my lunches were like, and also provides a rock solid reason why I’ve never eaten canned chicken again.
In high school things didn’t get much better for me. Now I was in charge of my own lunches, but because of my aforementioned lack of creativity, and the fact that my parents weren’t very helpful in buying me “lunch box” type foods to keep around, my midday meal tended toward chips, a soda and a candy bar. I’m not kidding. For years noon would find me with a bag of potato chips (or Fritos or Doritos—this was when they first introduced such wonders as Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch flavored Doritos), a Coke (because this was BDC—Before Diet Coke), and a Snickers or a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. And to answer the obvious question: I wore about a size 8 all through high school. Thank you, oh benevolent God of Metabolism (and by the way, what HAPPENED?)
If I happened to come into money, lunch went upscale to Roy Rogers or Burger King. I attended a private school in the middle of a city. The administrators realized that it was impossible to keep 150 teenagers in a school building for an hour every day without driving the teachers insane. Thus, we were permitted to leave “campus” for lunch and venture out to patronize the local businesses. For many years this meant The Liquor Store, or Giant. The Liquor Store was the closest establishment that sold comestibles (I think its real name was Van Ness Liquors, but I never really bothered to confirm this—we always called it The Liquor Store). It also happened to sell liquor, but knowing that there was a high school within walking distance, they were pretty sharp about carding people and none of us ever bothered to try to buy anything stronger than a grape soda from them. They also sold the chips and candy bars that were the foundations of my personal food pyramid, and a tuna fish salad sandwich that I liked, but which was a little pricey (hey, when a buck will get you a soda, chips and a candy bar, a $3 tuna sandwich is high living).
Giant (for those unfamiliar with it) is a grocery store and so of course you could buy the usual grocery-type foods, plus they had a bakery where you could get a seasonally decorated cupcake or two (nutrition seldom entered into our food choices, as you may gather). This was also the start of the salad bar era, and Giant had one, so sometimes lunch would be a salad with far too much Ranch dressing. This was about ten years before researchers would announce that the majority of fat in the average American woman’s diet came from salad dressings.
But in my tenth grade year, a local shopping center added a Roy Rogers to their array of stores. It happened that this particular shopping center was at a stop on the subway, so a fast food restaurant was a logical choice. The Burger King was further away, and technically we weren’t allowed to go there because the powers that be felt we couldn’t get down there, eat, and get back in the time allotted to us for lunch. As we got older and more willing to question authority (and, not incidentally, had “free periods” around lunchtime) we would sometimes walk down there anyway. We never got in any trouble for doing it, as I recall, and the directors of the school didn’t really care if we went, so long as we got back in time for our next class. They just had to set some kind of guideline.
So you can see that the nutritional and psychological foundations of my opinions about lunch were shaky at best. It didn’t get any better as I got older. When I went to work in an office, I found that I preferred “table service” restaurants to delis and the like (see aforementioned feelings on sandwiches). However, a proper restaurant meal costs about twice what a deli costs, and about five times what it costs to bring lunch from home. And of course, fat and calories are proportionally higher as well (generally speaking). My first job out of college paid $25,000 a year. A princely sum, but not enough to pay for my car, gas, clothes, rent, etc, etc, etc, oh and fifteen bucks a day, five days a week for lunch. I found myself deciding between turkey and roast beef far more often than I found myself asking for my check.
When I got married and started making dinners, I was making recipes that served four. My husband and I would generally eat our portions and then bundle up the rest in one of an increasing collection of Tupperware-type containers and take it for lunch the next day. To date this is the most successful means of providing myself with lunch. Oh sure, leftovers suffer somewhat in the microwave—their texture is often of a lesser quality than it was the previous night—but I do get a decent meal, and I don’t have to make myself a cold sandwich.
But now I have a new challenge confronting me. I have three children who require lunch on weekends (daycare provides their lunches Monday through Friday), and I am morally opposed to feeding them fast food both days (one day, perhaps, but not both). And of course, the day is fast approaching when they’ll require lunches to take to school. Of course, packaged foods are now widely available, and you can get just about anything in a pre-packaged form, but I dislike the idea of giving my kids Lunchables every day, so my dilemma is great. But as with every food quandary that I face, I can always use this one as a reason to investigate more cookbooks. Every handout of lemons is another chance to make lemonade, if you will.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Taking the Fun Out of It
I just read an article about those places where you go and spend an hour or two each week assembling the ingredients for meals for a week or two (or a month) and take them home. Apparently this trend started in Seattle (not far from where I am) and has caught on in a big way across the country. The thing is, I can’t really see why.
Perhaps I’m just one of the uninitiated here, but my understanding is that the process goes something like this:
- Go to food prep center and choose a dinner recipe for each night for the next two weeks (or duration of choice).
- I assume with staff’s help (else why would there be staff?), select the correct ingredients for the recipes chosen, making substitutions as necessary (accommodating allergies, food prejudices, etc).
- Perform prep work—slicing onions, chopping garlic, dicing peppers (OK, I’ll admit that this may be the part where I’m uninformed—it’s possible that what they’re having customers do is just dish out the correct amount of chopped onion from a bowl of pre-chopped onion that’s been set out by the aforementioned staff).
- Package everything up in takeout-type containers.
- Pay.
- Drive everything home and put it in the correct storage area in the kitchen.
For me, the whole meal preparation scenario goes something like this:
- Go to bookshelf and choose cookbooks/magazines from which to select meals.
- Make menu selections and grocery list at the same time.
- Go to grocery store and select ingredients (no staff to help me with selection/substitutions—hm, I think I can handle it on my own).
- Pay.
- Take everything home and put it away in the correct storage area in the kitchen.
- On the appropriate night, remove necessary ingredients for recipe, prep, and cook.
Savings? I see pretty much none.
However, to address the one area I might be fuzzy on—that there are Kitchen Fairies slicing and chopping in some hollow oak of a prep kitchen somewhere (doubtless ones who couldn’t get work on Food Network shows doing the same thing for the Rachel Rays and Paula Deens of the world). I submit that it’s a whole lot easier to scoop out a cup of chopped onion from a bowl of pre-chopped onions than it is to stand over a cutting board with an unlit match between my teeth chopping my own (that match thing really does work to keep your eyes from tearing, by the way—if you don’t breathe the fumes in through your nose, they’re far, far less likely to make you cry; you may shed a tear or two, but no need for waterproof mascara if you have the match in your teeth).
But I would say two things—one, do you really want to scoop your onions from a bowl that 20 other people (some with questionable hygienic habits) have scooped from before you? I know, I know, they make them wear plastic gloves, but non-food service professionals will still do things like rub their gloved hand across their brow (or worse, their nose) to scratch without realizing that they’ve just completely negated the purpose of the plastic gloves. For me, the answer is a resounding “No.” If I’m going to have icky bacteria and germs in my food, I at least want them to be ones from my own house and not from some random stranger who left them in the pepper strips ten minutes before I got there.
Then two, does everyone realize that if you’re really averse to chopping your own onions and peppers, slicing your own mushrooms, or chopping your own garlic, you can buy all of those things at the grocery store? And I don’t mean that tired old “tip” about getting things off the salad bar. You can buy chopped onion, and chopped or sliced peppers in the frozen food section, and the produce department carries pre-packaged pre-sliced mushrooms, and jarred chopped garlic. The quality is not really any less than stuff that was chopped ahead and put in a take-out container. Chopped onion starts to lose its finesse as soon as you chop it, so it’s really a moot point if you then freeze it, or stick it in a Styrofoam box for four or five days to sit in your fridge.
It also occurs to me that people who use these places still have to go to the grocery store for some things. I’m sure they don’t sell milk by the gallon, paper towel by the roll, or mustard by the bottle. Sure, you’d cut way back on your grocery shopping trips, but you’d still have to go once a month or so for some basics. It might mean you spend only forty-five minutes instead of two hours, but you’re still going to two “stores” to get what you need.
So I still don’t see the attraction.
Plus I would point out something that these places take out of the experience. You don’t get to browse in the grocery store. Yes, many shrug, but this is for me one of the highlights of the grocery shopping experience. My husband and I have had fights—fights!--over who gets to go to the grocery store. I have begged to be allowed to go after spending two or three days watching the kids—it’s a form of relaxation to me. I love to look around, see what’s new, get new ideas. I know so many people who hate going to the grocery store, but I love it. Grocery store stock represents society in a way that all of the museums, artistic performances, national landmarks, and historic buildings can never communicate. All humans require food, and what they eat on a daily basis gives far more insight into who they are than all of their other cultural icons combined, in my opinion.
When we travel, I always want to check out the grocery stores. I spent a week in Dublin on business a few years ago, and took a half a day to sightsee and shop. In driving from my company’s office back to my hotel, I got lost (the coworker I was traveling with had been doing all the driving up to that point), and wound up in some random southern suburb of the city in the parking lot of what was clearly an Irish Piggly-Wiggly. To this day I kick myself for not having thrown the car in park and gone inside to look around, instead of spending another half an hour finding my way back into the city and going to see Trinity College. In the first place, I’d been to Trinity College before, and in the second place, I’m sure the grocery store would have been infinitely more interesting than the courtyard of Trinity (not that it’s not beautiful and impressive, but it’s just grass and gravel, after all).
I’m not necessarily all that interested in going to the kind of places you see in photographs of France all the time—small local producers selling what they’ve grown on their own farms, etc. In France, I realize that’s the way people shop for food—supermarches, while gaining popularity, are still scorned by many. But in places where everyone goes to a regular ol’ grocery store to buy their food, that’s what I’m interested in. I want to see what the average person is buying, what they’re paying for things, what they’re being encouraged to consume by advertising.
Maybe if you aren’t the food-obsessed freak that I am, these prep kitchens are a godsend. If you hate going to the grocery store, I can see where they’d take the agony out of the experience. But for someone like me, who browses in the grocery store as a form of relaxation therapy and for clues to sorting out the puzzles of modern society, it would take all the joy out of the process.
Perhaps I’m just one of the uninitiated here, but my understanding is that the process goes something like this:
- Go to food prep center and choose a dinner recipe for each night for the next two weeks (or duration of choice).
- I assume with staff’s help (else why would there be staff?), select the correct ingredients for the recipes chosen, making substitutions as necessary (accommodating allergies, food prejudices, etc).
- Perform prep work—slicing onions, chopping garlic, dicing peppers (OK, I’ll admit that this may be the part where I’m uninformed—it’s possible that what they’re having customers do is just dish out the correct amount of chopped onion from a bowl of pre-chopped onion that’s been set out by the aforementioned staff).
- Package everything up in takeout-type containers.
- Pay.
- Drive everything home and put it in the correct storage area in the kitchen.
For me, the whole meal preparation scenario goes something like this:
- Go to bookshelf and choose cookbooks/magazines from which to select meals.
- Make menu selections and grocery list at the same time.
- Go to grocery store and select ingredients (no staff to help me with selection/substitutions—hm, I think I can handle it on my own).
- Pay.
- Take everything home and put it away in the correct storage area in the kitchen.
- On the appropriate night, remove necessary ingredients for recipe, prep, and cook.
Savings? I see pretty much none.
However, to address the one area I might be fuzzy on—that there are Kitchen Fairies slicing and chopping in some hollow oak of a prep kitchen somewhere (doubtless ones who couldn’t get work on Food Network shows doing the same thing for the Rachel Rays and Paula Deens of the world). I submit that it’s a whole lot easier to scoop out a cup of chopped onion from a bowl of pre-chopped onions than it is to stand over a cutting board with an unlit match between my teeth chopping my own (that match thing really does work to keep your eyes from tearing, by the way—if you don’t breathe the fumes in through your nose, they’re far, far less likely to make you cry; you may shed a tear or two, but no need for waterproof mascara if you have the match in your teeth).
But I would say two things—one, do you really want to scoop your onions from a bowl that 20 other people (some with questionable hygienic habits) have scooped from before you? I know, I know, they make them wear plastic gloves, but non-food service professionals will still do things like rub their gloved hand across their brow (or worse, their nose) to scratch without realizing that they’ve just completely negated the purpose of the plastic gloves. For me, the answer is a resounding “No.” If I’m going to have icky bacteria and germs in my food, I at least want them to be ones from my own house and not from some random stranger who left them in the pepper strips ten minutes before I got there.
Then two, does everyone realize that if you’re really averse to chopping your own onions and peppers, slicing your own mushrooms, or chopping your own garlic, you can buy all of those things at the grocery store? And I don’t mean that tired old “tip” about getting things off the salad bar. You can buy chopped onion, and chopped or sliced peppers in the frozen food section, and the produce department carries pre-packaged pre-sliced mushrooms, and jarred chopped garlic. The quality is not really any less than stuff that was chopped ahead and put in a take-out container. Chopped onion starts to lose its finesse as soon as you chop it, so it’s really a moot point if you then freeze it, or stick it in a Styrofoam box for four or five days to sit in your fridge.
It also occurs to me that people who use these places still have to go to the grocery store for some things. I’m sure they don’t sell milk by the gallon, paper towel by the roll, or mustard by the bottle. Sure, you’d cut way back on your grocery shopping trips, but you’d still have to go once a month or so for some basics. It might mean you spend only forty-five minutes instead of two hours, but you’re still going to two “stores” to get what you need.
So I still don’t see the attraction.
Plus I would point out something that these places take out of the experience. You don’t get to browse in the grocery store. Yes, many shrug, but this is for me one of the highlights of the grocery shopping experience. My husband and I have had fights—fights!--over who gets to go to the grocery store. I have begged to be allowed to go after spending two or three days watching the kids—it’s a form of relaxation to me. I love to look around, see what’s new, get new ideas. I know so many people who hate going to the grocery store, but I love it. Grocery store stock represents society in a way that all of the museums, artistic performances, national landmarks, and historic buildings can never communicate. All humans require food, and what they eat on a daily basis gives far more insight into who they are than all of their other cultural icons combined, in my opinion.
When we travel, I always want to check out the grocery stores. I spent a week in Dublin on business a few years ago, and took a half a day to sightsee and shop. In driving from my company’s office back to my hotel, I got lost (the coworker I was traveling with had been doing all the driving up to that point), and wound up in some random southern suburb of the city in the parking lot of what was clearly an Irish Piggly-Wiggly. To this day I kick myself for not having thrown the car in park and gone inside to look around, instead of spending another half an hour finding my way back into the city and going to see Trinity College. In the first place, I’d been to Trinity College before, and in the second place, I’m sure the grocery store would have been infinitely more interesting than the courtyard of Trinity (not that it’s not beautiful and impressive, but it’s just grass and gravel, after all).
I’m not necessarily all that interested in going to the kind of places you see in photographs of France all the time—small local producers selling what they’ve grown on their own farms, etc. In France, I realize that’s the way people shop for food—supermarches, while gaining popularity, are still scorned by many. But in places where everyone goes to a regular ol’ grocery store to buy their food, that’s what I’m interested in. I want to see what the average person is buying, what they’re paying for things, what they’re being encouraged to consume by advertising.
Maybe if you aren’t the food-obsessed freak that I am, these prep kitchens are a godsend. If you hate going to the grocery store, I can see where they’d take the agony out of the experience. But for someone like me, who browses in the grocery store as a form of relaxation therapy and for clues to sorting out the puzzles of modern society, it would take all the joy out of the process.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Making Menus
Every week I sit down for upwards of an hour and make up menus and shopping lists for the following week. This sounds tedious and awful, but I love doing it. If it’s morning I sit down with a cup of coffee (any time after noon is fair game for wine, though) and several cookbooks and/or cooking magazines. I decide what we’ll be having and make lists of what we’ll need from the store. I get input from various family members (my husband’s contribution generally consists of “Whatever is fine” and my three-year-old always demands pizza on Friday nights). As strange as it sounds, this ritual is one of the highlights of my week. I know plenty of people who would rather be forced to sit through the Ice Capades every week, but I love doing this.
I have a notebook devoted to the task. On each page I have the days of the week with the dinner choice, and below that is a list of things to get at the grocery store. Generally they’re what we need for the dinner recipes, but I also include things that are running low, or that we need every week. Instead of a magnetic list on the refrigerator, I have my notebook (the refrigerator pad either manages to get torn off of its cardboard backer, or I can’t find a pen to write down what we need—and I’ve never managed to get a pen to stay on the fridge with a little magnet or something, like some clever types can).
I start by looking at the upcoming week and noting any special events. If we’re having dinner out, or my husband will be away on a business trip and it’s just me and the kids that night, I indicate that next to the day and plan accordingly. Then I write in any “standing” meals. As I mentioned, my older son demands pizza every Friday night, so I write that down right away.
Then the fun starts. Depending on my mood and the season, I pull out anywhere from two to a dozen cookbooks or cooking magazines. I do try to keep the number of different sources for dinner recipes to a minimum. Once I’ve chosen everything we’re having, I leave the appropriate books out on the counter, and I don’t like to have too big a pile hanging around all week.
My collection is vast (too vast, says my husband). The most common sources are current issues of the various cooking magazines I get. I have subscriptions to Cooking Light, Everyday Food and two Australian food magazines: Donna Hay Magazine and Delicious. magazine. I generally pull out the back issues of previous years from the same month for whatever magazine I’m currently using. This is usually dictated by whichever one has come most recently in the mail. Donna Hay Magazine, for instance, is only published six times a year, and because their seasons are the reverse of ours, I have to pull out the old November/December issues in order to get light recipes for summer evenings.
Sometimes I use cookbooks. I have several “quick” cookbooks that often get called into service—some of them are a little more upscale than others. A couple of them are the “can of soup and egg noodle casserole” variety, while others lean more toward fast recipes for homemade potstickers and the like.
I try to vary the kinds of things we have from day to day. I try, for instance, not to have something with an Asian flavor two days in a row. I also try to make sure we’re not having the same kind of meat two days in a row. Since we often make enough dinner to have the leftovers for lunch the next day, that would mean eating the same type of meat for four meals in a row.
Because I have a three-year-old, I have a picky eater. Don’t tell me about your two-year-old who likes falafel and pad thai. I’m lucky my kid will eat green beans and cheese and crackers. So I have to make things that I can either serve to all three of us, or that I can modify somewhat and serve to my son in a plainer form. If we’re having a chicken stir fry that uses chicken tenders, I can cut a few of them up, bread them, and make them into nuggets for him. He’ll eat pepper strips, and loves Asian dipping sauces. While the stir fry is cooking, I fry his nuggets. I try to make it so that his meals don’t require much more effort than ours to make, but I’m not always successful.
Sometimes we get contrary and insist that he’s going to just have to eat what we eat or go hungry. Usually this means he eats cheese and crackers, and applesauce for dinner. I’ve read that this is OK to do, but it never works the way it’s supposed to. He just happily eats his cheese and crackers and applesauce and ignores the bits of “our” meal that we put on his plate. I know what they say about serving a kid the same thing 15 times before he or she will try it, but honestly, I can’t stand to throw away whatever it is I’m trying to get him to eat the other 14 times I offer it to him. And if there are other kids around, he will eat what they eat. So I figure when he starts school he’ll be influenced by his friends, just as I was (I didn’t try cauliflower until I was 13 and it was served at a friend’s house, and then I loved it) and his horizons will expand, just as mine did. Until then I’m resigned to his eating hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. He eats a reasonable selection of vegetables and fruits, so I don’t think he’s going to die of some vitamin deficiency between now and age eight.
Still, I love poring over cookbooks and magazines, reading through the preparation, calculating how long it will take to get dinner on the table. I suppose it can be related to the female tendency toward nesting that has been both discussed and derided over the years, but I feel like this menu-making is part of my “job” as wife and mother. My feelings may also have to do with the fact that my own mother was a bit of a washout in this department. She worked full time, so my father was almost always the one to cook me dinner, and I have memories of really standout awful meals he prepared, mostly featuring canned beets and instant mashed potatoes. As an adult, when I became interested in food, I was determined that I would not follow in their footsteps.
The downside to all this is that we seldom have the same thing twice. Because I have so many sources, and am so excited to try so many different things, I suspect that as adults, my children will wind up being like an old coworker of mine. She had something like seven or eight recipes that she served in rotation. Her husband was a highly selective eater (he’s probably the only person I’ve ever heard of who doesn’t like pizza) so she had found a handful of things that both he and her kids would eat, and that’s what she made, over and over again. No doubt when my kids look back on their childhood they’re not going to have a “favorite” dish that mom used to make—meatloaf, or spaghetti, or turkey tetrazzini. They’ll look back on a jumble of casseroles, roasts, soups, and random other offerings and have no very clear idea what dinner “means” to them. Then again, they may say that to them, comfort food is applesauce and cheese and crackers. That’s certainly the direction in which we’re headed.
I have a notebook devoted to the task. On each page I have the days of the week with the dinner choice, and below that is a list of things to get at the grocery store. Generally they’re what we need for the dinner recipes, but I also include things that are running low, or that we need every week. Instead of a magnetic list on the refrigerator, I have my notebook (the refrigerator pad either manages to get torn off of its cardboard backer, or I can’t find a pen to write down what we need—and I’ve never managed to get a pen to stay on the fridge with a little magnet or something, like some clever types can).
I start by looking at the upcoming week and noting any special events. If we’re having dinner out, or my husband will be away on a business trip and it’s just me and the kids that night, I indicate that next to the day and plan accordingly. Then I write in any “standing” meals. As I mentioned, my older son demands pizza every Friday night, so I write that down right away.
Then the fun starts. Depending on my mood and the season, I pull out anywhere from two to a dozen cookbooks or cooking magazines. I do try to keep the number of different sources for dinner recipes to a minimum. Once I’ve chosen everything we’re having, I leave the appropriate books out on the counter, and I don’t like to have too big a pile hanging around all week.
My collection is vast (too vast, says my husband). The most common sources are current issues of the various cooking magazines I get. I have subscriptions to Cooking Light, Everyday Food and two Australian food magazines: Donna Hay Magazine and Delicious. magazine. I generally pull out the back issues of previous years from the same month for whatever magazine I’m currently using. This is usually dictated by whichever one has come most recently in the mail. Donna Hay Magazine, for instance, is only published six times a year, and because their seasons are the reverse of ours, I have to pull out the old November/December issues in order to get light recipes for summer evenings.
Sometimes I use cookbooks. I have several “quick” cookbooks that often get called into service—some of them are a little more upscale than others. A couple of them are the “can of soup and egg noodle casserole” variety, while others lean more toward fast recipes for homemade potstickers and the like.
I try to vary the kinds of things we have from day to day. I try, for instance, not to have something with an Asian flavor two days in a row. I also try to make sure we’re not having the same kind of meat two days in a row. Since we often make enough dinner to have the leftovers for lunch the next day, that would mean eating the same type of meat for four meals in a row.
Because I have a three-year-old, I have a picky eater. Don’t tell me about your two-year-old who likes falafel and pad thai. I’m lucky my kid will eat green beans and cheese and crackers. So I have to make things that I can either serve to all three of us, or that I can modify somewhat and serve to my son in a plainer form. If we’re having a chicken stir fry that uses chicken tenders, I can cut a few of them up, bread them, and make them into nuggets for him. He’ll eat pepper strips, and loves Asian dipping sauces. While the stir fry is cooking, I fry his nuggets. I try to make it so that his meals don’t require much more effort than ours to make, but I’m not always successful.
Sometimes we get contrary and insist that he’s going to just have to eat what we eat or go hungry. Usually this means he eats cheese and crackers, and applesauce for dinner. I’ve read that this is OK to do, but it never works the way it’s supposed to. He just happily eats his cheese and crackers and applesauce and ignores the bits of “our” meal that we put on his plate. I know what they say about serving a kid the same thing 15 times before he or she will try it, but honestly, I can’t stand to throw away whatever it is I’m trying to get him to eat the other 14 times I offer it to him. And if there are other kids around, he will eat what they eat. So I figure when he starts school he’ll be influenced by his friends, just as I was (I didn’t try cauliflower until I was 13 and it was served at a friend’s house, and then I loved it) and his horizons will expand, just as mine did. Until then I’m resigned to his eating hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. He eats a reasonable selection of vegetables and fruits, so I don’t think he’s going to die of some vitamin deficiency between now and age eight.
Still, I love poring over cookbooks and magazines, reading through the preparation, calculating how long it will take to get dinner on the table. I suppose it can be related to the female tendency toward nesting that has been both discussed and derided over the years, but I feel like this menu-making is part of my “job” as wife and mother. My feelings may also have to do with the fact that my own mother was a bit of a washout in this department. She worked full time, so my father was almost always the one to cook me dinner, and I have memories of really standout awful meals he prepared, mostly featuring canned beets and instant mashed potatoes. As an adult, when I became interested in food, I was determined that I would not follow in their footsteps.
The downside to all this is that we seldom have the same thing twice. Because I have so many sources, and am so excited to try so many different things, I suspect that as adults, my children will wind up being like an old coworker of mine. She had something like seven or eight recipes that she served in rotation. Her husband was a highly selective eater (he’s probably the only person I’ve ever heard of who doesn’t like pizza) so she had found a handful of things that both he and her kids would eat, and that’s what she made, over and over again. No doubt when my kids look back on their childhood they’re not going to have a “favorite” dish that mom used to make—meatloaf, or spaghetti, or turkey tetrazzini. They’ll look back on a jumble of casseroles, roasts, soups, and random other offerings and have no very clear idea what dinner “means” to them. Then again, they may say that to them, comfort food is applesauce and cheese and crackers. That’s certainly the direction in which we’re headed.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
In Defense Of Recipes
I read an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer food section this week that I found rather annoying. To be fair, there are days when I find everything annoying, and this may well have been one of them. However, annoying or not, this article generated in me some strong feelings regarding its topic: recipes and their use (or, in this case, overuse).
The primary point of the article was that we as a society are far too reliant on recipes, and don't use our intuition enough in cooking. That we're too quick to throw up our hands and say "I can't make that" because we lack written instruction, rather than being willing to dig into our store of cooking knowledge and logic and figure out how to create the dish we're after. The columnist said she often received phone calls requesting a certain recipe, and that the caller insisted s/he must have the recipe because it was their family's favorite, that making it from memory wouldn't be good enough.
She refers to recipes as a crutch, and calls them "the speed dial of the culinary world." My first reaction was "So?" After all, what's wrong with using speed dial if you actually know how to use the telephone keypad? Certainly I can look up a number and dial it, but if I can just push a single button, why not? Yes, I can make Beef Stroganoff from memory, but if I have a combination of ingredients from a cookbook or magazine that I know is successful, and perhaps more importantly, tasty, why not use it?
It also occurred to me that I can get in touch with someone more easily if I have their exact number, just as I can make blueberry muffins more successfully if I have the ratio of the ingredients to one another. I know that blueberry muffins are flour, sugar, an egg, some oil, and things like baking powder and/or soda, and blueberries, but they'll turn out better if I know exact proportions. Just as I know that my grandmother's phone number is 2 twos, an eight, a four, a six, a one, and a five, I'm more likely to actually have my grandmother's phone ring if I know the correct sequence of numbers than if I just dial 8-4-6-1-5 and 2 twice, in random patterns and combinations.
The author suggests that when we use recipes, we fail to recognize basic concepts that appear over and over in those recipes. I disagree. I recognize the basic concepts I've learned over the years. I know, for instance, that white sauce is flour and butter, with a certain amount of milk or cream added. And I know that, in general, a 1:1 ratio of flour to butter works best, but I always have to look up how much milk to use (but do I know all the words to "American Pie"? Yes). And white sauce is not a food that lends itself to correction of mistakes easily--find out too late that you didn't use enough liquid, try to add some to the already-made sauce, and you will find yourself with the most unattractive soupy, lumpy mess you've ever encountered. It'll break your arm trying to beat the lumps out, and you'll never manage to do it (you'll wind up pouring it through a sieve instead--a nuisance and a mess, although it does work). So why not use a "recipe" and save yourself the headache?
Some things of course I eyeball. Mashed potatoes and rice spring to mind. But many times I've made slightly too runny mashed potatoes when I got overzealous with the milk and didn't realize how much I was putting in there (and the first person who says "Start with a little--you can always add more..." gets one on the beak). For rice I just put water in the pan, then use half as much rice. I've never made crunchy rice, but I can also say that I've never felt my rice was much of a success story, either. I might actually benefit from some of those techniques I've read that are "recipes" for rice that involve tea towels or steamers or some such thing.
She offers, as an example, a series of recipes she had provided for peach pie the previous week. She dismisses concerns over oven temperature, saying that it doesn't matter if you use 350, 375 or 400, so long as you follow the mandate that the crust be brown, and the filling thickened and bubbly. This argument works fairly well for peach pies, I suppose (and even for lots of other things), but for some things, temperature is very important, and timing is secondary. I recall a disaster of an almond cake (that used almond meal, which goes for over twelve bucks a pound at my grocery store, I might add) that resulted when I translated the temperature (incorrectly) from Celsius to Fahrenheit (OK, to be 100% fair, all I did was read a combination of the numbers given--the recipe provided both Celsius and Fahrenheit temperatures, and I read the first number of the Fahrenheit one, and the last two of the Celsius number, resulting in an oven temperature of 360 instead of 320).
By the "peach pie" logic, it shouldn't have mattered that the oven was hotter than was called for, so long as I kept a close eye on this cake. In truth, the result was a thoroughly overdone, rubbery, almost burnt top, with a center that was just barely set. Although this was a cake--something that can be notoriously temperamental--the same thing could just as easily happen with any number of things. Casseroles in which the top burns before the center heats through properly because the oven is too hot. Biscuits that are cooked through but not golden brown on top because the oven temperature was too low.
As well, those oven temperatures and cooking times are given to us as a convenience. Yes, I could cook my dinner at 425 instead of 350, but that would mean that after the first half of the cooking time, I'd have to be looking in on it every five to ten minutes to make sure it wasn't getting too done. Some of us want to be able to put dinner (or a pie, or a loaf of bread) in the oven and know that we can forget about it until the last ten or so minutes of cooking time, at which time it's always prudent to start checking for doneness. I don't want to be a slave to my meal.
She concludes that we're paying so much attention to the recipe that "technique eludes us," and that we "lack a general understanding of how ingredients function." I won't dispute the point--I'm sure it's true for many people. But I will point out that I learned technique and how ingredients function through years of experience, and by using recipes. I didn't have to learn the hard way that if you're combining a bunch of wet ingredients, and you decide to just toss them all together in a measuring cup (because the instructions say to add them all to the dry ingredients at the same time), and two of those ingredients are milk and lemon juice, that if you put those two things in the same container, the lemon juice will curdle the milk (although I confess I have done this). I didn't have to ruin a Beef Stroganoff by adding the sour cream to the sauce on the stove and accidentally letting it boil and finding out that sour cream breaks when it's heated to a boil (I haven't done this). Today I know these things. Fifteen years ago, I did not.
As for the readers calling her to beg for a recipe, who knows how long they've been cooking? These days cooking is a very popular activity, but when I was a child, many of my friends (and, for that matter, I myself) had working mothers who didn't have time to cook. My mother learned to cook by watching my grandmother, reading a few "basic" kids' cookbooks that were given to her, and experimenting. I learned to cook by reading cookbooks and experimenting only. There wasn't anyone for me to observe in the kitchen who was particularly skilled at cooking (my dad did a lot of the cooking and...well, that's another story).
I learned certain fundamentals from reading recipes, and from following those recipes a few times until I was comfortable with the concepts. I have recipes I still follow to this day. Yes, I may add a little more of this, not include that, but I follow the spirit of the recipe. As I've said before, I am not a creative cook--I need recipes to offer me ideas, and correct proportions of ingredients. I could probably get through a week, or even a month, of cooking sans recipes, but that's because for so many years I did use them as a "crutch," if you must. But they were like the crutches used by people who are healing, to support them until their hurt foot can bear their weight again; not like the ones used by people who are, for whatever reason, chronically unable to walk unaided. I can cook unaided if necessary, but I prefer to lean a little on my recipes. I don't lean as heavily now as I did ten years ago, but it's nice to know they're there to support me if and when I want them.
The primary point of the article was that we as a society are far too reliant on recipes, and don't use our intuition enough in cooking. That we're too quick to throw up our hands and say "I can't make that" because we lack written instruction, rather than being willing to dig into our store of cooking knowledge and logic and figure out how to create the dish we're after. The columnist said she often received phone calls requesting a certain recipe, and that the caller insisted s/he must have the recipe because it was their family's favorite, that making it from memory wouldn't be good enough.
She refers to recipes as a crutch, and calls them "the speed dial of the culinary world." My first reaction was "So?" After all, what's wrong with using speed dial if you actually know how to use the telephone keypad? Certainly I can look up a number and dial it, but if I can just push a single button, why not? Yes, I can make Beef Stroganoff from memory, but if I have a combination of ingredients from a cookbook or magazine that I know is successful, and perhaps more importantly, tasty, why not use it?
It also occurred to me that I can get in touch with someone more easily if I have their exact number, just as I can make blueberry muffins more successfully if I have the ratio of the ingredients to one another. I know that blueberry muffins are flour, sugar, an egg, some oil, and things like baking powder and/or soda, and blueberries, but they'll turn out better if I know exact proportions. Just as I know that my grandmother's phone number is 2 twos, an eight, a four, a six, a one, and a five, I'm more likely to actually have my grandmother's phone ring if I know the correct sequence of numbers than if I just dial 8-4-6-1-5 and 2 twice, in random patterns and combinations.
The author suggests that when we use recipes, we fail to recognize basic concepts that appear over and over in those recipes. I disagree. I recognize the basic concepts I've learned over the years. I know, for instance, that white sauce is flour and butter, with a certain amount of milk or cream added. And I know that, in general, a 1:1 ratio of flour to butter works best, but I always have to look up how much milk to use (but do I know all the words to "American Pie"? Yes). And white sauce is not a food that lends itself to correction of mistakes easily--find out too late that you didn't use enough liquid, try to add some to the already-made sauce, and you will find yourself with the most unattractive soupy, lumpy mess you've ever encountered. It'll break your arm trying to beat the lumps out, and you'll never manage to do it (you'll wind up pouring it through a sieve instead--a nuisance and a mess, although it does work). So why not use a "recipe" and save yourself the headache?
Some things of course I eyeball. Mashed potatoes and rice spring to mind. But many times I've made slightly too runny mashed potatoes when I got overzealous with the milk and didn't realize how much I was putting in there (and the first person who says "Start with a little--you can always add more..." gets one on the beak). For rice I just put water in the pan, then use half as much rice. I've never made crunchy rice, but I can also say that I've never felt my rice was much of a success story, either. I might actually benefit from some of those techniques I've read that are "recipes" for rice that involve tea towels or steamers or some such thing.
She offers, as an example, a series of recipes she had provided for peach pie the previous week. She dismisses concerns over oven temperature, saying that it doesn't matter if you use 350, 375 or 400, so long as you follow the mandate that the crust be brown, and the filling thickened and bubbly. This argument works fairly well for peach pies, I suppose (and even for lots of other things), but for some things, temperature is very important, and timing is secondary. I recall a disaster of an almond cake (that used almond meal, which goes for over twelve bucks a pound at my grocery store, I might add) that resulted when I translated the temperature (incorrectly) from Celsius to Fahrenheit (OK, to be 100% fair, all I did was read a combination of the numbers given--the recipe provided both Celsius and Fahrenheit temperatures, and I read the first number of the Fahrenheit one, and the last two of the Celsius number, resulting in an oven temperature of 360 instead of 320).
By the "peach pie" logic, it shouldn't have mattered that the oven was hotter than was called for, so long as I kept a close eye on this cake. In truth, the result was a thoroughly overdone, rubbery, almost burnt top, with a center that was just barely set. Although this was a cake--something that can be notoriously temperamental--the same thing could just as easily happen with any number of things. Casseroles in which the top burns before the center heats through properly because the oven is too hot. Biscuits that are cooked through but not golden brown on top because the oven temperature was too low.
As well, those oven temperatures and cooking times are given to us as a convenience. Yes, I could cook my dinner at 425 instead of 350, but that would mean that after the first half of the cooking time, I'd have to be looking in on it every five to ten minutes to make sure it wasn't getting too done. Some of us want to be able to put dinner (or a pie, or a loaf of bread) in the oven and know that we can forget about it until the last ten or so minutes of cooking time, at which time it's always prudent to start checking for doneness. I don't want to be a slave to my meal.
She concludes that we're paying so much attention to the recipe that "technique eludes us," and that we "lack a general understanding of how ingredients function." I won't dispute the point--I'm sure it's true for many people. But I will point out that I learned technique and how ingredients function through years of experience, and by using recipes. I didn't have to learn the hard way that if you're combining a bunch of wet ingredients, and you decide to just toss them all together in a measuring cup (because the instructions say to add them all to the dry ingredients at the same time), and two of those ingredients are milk and lemon juice, that if you put those two things in the same container, the lemon juice will curdle the milk (although I confess I have done this). I didn't have to ruin a Beef Stroganoff by adding the sour cream to the sauce on the stove and accidentally letting it boil and finding out that sour cream breaks when it's heated to a boil (I haven't done this). Today I know these things. Fifteen years ago, I did not.
As for the readers calling her to beg for a recipe, who knows how long they've been cooking? These days cooking is a very popular activity, but when I was a child, many of my friends (and, for that matter, I myself) had working mothers who didn't have time to cook. My mother learned to cook by watching my grandmother, reading a few "basic" kids' cookbooks that were given to her, and experimenting. I learned to cook by reading cookbooks and experimenting only. There wasn't anyone for me to observe in the kitchen who was particularly skilled at cooking (my dad did a lot of the cooking and...well, that's another story).
I learned certain fundamentals from reading recipes, and from following those recipes a few times until I was comfortable with the concepts. I have recipes I still follow to this day. Yes, I may add a little more of this, not include that, but I follow the spirit of the recipe. As I've said before, I am not a creative cook--I need recipes to offer me ideas, and correct proportions of ingredients. I could probably get through a week, or even a month, of cooking sans recipes, but that's because for so many years I did use them as a "crutch," if you must. But they were like the crutches used by people who are healing, to support them until their hurt foot can bear their weight again; not like the ones used by people who are, for whatever reason, chronically unable to walk unaided. I can cook unaided if necessary, but I prefer to lean a little on my recipes. I don't lean as heavily now as I did ten years ago, but it's nice to know they're there to support me if and when I want them.
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