The Wretched Table: How Dinner in America Became an Ordeal
psmag.com
psmag.com
Plan food for the whole week. Buy the ingredients in one trip. Clean as you cook.
Take one day a week to pre cook and freeze as much as possible. Cook three or four nights a week and eat leftovers for the remainder.
Build a repertoire of around ten meals you train yourself to bang out quickly and without thinking.
If you're cooking for your kids, make them help with the cooking and the clean up. (This is how I learned to cook.)
It's not rocket science.
It's an obvious source of fluster and stress for my friends who don't. They never seem to figure it out either. Even when I do it for them.
Plus. Stop determining what you want to eat first. Look at what you have in your fridge and learn to work with it. Have a few proteins and a few cheeses and kitchen basics and you can improvise many things.
These are all huge stumbling blocks- especially when it's so easy to just order take-out, which will at least be consistently edible, with the added bonus of not resulting in wasted ingredients.
What ultimately turned it around for me was when my girlfriend and I decided to fully commit to cooking at home, and went and spent $150 on groceries- but instead of buying ingredients, we bought pantry essentials. Flour, sugar, baling powder, baking soda, cornmeal, table and kosher salt, seasonings, potatoes, rice, pasta, and so on. Not to mention an initial stock of perishable basics: onions, garlic, lemons, limes, milk, butter, eggs, and cheese.
While it left a dent in our wallet at the time, it turned out to be a game-changer. We found that it was immensely easier to plan meals, because we already had half the ingredients of any given recipe.
This is a huge societal problem, in my opinion. I'm a pretty privileged dude when it comes down to it, and I was able to absorb the inefficiency of not being able to cook at home while still eating pretty healthy food. Furthermore, I was able to get over the hump of figuring out how to cook on my own, because I had the resources to absorb the inefficiency of learning how to do it.
What about the folks that can't?
And you buy cheap. A jar of spice from McCormick might cost five bucks, but you can get the same amount in a plastic bag at the bodega for a dollar. And really, you don't need two kinds of salt.
If you're one of the fortunate poor, your immigrant parents/grandparents have already taught you how to cook.
It's really quite a foreign idea to me that cooking for yourself is expensive, even though I hear that all the time from people my age and younger. Maybe they all think you need to cook elaborate meals. But when you look at the way immigrants cook, it's really just a small set of cheap ingredients combined a bunch of different ways.
It may be cheap in terms of ingredients but in traditional immigrant households the mother and often grandmother don't have jobs and stay at home all day cooking. They use cheap ingredients but it's a TON of work.
When my wife's mom (who's not from the US) comes to visit, she starts cooking early in the morning and doesn't finish until dinner. It probably takes longer than it would if she had her flow setup since she has to prepare basics that we don't have ready, but still a lot of traditional dishes take a lot of time.
Things are often slow cooked for example because cheap cuts of meat are used and you need to do that to make them edible. Most office workers won't have time to do that.
Buy a slow cooker (aka crock pot) and leave it running while you're at work.
> They use cheap ingredients but it's a TON of work.
Do this type of cooking for your meal bases in a single day.
In my house, mom worked 40 hours but would get a giant pot of red sauce and a giant pot of pasta e fagioli going on Saturday morning - maybe 30-60 minutes of prep, then all day to cook - unattended except for the occasional stir. This would yield enough soup and sauce for a week of dinners for a family of four - just add pasta.
Friends from other backgrounds describe similar techniques with things like refried beans, etc.
I learnt how to cook properly at university (UK). I'd watched my mum a fair amount growing up, and in the final few weeks before I left she showed me things like how to shallow fry chicken, or check it was cooked.
I ate takeaway on the day I arrived, since everyone was too drunk, but on Sunday I paired up with people living on the same floor and cooked with them for the rest of the year.
It cost a fraction of what takeaway food would have cost, and we weren't trying to be super cheap.
No. The vast majority of college students I know don't cook. They either eat in dining halls or get take-out.
Some learn while in college, but lots just buy a meal plan from the school or get takeout a lot (and/or "instant meals") and learn nothing about cooking.
> I'd watched my mum a fair amount growing up, and in the final few weeks before I left she showed me things like how to shallow fry chicken, or check it was cooked.
It seems to me lots of Americans don't get even this level of basics (and, with it, the confidence to actually be willing to try things in the kitchen) growing up, and that that's the problem.
I emigrated six weeks ago, so I have to restart my "pantry essentials". I didn't buy everything in the first week, I will buy things gradually. I bought things like canned tomatoes, mixed herbs, pepper, salt; plus things that are used a lot quicker (rice, butter, noodles, onions, garlic). Last week I fancied Thai food, so I bought some fish sauce, lemongrass etc. It will take a year before I have all the spices and sauces I left behind.
Yes, this.
Always have the essentials stocked for your repertoire.
I grew up Italian-American, so we always had: onions, garlic, lemon, parsley, green peppers, sausage, tomato paste, anchovies, pasta, a few types of beans, grated cheese, olive oil, balsamic, etc.
Add some random meats or fresh vegetables, and you've got like, a hundred different recipes right there.
> Seriously. CLEAN AS YOU COOK. It drives me insane that people don't get this.
So many, many people don't understand this. My mom DRILLED this into my head as a kid. When I'm cooking with a friend who doesn't clean as they cook, I usually just hand them a glass of wine and kick them out of the kitchen.
plus it wipes-out one of our only two days off together.
Unless you have huge freezer space that can accommodate multi-week batches there's no real way around that.
Then again, I'd say 40% of our grocery budget is vegetables, if not more. Perhaps we're not the average case.
I also really like frozen vegetables - green beans, broccoli and cauliflower florets, etc. I don't understand the stigma against them, particularly if they're organic.
Meat goes bad much more quickly. If I'm not eating meat within two--maaaybe three--days of purchasing it, I will freeze it.
Since I live alone, I tend to buy vegetables once a week, and meat on my way home if I'm sure I'll use it — I'm prone to wasting it otherwise. I go past at least four small supermarkets on my way home from work (30 minutes by bicycle). I have some frozen fish too, since it's quick to defrost, and bacon, since it keeps for ages. I have no problem making a vegetarian meal (chickpeas, tofu etc -- these keep indefinitely).
Also, something like this can really help: http://www.buzzfeed.com/christinebyrne/clean-eating-2015
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This is the bit you're doing backwards. Type the ingredients you've got into Google, along with "recipe" and see what you fancy eating.
Now having said that, I do sympathize with posters who think cooking is time-consuming and hard. At the age of about 25 I specifically set about learning to cook, and it took me probably 5 years before I got good at it, and another 5 years before I was able to conjure a meal from bits and pieces of unpromising leftover ingredients.
When all was said and done, I felt that the best value proposition would be to just go on the Blue Apron website, look at the recipes, buy dry good ingredients in bulk, and make the recipes myself as time went on, buying the fresh ingredients as needed. As always, YMMV.
Edit: as many others have also pointed out, the packaging is "neat", and probably necessary for their workflow, but it feels ever so wasteful. You could supply a kindergarten arts and craft class with leftover materials from each shipment.
Where can you get a "gourmet healthy" email when eating out for $10? That would barely cover a Shake Burger + fries.
Perhaps it seemed that I suggested you could get a healthy meal + restaurant experience for under $10, but I was more thinking take-out options. Whole Foods' hot and cold (salad) buffet bar is like $9 per pound if I remember correctly. [1] Fairway, a competitor to Whole Foods in NYC, has a deli counter or buffet bar where you can get close to 1lb of veggies + grains + meat for under $10. [2] The only way Blue Apron makes sense over Fairway and Whole Foods, to me, is if you are either looking for the experience of cooking, or if you are a variety fiend and are going to tire of the flavors that the supermarkets use.
[1] https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/department/article/daily-me...
[2] https://www.fairwaymarket.com/content/uploads/06_05_15_REDHO... Scroll to the bottom: those build your own meal options are listed as sale prices, but they are representative for regular non-sale options too.
Bonus how-to maximize value at the salad bar: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/08/03/whole-foods-salad-b...
Wait, the Whole Foods salad with meat is more expensive. And the Fairway meals are as expensive or more for what looks like slop.
Also, how do you figure that the Whole Foods "salad with meat" is more expensive? You're getting a pound of prepared food for $9: hot, cold, meat, vegetarian, salad, whatever you want. The Blue Apron portions do not contain a pound of food.
https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&q=whole+foods+b...
https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&q=fairway+deli
You seem pretty closed minded with respect to your meal planning. [1] Best of luck. Getting things delivered to you in 15 tiny little plastic baggies, with limited protein choices, seems pretty boring and ineffective to me, but, different strokes for different folks.
I am quite open minded about my meal planning. I do Blue Apron, Din, Soylent, Caviar/fastbite, local delivery, Sprig, Munchery, Trader Joes pre-made and scratch, Whole Foods buffet, mall food court (we have a great one in SF), etc. My sense is that you don't really know what you're talking about.
"people fall into a few habitual meals"
"choose the meals based on what you have"
Goes without saying that you're pretty much dead wrong.
Finding a recipe: skip this. It's a waste of time. I haven't followed a recipe for anything that wasn't a cake in the last 15 years.
Getting the ingredients: you have the causality reversed. You choose the meals based on what you have, not what you will have based on what meals you want.
Figure out the recipe: see point #2, but also, recipes are extremely standardized. It's your failure to have learned the language that is the problem.
I'll be the first to admit that it's cooking with training wheels, but I'm a busy professional with a young child. Anything that can save me time and stress is well worth it.
Well ill have to be honest, i just eat the same thing over and over again. Chicken, Quinoa (or rice if you want) Broccoli, potatoes, lentils.
My digestive system loves it.
Lots of family time planting, weeding, picking and processing all those damned vegetables, though...
Dinner in my household is not difficult or fussy or unhealthy or expensive or bland.
We don't buy food every day, but we also don't buy processed food. We eat fresh meat and vegetables, with small servings of simple carbohydrates, going to the grocery store once a week. Our trips come out to about $100 total, which is about $2/meal per person.
I make dinner from scratch almost every night. I design it to leave leftovers for lunch the next day. It takes no more time to make four servings than two for most things. This means that the time I spend on dinner saves time on lunch.
Once a week, I make a meal designed to leave a LOT of leftovers, like a roast chicken or tacos or chili. Roast chicken takes a long time to cook, but takes almost no prep-time. Tacos take a little prep time, but almost no time to cook. Chili takes a lot of prep time, a lot of cooking time (if you want to do it right), but makes so damn much that we freeze half so we don't burn out on eating it for the entirety of the week.
And don't get me wrong: we don't eat the same thing every night. I'm somewhat of a fussy eater. I don't mean there are only a few things that I will eat, I mean I am very intolerant of poorly prepared food. We eat extremely well in my house.
Oh yeah, there are nights where I say to myself, "damn, I'm just too tired to make anything special". That's when we eat the leftover, frozen chili. Or I dice up the leftover chicken from the roast and make a chicken salad out of it and we have sandwiches. Or we have tacos a second night, because we freakin' love tacos (I could eat tacos for every meal, and I know this because I have done it before).
Eating well doesn't mean complexity, it doesn't mean expense. Simple food, the right symphony of spices, and the correct cooking method. It's no different than programming.
Hell, some things like knives and cutting boards, I clean while I'm cooking. While I'm waiting for something to finish roasting or frying, I'm already cleaning my work area. Usually, the only dishes that are left over are plates, forks, and glasses.
And it's part of the day. Brushing your teeth takes time. Taking a shower takes time. Getting dressed takes time. You have to decide that you are a person who takes time to cook, not spend 15 more minutes on Twitter.
I'm not some rural hippy who has no real job, living off of the land, disconnected from the pace of life. We live the DC metro area. And by that, I don't mean we live in a mansion in Herndon or Reston, I mean we live in an a small apartment in Alexandria. I'm the CTO of a technology consulting firm. We have only one car between my wife and me, which she drives, and I take public transit everywhere.
If you don't feel like doing the dishes every day, you can just stack them up and do them once a week...
We probably had a bit more "bland" — I couldn't help being British — but we'd also go shopping once a week, cook most evenings, and vary between short/long prep/cooking time things. We'd sometimes use semi-prepared foods, (British-)Indian curry pastes were used relatively often, but something like a "make tacos kit" was expensive for what it contained, and only used once or twice before we'd work out how to make it ourselves.
Also, being four 18 year olds, we were never able to make leftovers last until the next day :-D
(None of this was unusual in Britain; /not/ doing this was unusual.)
If my dad woke up in 1975 where he lived in Brooklyn and decided that he wanted a Greek yogurt fresh blueberry and organic granola parfait... Well too fucking bad. Best case, you had a tub of Dannon plain yogurt and a bag of frozen berries.
Now everything is available all of the time, and that hyper-specialization of everything has eliminated cheap stuff that everyone bought to get by. Something like flank steak used to be sold for pennies on the dollar, now I see it prices the same as a strip steak!
It's not. If you don't know how to cook, buy a cookbook, one that has the fundamentals in it, one that teaches you about meat and bread and vegetables and starch and sauces and fish and condiments. And once you've learned the basics of "frying meat" or "cooking pasta", you can easily start to combine what you've learned into meals, and you can more easily follow recipes for variations or ideas on how to spice it or prepare it or present it.
But, I do believe as you allude to in your last sentence that nothing takes the place of practice. I think a lot of people get overwhelmed looking at a list of ingredients. With experience you know what ones are critical to the dish and what can be left out or substituted as you have learned tastes and can intuitively understand measurements.
And to circle back to the article, I think a lot of young people in America simply don't even get to try cooking for themselves the way society is organized.
When I started university and moved out of my parent's home, I didn't move into a dorm with a cafeteria, instead I moved into a small student apartment. If I wanted dinner each night, it was completely up to me. Frozen pan pizza gets kinda boring, so I had to start cooking for myself.
Then, when you want to have a meal, fill your kitchen sink full of hot water, maybe half-full, and throw one of those ziplock bags in. In 15 to 30 minutes, the meat will be completely thawed and you can cook whatever you want.
Given the right recipe, you might even be able to work the thaw time into the vegetable prep time.
EDIT: There are three other options for defrosting meat: in fridge, on the counter, and in the microwave, in order of speed from slowest to fastest. In the fridge takes extreme pre-knowledge: you practically have to do it the night before, and I am too fussy of an eater to know what I will want to eat a day ahead of time. On the counter is same-day, but has to be done in the morning, plus some people might be squeamish about leaving meat out at room temperature for several hours. Using the microwave takes 15 to 30 minutes, but is imperfect and often ends up cooking the meat to a certain degree. In short, the waterbath method is the most convenient defrosting method.
Meat should only be thawed in a fridge or, in an eemergency, in a bath of cold water.
Plunging it into hot water is heaven for bacterial growth.
Hot water isn't really that bad for bacterial growth. Lukewarm water is the enemy but even that's fine as long as you cook the meat within half an hour of taking it out of the fridge for defrosting. If you're taking longer z than half an hour that's a substantial cut off meat and you really should be able to plan a day ahead.
> Plunging it into hot water is heaven for bacterial growth.
Only true for large roasts; for steaks and similar portions, hot water thawing is safe and convenient:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/dining/a-hot-water-bath-fo...
Whether you cook from scratch, make some kind of prepared food or leftovers, have take-out/delivery, or go out to eat seems irrelevant by comparison.
My sister is a good example of this. She picked up a crazy, pain in the ass fad diet, has two kids and high powered corporate gig. Her husband is in a similar gig. The kids are in care from 7-7. So yeah, even buying a vegan, glueten free burrito is a pain in the ass. I worry about her, as she's going to have an anxiety attack someday.
That, I think, is the key. It's not reasonable to expect a big production dinner when both parents have full time jobs, particularly professionals who have to work late on occasion. That takes a level of organization most people just don't have.
Everyone knows you start the gravy (aka sauce) in a big pot on Saturday morning, make the kids stir it all day long, then heat it up for quick dinners throughout the week.
It's hard to read this and come away from it feeling that the problem is anything more than willfully ignorant parents (healthy eating information isn't hard to come by), indolently wallowing in their lack of self-awareness and inconsistencies.
In other words, normal people.
I get how some people derive great pleasure from making a meal from scratch, but for people in a great hurry, it's one of many checkboxes. And time spent stirring a pot or slicing vegetables is hardly quality family time.
Invite your kids into the kitchen. Teach them how to cook. Cooking can be some of the best quality family time if you make it a priority.
As an example, I take my kids camping a few times a year. I show them all kinds of things, like how to stake a tent, how to make a fire safely, etc.
If we had to do these things every single day just to cook and go to sleep, I suspect it would quickly devolve into running through the chores as quickly as possible while they stand to the side and poke at ant mounds with sticks.
We do make healthy quality meals and involve the kids with what we're doing, but this is certainly not an every night thing. Often, it's much easier to simply find a way to solve the problem and move on.
Teaching one's offspring what is and is not good to eat is perhaps the oldest and most fundamental task associated with raising young. It predates humanity by millions of years. If that is not "quality family time", I can't fathom what is.
> In other words, normal people.
As much as this looks like a rude thing to say, (and it kind of is), it's really quite true and I've experienced similar things with various parents I've seen (thankfully not mine).
There's a vast amount of lip service paid to to almost anything in the personal milieu that that involves the slightest forebearance, forethought or effort.