Paul Roberts, author of "The End of Food," writes that we Americans may not all be able to grow our own food, but we can certainly quit outsourcing its preparation:
Beyond the occasional backyard garden, few of us have the capacity to produce our own food. But until the last few decades, most Americans still exercised a lot of control over the quality and cost of the food entering our home: We cooked almost every day. We bought ingredients and turned them into meals; we planned menus and stocked pantries, all of which required being connected to our food.Today, despite a mania for cookbooks, celebrity chefs and 24-hour programming on the Food Network, cooking is a dying art. According to the Department of Agriculture, half of our food dollars are spent on items cooked outside the home, and almost half of the meals served in the average U.S. household lack even a single from-scratch item.
Marketing surveys blame our crowded schedules, our "time poverty": The average American can spare just 30 minutes a day for the kitchen. But the sad truth is, many of us no longer know what that room is for. Because so many of the roughly 100 million consumers born since the 1970s grew up in households where cooking was already passe, it's a skill we never learned.
Yet if we're serious about reclaiming control of our food, the kitchen is where we have to start.
Read the whole thing -- especially the part about how people who claim they have no time to cook sure do make time to watch television.
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Knowing sig's recent penchant for a little pre/post-prandial shooter with a License to Refill that has James Bond at once shaken and stirred with more than a Martini bit of envy, I may have to ask her to wok a straight line before allowing her to take the wok-keys as she heads home and into the kitchen...
And before I inform my wok of sig's sighing confession above, I plan to draw Cupid's bow and assist Requited Love's Labours by first cooking tomato soup in it, with a cluster of tofu chunks in the center and sour cream swirls throughout, and my index finger dug inside its lip: its resemblance at that point to a blushing Elmer Fudd, teased beyond bachelor endurance by a ruby-lipped and lash-plucked Bugs, will prove just the persuasion Warner Bros. will need to greenlight my latest cartoon screenplay, "Wok-sig Matilda"...
PS: Olive oil can many times substitute for butter in those recipes and basil, garlic power and onion powder are to cooking what primary colors are to Crayolas.
Sometimes. And sometimes I use both. For the soup I described, though, olive oil just doesn't work. Olive oil is better with tomato based soups.
Garlic powder isn't garlic. That isn't to say I don't use it-- ever useful for rubs and I like it in a small amount in a chicken salad-- but it has nowhere near the flavor profile of the real stuff. Garlic powder has its own flavor profile.
One other piece of advice from my mom-- invest in good cookware that will last for years--Caphalon is a good brand-- that has good even heating. Buying the cheap stuff costs you more than you would think.
No, Kevin, I know the difference between garlic and garlic powder. To your point it has it's own profile. I use garlic powder in a thousand things as a nuance...from salad dressings to marinade/rubs. Garlic I use a completely different way. I'm talking cooking with flavor 101 for those timidly looking to feel creative and encouraged. And to add texture to flavors, I find that the garlic and onion powders and basil and olive oil and soy sauce and sea salt and regular and fresh ground black pepper and white pepper and canola oil for saute... are the must-have staples to create instant 5 minute chicken breasts of salads or stir fries. Lately I have used a lot of ginger and curry added subtle bits to many things. There too, ginger powder AND fresh ginger. Two different cats. The latter when you want to feature it. The former when you want lurking mystery.
My nephew Michael (24 years old) is taking care of his terminally-ill mother. About 3 months into it, he confessed that he was sick to death of take out food and canned soup. I sent a request out to all my friends for simple recipes/cooking instructions that I could put into a book for him (I was looking specifically for information about cooking pork and beef--I'm a chicken and fish person myself). People responded well (much like the responses here) and he received a notebook full of basic cooking info. I see the book in use every time I'm there. He feels better, and is not spending the money he was before. I have decided to give a copy to each of my nieces and nephews as they prepare to move out on their own.
If I were to give/recommend one general book on food, excepting cookbooks, to those who eat, but in darkness, it would be Wellness Foods A to Z,
tinyurl.com/6q9eyx
the successor, from 2002, to The Wellness Encyclopedia of Food and Nutrition
tinyurl.com/5vp8d6
from ten years prior.
That I haven't dog-eared my copies of both is testament more to their solid hardcover build than to any white-gloved delicacy on my hamhanded part. Produced by the editors of the most sober, balanced and informative general health newsletter, The Wellness Letter (University of California at Berkeley), each book is a veritable Magical Mystery Tour waiting to take you away to Things You Never Knew, nutritional and culinary, about every food in the supermarket from Apples to Zucchini, and chockablock with sidebars jam-seeded with lore and tips for those hot to master and avoid disaster when playin' The Bitchin' Magician in the Kitchen. After sixteen years' of daily discovery, I give both editions two juice-bursting plums up.
Jack Horner, Pie Rustler
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