Pizza rolls, Steak-umms, and Chef Boyardee pizzas were basically survival food in the 80s as many of us were left to fend for ourselves for days at a time during the school week.
80s? I don't know, wasn't like that for me. I knew some kids maybe where it was like that for them, I felt sorry for them.
From my perspective, obviously a limited perspective based on the time I grew up, the 1970's was the best time to be a kid in the history of kids.
We roamed the streets, 10 years old, running wild in the streets.
So latchkey kids could also roam the streets.
My Mother's pizza is famous amongst my friends and family. It is started from the chef boyardee pizza kit and surprisingly little has changed in her version.
My brothers and our childhood friends are all in our 40's and 50's now, have had pizza all over the world, and momma pizza still ranks.
They were super excited and insisted we go.
The conversation went like this "This pizza isn't really that good." "I know! That's the great thing about it!"
Imosholm syndrome is real.
With imos you can't go in expecting anything, just enjoy it for what it is.
It was definitely "different."
Today they do not even include cheese in the box.
I wish they would sell the sauce with the mini pepperonis in a jar by itself.
Similar to what you would get from a butcher for frozen philly cheese steak sandwiches, but not the same.
Also, most things come with some sort of cooking instructions, like pasta or rice or whatever.
Is it unusual that my parents (and pretty much all my friend's parents) made sure we grew up knowing how to cook and eat really good food? Maybe it's a UK vs US thing, maybe it's because the nearest "convenience stores" were a couple of hundred miles away.
Yeah, I overstated the reality for rhetorical effect, but it also would depend on what part of the US. Gender roles have changed in some places, but not so much in others.
> until I reached high school and football practice got in the way
That says a lot about US culture right there.
I received similar pushback for taking both Home Ec classes. It was really the only way out of the latchkey kid diet, which, yes, was primarily sandwiches, Steak-Umms, and so on.
"But you'd be the only boy in the class, everyone else in the class is a girl!" was the general objection from the staff doing the timetables.
Yes. That is rather the point, isn't it?
Anyway I did Technical Drawing instead because either they couldn't see what the plan was, or they could see it all too well.
When I had to do some photography on appointment and sometimes videography, well, nervous people can mess up their clothes. A number of women were surprised when I whipped out a needle and matching thread to briefly repair a tear in their clothing when time was tight.
I felt pretty annoyed at having to defend these kinds of choices, and a surprising amount of the pushback came not from boys my own age, but girls and women.
I credit this with why I know how to cook as well as I do. We grew up poor by most standards in the US, but my uncle was a butcher, both grandparents were farmers, so the one thing we had access to was fruits, vegetables and good meats.
Its also why I think i never learned good portion control as a child and still have trouble maintaining a healthy weight (among other reasons I won't get into here), we made very good savory food all the time because its what we had. We had to cook, as take out wasn't an option, and frozen foods weren't cost effective the same way for us (due to familial professions, we had access to things most people don't in this way).
That's the irony. I feel like I grew up with blander foods I'd be less inclined to eat them so much growing up, feeding a long habit of food being comfort.
So my mate would go round to his grandparents and find his grandad stirring a pot of chilli and a pot of stew and a pot of curry each roughly the size of a dustbin, and be greeted with "Oh hello, young lad, I wish I'd known you were coming, I'd have made you some dinner!"
Wtf does medium heat mean? How about simmer?
They're great if you've got a basic understanding of cooking, but not for getting that basic understanding.
If you're functionally literate, you can figure it out in no time.
No classic cookbook describes how to listen for medium versus high heat.
"Medium heat" is when the ring is half-way up. "High heat" is when the ring is all the way up.
I knew shit like this when I was nine years old, because I knew what words like "medium" and "high" and "heat" meant.
This whole thread is just reinforcing the impression I have that Americans are just permanent children, forever eating scaled-up versions of the children's menu.
Sure you can hack around and get something ok regardless, but...
> maybe it's because the nearest "convenience stores" were a couple of hundred miles away
Gosh, what a wild idea that that would lead to a difference! Combine that with parents without enough free time to be home much in the first place, the rapid availability of processed food that lasts longer and is ready faster, and advertising campaigns that innundated people with these and didn't mention the downsides of the new shit... why are you being so smug about just happening to grow up in a different environment?
Gas or electric? Small or large burner? Cast iron or steel pan?
Kudos to you for being an exceptional nine year old cook, but it's objectively true that most cookbooks are written assuming basic cooking knowledge, the kind one would get from a parent who had time to cook with a child.
This hasn’t been true anywhere I’ve lived, except my current house, where I adjusted the gas. In Cupertino, high barely summers. In New York, quarterway turned will sear and instantly burn dry powders. (Also: I grew up overseas.)
This is incorrect.
Medium is when the surface of the pan is around 350°F. High is when it's around 450°F. (Low is 250°F.)
How to get and then maintain the surface of the pan at that temperature is probably one of the trickiest skills there is for people to learn. Because obviously if you put an empty pan on the middle of your gas burner dial and just leave it there it will quickly heat up to ultra-hot (550°F+). While if you dump a bunch of watery vegetables in there to sauté it will just go down to like 150°F and not heat up further.
In the end setting the right burner strength to maintain your desired temperature is a crazy nonlinear function of heat, pan temperature, pan material (both conductivity and thermal mass), food quantity in pan, food temperature, food water content, and lid on/off. That you learn through just a lot of trial and error, involving a lot of listening for sizzle and seeing bubbles and browning and feeling for radiant heat with your hand. Not by setting the dial to a particular setting.
If you want to know why so many people have difficulty doing something so "basic" as frying an egg, this is why. If you want to know why part of the interview to cook in a restaurant is also quite often... just to fry a single egg... that's why. (It's "fizzbuzz" for cooks.)
Also, please don't do things like insult entire nationalities here. It's very much against HN guidelines.
The trash can was actually the biggest part of the lesson, don't be afraid of failure.
Which is weird, because I never used one as a kid. Toaster, yes. Toaster-oven, no.
Sure, I know you do...
Some of the recipes remind me of the matpakke video. "But not too exciting or tasty!" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JlNmeVK_zLg
Americans are scared of flavour.
People who like soccer were exposed to it.
People who like working on electronics were exposed to it.
Rarely does anyone do stuff independently. You saw someone else do it and that’s what got you into it. It has never mattered that libraries existed. Libraries are mostly for researching something that you’ve already taken an interest in. A library is literally massive.
If you and your parents emphasized cooking, then that’s good. But you know, a really rich family would expose their kid to everything while a poor one wouldn’t. And what you get exposed to determines your life’s path, so that’s how the cookie crumbles.
We look back and say "I'd just go find a book, read it, and then try some practice runs."
To an 8 year old, that sequence of events in response to not knowing something is completely alien.
My parents didn't keep non-frozen and non-boxed food in the house.
Do Americans just not like food, or something?
I could have made a salad, but not many 8 year olds would choose those over bagel bites.