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.

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.

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 (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.

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.

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.

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.

We Don't Need Another Pita Chip Recipe

I am an avid, some might say obsessive, reader of cookbooks. I pore over them the way some people read novels. I’m always interested in the new ones that are coming out, whatever their genre. I read newspaper and magazine reviews, skim through tables of contents in bookstores, and read online responses from other readers. I love to cook from cookbooks, and I am a great admirer of those who are creative enough to actually make a living developing recipes I state right now that I am not. I would starve trying to develop recipes. When it comes to combining foods, I confess I am not particularly original in my thinking. This does not, however, stop me from criticizing those who are.

One thing I’ve found over the years is that there are some recipes that are repeated so often that they’ve become clichéd. It’s not possible to pick up a cookbook that doesn’t contain a recipe for vinaigrette dressing, garlic mashed potatoes and brownies. And, as one reviewer said, when reviewing a new “comprehensive” cookbook “Does the world really need another recipe for basic vinaigrette?”

And so, to put a stop to the endless repetition of recipes for which we all already have a thousand variations, I set forth my list of items for which we, the cookbook readers and users of the world, do not need any more guidance in preparing. Cookbook authors, cooking magazine editors and recipe developers, please take note.

Vinaigrette Dressing: By now, most of the literate world knows how to make a vinaigrette dressing. Vinegar or lemon juice, oil of some kind, salt, pepper. We know how to make a Dijon vinaigrette too, by adding a little Dijon mustard. We know about adding garlic, swapping out balsamic vinegar, using ginger and sesame oil to give it an “Asian twist,” using fresh herbs, and pretty much anything else you can think of. I’ve never been at a restaurant or a dinner at anyone’s house where someone said “This is the most fabulous vinaigrette I’ve ever had! How EVER did you make it?!?” Of course if you’re recommending a particular vinaigrette to go on a salad for which you’re providing the recipe, it’s only appropriate to provide the recipe for said vinaigrette, but it is just no longer necessary to print a recipe for vinaigrette alone and suggest that it might be wonderful over mixed greens. This is not a new idea.

Mashed Potatoes: Pretty much every variation on mashed potatoes has been done. If there is a combination of potatoes and something else that hasn’t been tried, ask yourself if there is perhaps not a reason for this. Ask yourself this before you put salsa in mashed potatoes and cue the trumpet fanfare. Potatoes mashed with milk, cream, half and half, broth, sour cream, roasted garlic, garlic that has been boiled with the potatoes, celery root, sweet potatoes, any kind of cheese and/or crumbled bacon have all been revealed to the world. We’re all pretty savvy about putting butter and salt in our potatoes. We even know the trick of using white pepper instead of black, to avoid those unsightly little flecks. Let’s move on.

Pita Chips: There’s not a diet magazine, cookbook, website, flyer or pamphlet in the whole world that does not proclaim that you can make your own pita chips! With a fraction of the fat of store bought ones! These sources then proceed to instruct us on how to cut a pita in half, cut the halves into triangles, lay them on a baking sheet and bake at 350 until crisp. How far below “functional” does one’s IQ have to be to need a “recipe” for pita chips? And yes, yes, offering suggestions about how to brush them with a little olive oil, scatter them with sea salt, sprinkle them with paprika and all those other add ons are nice, but the average hamster could elaborate on the idea of a cut, toasted pita bread and come up with any of these variations. This same rant also applies to home made baked tortilla chips, a related, equally done-to-death recipe.

Oven Fries/Oven Roasted Potato Wedges: In the same vein, it doesn’t take much intelligence to slice a potato into wedges or “fry shapes,” put it on a baking pan (either tossed with some kind of oil or not), and bake it until it’s done. Herbs are nice. So is salt and pepper. No more recipes for oven fries, please.

Hummus: Speaking perhaps only for myself, I have a hummus recipe I like, so the culinary world can stop trying to sell me on another version of it. The version I love comes from an old Weight Watchers magazine and calls for chickpeas, roasted garlic, silken tofu, a splash of olive oil, cumin, salt and pepper. I have been rather sniffly informed by a friend of Middle Eastern descent that the “dip” for which I have a recipe is not hummus. I will concede the point, as I recognize that classic hummus contains no tofu (nor roasted garlic either), but I will say that the tofu makes it much smoother than any other version I’ve had. Most hummus has a texture that reminds me of chickpeas blended with pea gravel or builders sand. As I tell the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I’m happy with what I have, thank you.

Roasted Corn on the Cob: I have a personal bias here that makes me somewhat more caustic about roasted corn on the cob. I hate corn on the cob, and I don’t like grilled food. Corn on the cob gets jammed up in my teeth, it’s messy to eat and it’s just not that great. I don’t care if it says “summer” as nothing else can. I don’t need a starchy vegetable to remind me what season it is. I have a calendar, and full use of all of my sensory organs, so I can pretty much tell what season it is on my own. It doesn’t help that every time we go to the grocery store with the intention of buying corn on the cob (at the request of my husband, grudgingly agreed to by me on the condition that I’m not actually expected to eat any of it) we walk out with three times as many ears as we need, and no more than two ears will fit in our already overfull, undersized fridge. No matter how many times I point out that HE will be the only one eating it (or he and our two guests, or whatever), my husband always insists on buying at least three ears of corn for each person, including me. The result of this overpurchasing is that the stuff sits on our counter in the plastic bags from the store (because of the aforementioned fridge issues) and, likely as not, half rots before we can serve it. This necessitates another trip to the store the day of the intended corn consumption to purchase still more ears of corn.

I’m sorry—I seem to have gone off on a tangent about quantity of corn, versus the original intent of talking about why roasted corn on the cob recipes are excessively abundant. Well, it seems that absolutely anyone who insists on including a chapter on “grilling” in his or her cookbook (or even just a chapter on vegetables) feels the need to remind the world yet again the best method for roasting corn on the cob in the husk. People who like corn on the cob roasted in the husk know how to do it. Those of us who do not will never like it, so it’s just wasted space.

Caesar Salad: Like roasted corn on the cob, people who love Caesar salad know how to make it. People who don’t won’t make it. Offering suggestions like serving it with grilled chicken or shrimp is not new or clever. They’re on every menu in every restaurant in North America. Anything you can get at your average Wendy’s is not something that we need instructions for making at home.

Chicken Broth or Stock: The only really useful recipe for chicken broth I ever saw was in a cooking magazine that had you use a whole chicken to make the stock. Then you picked the meat off of the bones, and out of the stock, and made things with the meat and the stock combined. Chicken soup (another overprinted recipe) was one of them, but so was a very tasty chicken a la king that caused me no end of grief and heartache when I made it twice within a two month period and was told by my then-fairly-new husband that he didn’t, um, really like chicken a la king that much, in spite of having said it was “really good” when I’d made it the first time. Chicken broth recipes vary only a little from one to another, and this is a textbook case of “seen one, seen ‘em all.” Until they can come up with a unique twist on chicken broth, I would respectfully request that the cookbook authors of the world cease including recipes for it.

Brownies: In addition to there being far too many recipes for brownies in the world, there are too many introductory paragraphs theorizing how brownies came to be. Really, does it matter? We have them now. They’re wonderful. They make a fantastic base for a scoop of vanilla ice cream, a slathering of chocolate or caramel sauce, a huge pile of whipped cream, some chopped nuts and a cherry (got to get in those servings of fruit!). Also, the debate over nuts versus no nuts is tired. If you like them, put them in; if you don’t, don’t. If you write recipes for a living, just put “optional” in parentheses next to the quantity of nuts and let it go at that. The chances that you’re going to change a person’s mind on nuts or no nuts in brownies in your 75 word introductory blurb is almost nil. Don’t bother.

There are probably a dozen more recipes I could think of that fall into the category of overprinted and overexposed, but instead, here are a few things for which I’d like to see more good recipes. Things that are easy to make, good for you and readily available, and should have more recipe development focused on them, in my opinion.

Duck Breasts: These are becoming more and more available (unless you shop at either of the two grocery stores in my town, in which case you’d conclude by their scarcity that they were more precious than rubies). They’re yummy, can be used in healthful recipes (despite all that fat), and because they’re not everywhere all the time, they make even the most mundane of meals feel like a special occasion. Duck breasts are to our age what lamb was to the previous generation—something that you got only on special occasions, and often ordered in restaurants because it was somewhat daunting to make at home.

Cabbage and Brussels Sprouts: I group these together because they’re closely related in flavor. Most recipes for cabbage are for cole slaw, and most recipes for Brussels sprouts are cooked with bacon. Both preparations are good, but let’s branch out a bit, shall we?

Zucchini: steamed (with or without herbs) and bread are both old and tired. We need some new blood, like the zucchini slaw that Sara Foster provides a recipe for in her Fresh Every Day cookbook. Now that’s a good idea.

Oriental Greens: Admittedly, I haven’t checked out all the oriental cookbooks available, but my Australian ones provide an admirable selection of treatments for oriental greens such as baby bok choy, gai larn, chow sum. American cookbook authors should take a lesson and stop abusing spinach, kale and swiss chard. What fun things can you do with baby bok choy? It’s easy, yummy and different.

I would suggest that pretty much any cookbook that includes a “basics” or “foundation recipes” section in it can most likely just save the price of printing those pages. Direct people to cookbooks like Fannie Farmer, Joy of Cooking, or the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook if they really haven’t got a clue how to make chicken stock. If they’re so new to cooking that they don’t know how to make stock or a basic vinaigrette, they really need one of these foundational cookbooks more than they need a section at the back of a more advanced one explaining to them how to combine chicken bones, carrots, celery, water and an onion in a pot for two hours. Use the space for recipes that will really expand our horizons and give us new ways to eat things that are good for us. This is especially helpful for unimaginative cookbook addicts like myself.

Homemade English Muffins: A Surprisingly Good Idea

We recently moved to a small town on the other side of the country, and neither of the convenient grocery stores carried my style of English muffin. I like English muffins with a little butter and jam for breakfast sometimes, but I prefer the Oat Bran ones, and all I could find were Honey Wheat or 12 grain. So I decided to make my own. I have no idea why I went with the idea of making my own, instead of deciding to just switch flavors. Time must have been hanging heavy on my hands. I made plain whole wheat initially, but now that I’ve found the experiment to be successful, I can buy my own bag of oat bran and make the kind I can’t find here.

I wasn’t at all sure they would turn out, you understand. I used a recipe from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook and as I was putting the dough together, it seemed questionable. First it called for one and three quarter cups of liquid to three cups of flour. When I mixed this up, it didn’t seem very promising. It said to let the dough rise until it doubled in bulk. This first rise wasn’t so much a rise as an unimpressive bubbling. At least I knew the yeast was working, even if it didn’t seem like I would wind up with anything that even vaguely resembled English muffins at the other end.

The second rise was also unpropitious, although it did do something that more closely resembled doubling in bulk. I also added and extra half a cup of flour beyond what the recipe called for because the dough seemed awfully sticky. When I patted out the dough and cut out the muffins it was still sticky. I used a lot of flour to keep them from sticking to the cutting board, and even had to use a spatula to scrape them up so I could move them around. (Now I use more flour than the recipe calls for, adding it by quarter cups until the dough can be handled easily, and use less on the board when I cut them out.)

English muffins cook on a griddle or in a skillet, rather than being baked. I used a 10” skillet we have—regular, not nonstick, but sprayed with cooking spray to keep them from sticking. And they cook for a long time—about 10 to 15 minutes per side. They just get cooked over a very low heat so they don’t burn. My big fear was that they’d be done on the outside, but still raw in the middle. I must say that when they were cooked, they looked a lot like English muffins on the outside. And surprisingly, they even tasted like English muffins. It looked like an English muffin! It tasted like an English muffin! It even split in half the way the ones from the store do! I was pretty thrilled that I had managed to produce a real, live English muffin.

There are some things that we buy in the grocery store that we wouldn’t really think of making at home. Yogurt springs to mind (I make this too). Hot dog or hamburger buns. Ketchup. Sausage. I’m sure there are people who make these things from scratch, but until I made English muffins, I never thought of myself as one of them.

Since making these muffins, I’ve found a cookbook that actually suggests you make them for guests for a weekend breakfast. A year ago I would have scoffed at this idea. Now I’d consider trying it. As with any yeast dough, you can slow down either of the rises by refrigerating the dough, so you could mix it up the night before through the second addition of flour, put it in the refrigerator for the second rise, then cut them and cook them in the morning. And rather than giving a recipe here, I’d just say go check out Fannie Farmer, and use your best judgment as regards dough texture—never mind how much flour she says to use; it should look like dough, so after the first rise (but before the second) add enough flour until it does.

I cut mine out using a juice glass that’s about 2 ¾” in diameter (the last of a set of six I liberated from a company I used to work for that had actually gone to the expense of having their logo silk screened on juice glasses and coffee mugs for executive meetings—ah the excess of the 1980s). But you could also just pat the dough out and cut them in squares (not traditional, but less trouble than actually cutting them out with a round cutter). It has also occurred to me that they’d be wonderful cut out small—maybe 1”—cooked, and served with soup, or as the bread for some kind of little sandwich on a buffet. I’ve made ham biscuits a number of times, and served them with several different mustards, but little English muffins could either be split and made into pizzas, or used as the outside around some kind of sandwich filling (turkey or ham, or even something like chicken salad).

While they take a bit of time to make, it’s unattended time, for the most part. Even when they’re cooking, you can wander of for a few minutes at a time. I don’t recommend leaving them cooking and going off to shower, but certainly you could go check the mail, change over a load of laundry, or let the dog out (possibly even all three, if the dog didn’t take too long outside), and get back just about the time the muffins were cooked on one side. As for that underdone in the middle fear, even if they are a tad doughy in the center, toasting them will cook them that last little bit. It’s not the solution for really underdone muffins once they’re split—I don’t think there’s any hope for them, except perhaps to bake them in the oven for a little while at 350—but the toasting will finish off a muffin that came off the griddle slightly too soon.

I classify my English muffin experiment as a huge success. I haven’t had the courage to tackle ketchup yet (it’s not really tomato season here yet anyway), and I may never (things that need to go in sterilized jars or bottles kind of intimidate me, frankly—botulism is such an ugly thing). But one of these days I’ll make homemade English muffins for my weekend guests or in place of biscuits on a buffet, and be able to say truthfully “Oh, they’re simple, really.”

The Stocker

I am a stocker. I stock non-perishables. For some reason, this makes my husband uncomfortable. I, on the other hand, am uncomfortable if we have an open bottle of mustard and don't have an unopened one in the cupboard.

As soon as we open the "other" bottle or jar of something, I put that item on the list so we can get a new one. That way, you see, we never run out of olive oil, or peanut butter, or ketchup (we simply cannot run out of ketchup--we have a three year old).

But, as I say, for some reason my husband winces at this.

"Do we really need chicken broth?" he asks peevishly.
"Well, we have two cans left," I'll reply, "but we have three things that call for it on the menu for next week." (Admittedly these are the large cans we're talking about, but we use a LOT of chicken broth in a week.)
"So do we need chicken broth?" he'll repeat.
Usually I just sigh at this point. (And buy the damned chicken broth anyway.)

Now, mind you, I'm talking about the purchase of a $2.69 can of Swanson chicken broth. I'm not trying to corner the market on peppercorns or anything like that. But I've heard from other women friends that their respective spouses are also uncomfortable with this behavior. In fact, I had one friend whose husband went so far as to build a little pyramid out of the three or four boxes of dental floss she had bought (on sale!), presumably to make a subtle point about what he considered to be an excessive number of boxes of dental floss on the shelf.

I would argue that this stocking tendency actually acts as a money-saving device. Grocery stores are laid out in such a way as to encourage impulse shopping. You go in for chicken broth, or mustard, and you come out with mustard, and some butternut squash that looked good and was on sale, and some shallots and pears (because now that you've bought the squash, you figure this weekend you'll make that fabulous roasted squash and pear soup with curry powder that you love so much), and some olive oil, and rosemary bread (goes with the soup), and some brown sugar (why not?).

With my method, we never have to go to the grocery store midweek. OK, almost never. But still, we rarely have to go to the grocery store midweek. And thus, I argue, we save both time and money by not being sucked into the quick-stop-for-mustard that turns into a mustard-squash-pears-shallot-bread-brown-sugar-$35/35 minute trip.

Besides, I hate getting half way through a recipe and finding we're out of the kind of tomatoes I need, or something like that. When I make a recipe for the first time I prefer to make it exactly as written. Then if there's something I don't like I can make a fully educated decision about what to modify. If I've had to substitute an ingredient and I don't like something about the finished product, I feel that perhaps it was the fault of the substitution and not the fault of the recipe. Once I've made it and determined what I like and don't like, then I'll know if using tomato sauce instead of crushed tomatoes (for instance) is OK or not.

My husband hasn’t always had this unreasonable fear of having a well-stocked pantry. When we were first married, we lived in a house that had a whole wall of shelves above the steps that led down to the basement (conveniently located right off the kitchen). These shelves were just deep enough for canned goods, and I recall no objections to our having half a dozen cans of various preparations of tomatoes, plus multiple cans of several kinds of soup, back up chicken broth, etc. lining these shelves. Ah, you say, clearly he now objects because you’ve moved and you haven’t the space for all these non-perishables.

Nope. Since then we’ve lived in houses that had MORE storage space, not less. This attitude seemed to come out of the blue. I vaguely recall that it might have started with hoisin sauce. Some years ago I developed a…well, OK an obsession, with an Australian cookbook author named Donna Hay (an obsession, by the way, that continues to this day). Because of Australia’s proximity to Asia, modern Australian cooking has a very strong Asian influence, and uses a lot of oriental ingredients, including hoisin sauce. It took some experimentation to find one I liked. As soon as I had identified it, the grocery store we went to most often stopped carrying it (natch). As a result, I was forced to “stock up” when we went to another grocery store, to which we went about once a month. This particular brand of hoisin sauce didn’t come in very large jars, so a single recipe could wipe out most of a jar (plus hoisin sauce is somewhat sticky, so like ingredients such as molasses or corn syrup, you scoop up a half cup, and about a tablespoon of that remains in the measuring cup when you add it to your recipe, so you—well, I—end up plopping a little bit more in the pot for good measure). The purchase of three or four jars of hoisin sauce at a time seemed to activate some long-repressed “objection gene” in my husband’s DNA composition. I still don’t get it.

However, I think that after ten years I'm finally wearing him down. Since we now have three children under the age of four (and the younger ones are twins), there's no such thing as a "quick" trip to the grocery store. Going to the market means either one person stays home with the babies and the older kid goes along to the store, or someone stays home with all three kids. Stopping on the way home when we have all three kids with us is just NOT an option. It's almost impossible to navigate the store, push a double stroller, keep an eye on the older child AND collect whatever it is we need all at the same time.

So I may have convinced him, but it took having twins to do it. Seems rather drastic to me, but I think I came out the winner—not only do I get to have all my extra bottles and cans of things in a comforting row in my pantry, I also got three really great kids out of it.

Shameful Confessions

In 1989 Steve Martin starred in a movie called “Parenthood” that featured, among others, a pair of characters who were supposed to represent the modern “new parent.” They’re teaching their little daughter Japanese and martial arts, having her read Kafka, do flashcards, and all this before she’s four. It is also very visibly noted that they “power eat” and take their own food everywhere, an adoption of another then-new trend. Although what exactly they’re eating isn’t specified, it’s implied that it’s organic, all natural, and eschews certain stereotypically “bad” foods like red meat, sugar, salt, etc. In several statements, the wife (played by Harley Kozak) lets the audience know that it’s her husband who’s the driving force behind such behavior. She’s enthusiastic about the idea, but he “turned [her] on to it.”

However, in a later scene, where her husband has upset her by being insensitive (as husbands sometimes are), she digs into her closet, comes up with a shoebox full of candy and cakes, and chows down on a Hostess chocolate cupcake. The message (for those of you who don’t feel like pondering deeply), is that, in spite of her outward devotion to her husband’s theories, she harbors a certain resentfulness (if not outright hostility) towards him because of them. I would also add that it’s a reinforcement of the statement that old habits die hard. Her family is depicted throughout the movie as having been brought up pretty typically for an American household of the 1950s/1960s/1970s, and most likely she ate all that stuff as a kid. Clearly one of her defense mechanisms is “comfort eating,” and in doing so she returns to the foods of her childhood.

What, you may ask, does a 10+ year old movie have to do with anything? My point (reached rather circuitously) is that I feel a very strong kinship with this character for her love/hate relationship with what we now call junk food. Although I haven’t entirely embraced organic everything, I’m certainly at a point where I’m scornful of packaged, processed foods. I think they’re oversalted, oversugared, and generally terrible for you. I’ve been known to get up on my soap box about excess packaging in such products, how utterly flavorless they are, and how much better the “homemade” version is. Why, I ask, would I buy cookies when what I can make at home is so vastly superior to the ones from the store, which taste the way aisle 7 smells?

But secretly, I love it. I love Stouffer’s frozen macaroni and cheese. Worse, I love Kraft macaroni and cheese (NOT the kind with a foil packet of Velveeta—the one with the powder that you mix with milk and margarine). I love frozen pizza. I love—this is truly shameful—Slim Jims. I adore cheap chocolate, and I could eat my own weight in Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (no small feat, I assure you).

My mother used to make me turkey pot pies back in the days when turkey pot pies came in little foil pans instead of little microwave-friendly paper ones. She never cooked them enough—the bottom crust was always underdone and soggy—but still I loved them. Today, on the rare occasion I’ll make one for myself (owing to their outrageous fat gram count they’re hard to justify), I cook it for upwards of an hour at 350 degrees in order to get that bottom crust cooked all the way through. A long, long time in a moderate oven will achieve the result without burning the top crust. I’ve also found that putting them on a baking sheet and cooking them for about 45 minutes in a 400 degree oven will result in a perfectly done bottom crust. And that’s turkey, by the way, not chicken. I tried a chicken pot pie once, and it’s just not the same for some reason. Swanson is the brand of choice, but I suspect that’s because it’s what I was served as a child.

And as shameful as the confession about loving Slim Jims is, it’s even more embarrassing to me to admit that I adore Pop Tarts. I don’t care about these new flavors they’re coming out with—s’mores, peanut butter and jelly, hot fudge sundae, French toast, lemon-lime fizz. I’m a traditionalist—plain old frosted strawberry is my favorite. I can handle some of the chocolate varietals, but any other fruit is just wrong (blueberry, apple, cherry, grape). And they simply must be frosted. After all, what’s the point otherwise? I don’t know how I got introduced to Pop Tarts. My mom, although she had no qualms about buying me pot pies, Slim Jims and potato chips, seemed to balk at junky breakfast food. I really don’t know why, because it’s not like she ever made me breakfast anyway. Probably just about the time they were doing the studies that found that kids didn’t perform as well in school if they skip breakfast, I was skipping breakfast. I don’t remember eating it at all, even in elementary school. (Note: I wasn’t a particularly bright star in the academic firmament—draw your own conclusion.)

But I think the worst, most appalling processed food I can admit liking is Cup-a-Soup. I don’t mean the Campbell’s Soup In Hand things that they came out with a few years ago. I mean powder in a packet to which you add boiling water. Mostly it’s just powdered chicken broth with a few dehydrated noodles. My flavor of choice is the cream of chicken, and I don’t even want to know what they do to come up with a dehydrated cream soup. I suspect it would reveal far too close an association with powdered milk for my taste. I also love ramen noodles, which are a first cousin to Cup-a-Soup, but every college student in America once lived on them, so I’m not sure I really count them in my list of Shameful Confessions about Packaged Foods.

Although I rail against processed foods, and yet secretly long for them, you won’t hear me speak out too violently about fast food and similar. My kid loves Chicken McNuggets. I love Chicken McNuggets. I love McDonald’s cheeseburgers. I love convenience store hot dogs. While I know that fast food is terrible for you, it can be part of a healthy diet, so long as it doesn’t comprise your whole diet. Movies like “Supersize Me” paint a grim picture of fast food in America, but the truth is, that guy made up his own rules, and I don’t know anyone who has rules like that. There’s no mandate that decrees that one must try everything on the McDonald’s menu (I don’t care for the Filet-O-Fish sandwich, and I’m not sure how much money would tempt me to eat a McRib sandwich…it would be a lot, though, know that). Nobody says you have to take them up on the offer to supersize the meal. It’s perfectly possible to eat a reasonably healthy meal (or an unhealthy meal within reasonable guidelines) at McDonald’s. A little research, a little common sense and anyone can eat fast food now and then without compromising their health.

I think the danger in packaged foods lies in their accessibility, combined with their portability. If I want Chicken McNuggets, I have to get in my car, drive to McDonald’s and buy them. And I have to be going at a time when McDonald’s is open (some now have 24 hour drive thru windows, making “open” a non-issue, but there’s still the transportation angle, and the McNugget craving would have to be pretty strong for me to get up at 3 a.m. and drive to McDonald’s—besides, mine is not a 24 hour drive thru, so it’s a moot point for me). If I want a Pop Tart, I have only to buy them at the store and put them in my cupboard. Then, when a frosted strawberry longing strikes, I’m off for the kitchen, and there they are, cooing at me lovingly from the shelf. Regardless of the time, my kitchen is always available to me. That’s what makes processed foods scarier than fast food. In this land of plenty, it’s too easy to get what we want. Individual serving bags of potato chips seemingly grow on trees, ripe for the picking. We’re taunted at every turn by ads for cookies, candy, sodas, Lipton Noodles & Sauce. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s tasty—have it now! No waiting! Only three minutes from box to table!

Yes, it takes longer to make cookies from scratch, but I would, in general, trade the flavor for the convenience. For many things I am willing to spend the extra ten, 15 or even 30 minutes to make something better from “real” ingredients, things I don’t need a chemistry degree to pronounce. Macaroni and cheese, however, is not one of them. For that, I confess, I’ll stick with Stouffer’s. I may be ashamed of it, but I can’t help but love it.

What To Give a New Mother

A friend recently told me that she had made a meal for a friend who had just had a baby. It was, it seems, the fifth child, so my friend felt a complete meal would be welcomed. Of course, all new mothers appreciate a meal, but I would have to say that a woman with four other children to feed would appreciate it at least four times as much as the mother of a first baby.

So my friend had made her a meal. What precipitated her telling me this was that she had just made two batches of Rice Krispies Treats to serve as dessert. She felt that children numbers 2, 3 and 4 probably felt progressively more neglected in the area of dessert, since as each subsequent child was born, the mother probably had less and less time for making desserts on a regular basis.

But, I asked her, what did you make for an entrée? Oh please, I thought, don’t say some version of pasta, red sauce and cheese.

“Lasagna!” she exclaimed joyfully.

Ugh. Oh, I’m sure her lasagna was tasty, but I had twins (and already had a two year old), and I belonged to a babysitting co-op, so I was provided with many, many meals. With one lone exception, they were all some combination of pasta and red sauce.

I understand the driving force behind this. I can’t think of anyone I know who can’t or won’t eat pasta with red sauce in some form or other. It is universally accepted and can be consumed by pretty much everyone on every diet (with the possible exception of a hard core no carbs devotee—and even then, South Beach adherents can eat it if the pasta is whole wheat).

But it’s so boring. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful—certainly in the early days of parenthood any meal that lands on your doorstep and requires minimal (if any) preparation is to be welcomed. I just wish people would be a little more creative.

The new mom meal that I favor for giving is one that can be served more than once and can be transformed into something slightly different the second (or third) time around. Roast chicken fills the requirements admirably. Donna Hay (an Australian cookbook author whom I worship—if you’ve never heard of her, get in your car now, drive to your nearest bookstore and buy all of her cookbooks—you won’t be sorry) suggests using a 3 to 3 ½ pound bird and cutting through the back of it. It then gets propped in a sitting position in a roasting pan lined with parchment paper (for ease of cleanup—aluminum foil would also work), tuck some thyme and sliced lemons around it and bake at 390 for about 45 minutes. And the joy is, it really does take about 45 minutes when you cut it up and sprawl it out like that.

Having roasted the bird, you can deliver it to the new mom with some traditional sides—mashed potatoes and a steamed vegetable (perhaps slightly underdone so they don’t turn to mush when they’re heated up in the microwave) work fine—and a loaf of bread. Then the next day, mom and dad can use the rest of the loaf of bread and the chicken to make sandwiches. Same food, slightly different taste. Not just reheated baked ziti just like last night. Deliver a head of lettuce (washed is nice, but it won’t last as long in their fridge) and a bottle of salad dressing and there will be lettuce for the sandwiches, and any chicken left over after the other two meals can be served shredded on a salad with the dressing.

Another meal that could lend itself to variations is barbequed pork sandwiches. The pork is easily made in a crock pot. Bottled sauce works fine, although I like the root beer sauce that was so popular a few years ago. I find the ratio that works best is two cans of root beer (not diet) to one bottle of chili sauce (I recommend Heinz—I used another brand once and it was full of weird chunks of unidentifiable vegetables and made a lumpy sauce). The sauce needs to reduce for a long time (several hours is best), but it cooks over low heat until it’s thick and…well, saucy, and then it gets poured over the cooked shredded pork. But you can just put it on the stove over low heat and go off and do your own thing, checking on it periodically to see how it’s coming along.
For the pork you can use pretty much any cut you like—shoulder is good. If you choose a fatty cut, you should trim off the excess fat to the best of your ability because otherwise the fat melts and, if it’s mixed with the sauce, makes it greasy. In fact, one of the joys of this dish is that the cheaper the pork, the better the sandwiches.

Cook the pork for 8 or 10 hours (crock pots are so forgiving) and then shred the meat into the sauce. The original recipe I had called for resting the pork on a bed of sliced onions prior to cooking. I stopped doing this because the onions just absorbed any fat from the pork and turned out sort of grey and nasty.

Deliver the pork along with a basic coleslaw (shredded cabbage and carrot, mayonnaise, a splash of cider vinegar and a little celery seed) and a package of rolls. For a second meal, the pork could be put on nachos, so a bag of chips and some nacho fixings would be useful. Cheese, chopped tomatoes, chopped onion, sliced jalapenos, sour cream, salsa—whatever the recipients might like.

For those who can’t or won’t eat pork this recipe also works well with any fairly cheap cut of beef, or even chicken. With chicken I’d recommend using a whole chicken cut up, and take the skin off of the pieces prior to cooking. Then you’ll need to be a little careful shredding, as chicken has far more tiny bones that could find their way into the sauce than beef or pork. But any of the three meats would work fine.

However, perhaps you don’t feel like roasting a chicken or shredding pork or beef. Perhaps you want to give a casserole. If so, then I highly recommend enchiladas of some kind. They can be made ahead and either cooked, or delivered to the recipient uncooked for them to heat up as convenient. They can be made with meat (chicken, beef or pork), or vegetarian (with vegetarian refried beans and cheese), or even vegan (vegetarian refried beans and soy cheese would work, even if it wouldn’t be my combination of choice).

Enchiladas are simple to make but no one ever does, it seems. They can be somewhat messy to assemble, but they’re easy and good. Start with the large tortillas (I prefer flour—or rather, my husband does—but it’s a matter of choice, and the large ones are easier to roll up than the small ones) and pick your fillings. Sauteed onions and peppers with cheese are good, as is shredded chicken with sautéed mushrooms and onions (not a terribly traditional enchilada filling, but it’s delicious). For vegetarians, as I said, vegetarian refried beans with shredded cheese would work, and if your recipient is a vegan you can switch to soy cheese.

Place a line of filing down the center of the tortilla and roll it up. Then place it seam side down in a baking pan sprayed with cooking spray. Once you’ve got all the enchiladas made, they need some kind of sauce poured over them prior to baking. Although I’ve heard it derided, I think canned enchilada sauce is one of the most wonderful products ever invented. Who in their right mind would bother to make enchilada sauce from scratch? (Well, Rick Bayless and Diana Kennedy for two.) I wouldn’t even know where to begin. A can or two poured over the enchiladas prior to baking makes a pretty authentic tasting meal. Sprinkle with a little shredded cheese for appearance. If you’re squeamish about canned enchilada sauce, a jarred salsa verde (or a homemade one, if you insist) is also good.

If you don’t put vegetables in the enchiladas you need some little salad on the side. While not the most nutrient-dense food in the world, shredded iceberg just seems to go with Mexican food. A salad of shredded iceberg, chopped tomato and a little shredded cheese (possibly with the addition of a few kidney beans, depending on your audience and what’s in your enchiladas) dressed with a combination of sour cream and salsa in a one to one ratio is a nice accompaniment. Your vegan friends won’t necessarily be able to eat this, but the vegetarians and the meat eaters should be fine with it.

Although the enchiladas don’t lend themselves to any kind of leftover variant, they’re different enough from the standard baked ziti that they can be eaten for a second meal without too much feeling of tedium.

And if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can make all three things for the new mom and you’ll be her best friend forever for providing what is potentially a weeks’ worth of dinners with some lunches tossed in. But really, in this world of lasagna, penne casserole and spaghetti with meatballs, even a single variation would be welcomed, and you may wind up as her best friend anyway, just for providing it.