wallwalker

(Yes, this is crossposted.)

I've been reading How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. I recommend it to the people here who want to learn to cook; the recipes that it contains are largely very simple, and it doesn't assume that the reader already knows a lot about cooking. Also this is the book that's convinced me that I really should pick up a food processor at some point. (Apparently there's a revised 10th anniversary edition, and I want to try to find it next time I have enough money to spend on a book; I'd really like to own this one.)

A lot of what Bittman tries to do in this book is steer people away from "convenience foods" - things like, say, boxed mac and cheese or canned soups or potato flakes - in favor of cooking from scratch. He prefaces a recipe for pancakes with this quote: “Americans must have been sadly alienated from the kitchen for pancake mixes to ever have gained a foothold in the market, for these are ridiculously easy to make.”

I'm not so sure it's alienation from the kitchen that's the problem, though. Not for pancake mixes, anyway. They do take some effort to prepare, and if someone was really just trying to avoid spending time in the kitchen they'd buy frozen microwavable pancakes, or go to a restaurant. There's a much smaller chance of burning them then. (Yes, I speak from experience. Pancakes give me trouble sometimes.) My opinion is that it shows an alienation from the pantry.

Think about it. The pancake recipe that he gives requires salt, sugar, flour and baking powder, all of which take up a lot more room than a simple box of pancake mix. And that's just the dry stuff. I know that technically those are staples, and we're supposed to have them on hand all the time anyway, but I typically don't. I think that a lot of people, myself included, either never learned to build a pantry in the first place, or never learned to use what they have in a timely enough fashion to avoid wasting food. I know I never did.

I actually enjoy cooking, you see. If you were to put me in a furnished kitchen with all of the ingredients I need, I'd probably learn how to cook from scratch pretty easily. But in the situation that I'm in right now, I'm feeling stuck. What I need is a resource that helps people keep their kitchen stocked in such a way that helps them keep the things on-hand that they need to cook good meals from scratch, even with limited space, and use them in a timely fashion so that waste is minimized. And that includes leftovers. Most of the resources that I've found for this sort of thing have recipes that feed four to six people. Most of the time I'm cooking for two, and the second person has the smallest appetite I've ever seen. We'd have a fridge just full of leftovers, and I'm sure at least some of them would never be eaten.

That's why I'm starting to think that my habit of reading lots of cookbooks is bad for me. I always see recipes I want to try, but that require ingredients that I don't have at the time. So I'll go out and buy them, but I'll end up with more than I need, and then I won't use them again. I think that I just need to learn the basics, and then go from there.

...it's ironic that I'm posting this after finishing a meal of boxed macaroni and cheese and mashed potatoes made from flakes, I know. But my boyfriend had a lot of this kind of thing on hand, mostly from his mother. I can't just throw it all away; that would be a huge waste. So I'm just trying to prepare and eat all of it as fast as we possibly can, so that I can start over, hopefully. My goal is to eventually be able to cook what we eat at home from scratch as much as possible; eating out sometimes is still fine with me, but I want to learn how to cook, and to do it in such a way that I'm not feeling like I'm spending all day in the kitchen when I do it. It'll take a while, but hopefully not that long.