In my last post I promised I would talk a bit about those dinner-assembly franchises like Let's Dish, Dream Dinners and My Girlfriend's Kitchen. They're popping up everywhere like the proverbial toadstools. The Washington Post recently printed an excellent primer on the subject (you may need to register for this, try BugMeNot for help). Quickly, the idea is that one makes an appointment to go collate ingredients for 12 or so recipes from pre-prepared ingredients by following recipes posted at each station. At the end of assembly, the meals - which serve 4 to 6 - are put into freezer-friendly containers and carted home. For about $200, the assembler has roughly two weeks of meals and, at least according to the marketing, has enjoyed a lovely wine-filled girls' (for, lets face it, the men of the house aren't really being spoken to here) night out cavorting with friends and yet still managing to fulfill her duty to family and home.

I find the idea behind these stores very attractive. Who wouldn't love to cook with friends, share the work, double the fun and come out of the whole event with delicious food to eat for days to come? Sounds lovely to me. Actually, it must sound lovely to a lot of women, because since Dream Dinners opened back in 2003 the industry has racked up billions in annual sales and competition has sprung forth like zucchini in July.

I can't help but wish, though, that moms had social permission to go out with friends without having to also multitask their way to through one of the most burdensome household tasks - making yet another dinner on yet another busy day. There seems to be something a little naughty about moms heading out on their own to think only of themselves for a couple hours. Or is going out with friends reserved for those selfish singles who viewed Sex and the City as aspirational television? There is something culturally going on that does not really love to see mothers indulging in some non-family related downtime - I guess I'm not surprised that womens' social time has now expanded to include dinner preparation duties. Moreover, I don't think it's too picky to point out that where individuals are pictured on the companies' websites, they are white. "Family" seems to be fairly narrowly defined here as caucasian, two-parent and fairly affluent. And, please, don't get me started on the "The best idea since the invention of the wife(R)" tagline - Brainiac nearly collapsed of rant-induced boredom the last time I even mentioned it.

But even beyond the socioeconomic issues, I'm troubled that businesses that are positioning themselves as offering solutions to a family problem may well actually be worsening a social problem. Most of the major franchises don't allow children to attend an assembly session - citing local and state laws about children in commercial kitchens - and some of them only permit couples under certain conditions and at certain times. So even while these companies are claiming to make things easier for women responsible for meal preparation, I think they are really reinforcing the social pressures that resulted in women maintaining sole responsibility for feeding their families in the first place. A woman who turns to any one of these establishments with frequency may well get food on the table but she also is going to have family members who are not learning to cook and share the job but who are also completely removed from grocery shopping and preparing food for cooking. It's one thing to not really love to cook or not totally get how it's done, but it's another altogether different story to not even be sure how to chop a fresh bell pepper, tear lettuce or know which end of a scallion is used. Or what constitutes a good buy on chicken, for that matter. Dinner assembly out of the house increases the risk that our kids' generation will be even less connected to their food than our own.

I want to be clear about one thing. I am not blaming women in general or dinner assembly customers specifically for their dinner-related issues. I know all too well what it's like to stare into the fridge at 6:30 p.m. wondering what on earth to feed the cherubs dancing about my legs chanting that they're staaaaarrvvvviinngggg. And I've certainly known the frustration associated with paying good, hard-earned cash for a larder full of fresh vegetables, meats, fruits and lovely condiments only to throw away shameful amounts because we were too busy to cook and eat at home and so grabbed a dog at Target. Further, I understand more than I care to the pressures associated with owning a lovely kitchen in a nice exurban town, only to have to leave it empty all day while out paying for it. Really, I know and know there really is a problem here in search of a solution. But this solution isn't really because it will only make the problem worse for having institutionalized not addressing the root causes of the dinner problem and making it o.k. to leave them unaddressed as long as food's on the table and mom's getting out once in a while.

It would be fair to challenge me on what I'd recommend to a busy woman with bacon to bring home if she can't quite find the time or energy to fry it up in the pan. If not Dream Dinners or it's siblings, then what? Well, as it happens I do have a few ideas. And, within the next three weeks, four dinner assembly joints are to open within 10 miles of my house. Despite the impression I may have given, I'm keeping an open mind and plan to give one or two a try. Like I said, I do find something attractive about the idea of hanging out with other women, having a laugh or two, and cooking up many evenings' worth of dinners. I just wish that instead of doing it at My Girlfriend's Kitchen I was doing it at, you know, my girlfriend's kitchen.

The Boy Wonder, looking out the window of the Ford Tri-Motor he rode in last Saturday.



I've written before about the differences between my mother's experience in home economics classes and my own. To recap: she and her classmates learned to cook and then catered sports banquets. I learned to make pudding pies and English muffin pizzas and then ate them in the 4.5 minutes after the bell on my way to the next class.

Leaving aside the sexual politics involved in classes of exclusively young women preparing and serving meals for banquets honoring (most likely) exclusively young men, I don't think it's a mistake to say that her experience was the more useful by far. She actually learned to cook, after all, whereas I learned nothing in particular that I couldn't have absorbed from reading the back of boxes or can labels. I have my theories about why my class was so different, so useless, so watered-down. In no particular order, these theories are:

1) Pudding pies, snack pizzas, and other pre-fab simple foods, were ideal for teaching a generation of latch key kids how to prepare something easy when they were home alone, while also managing to avoid burning down the house.

2) The 80s marked the start of marketing disguising itself as curricula. Most of the materials we used in our home economics classes were written and distributed by major food processing companies. It is, of course, in these companies' best interests that young cooking students don't actually learn to cook.

3) Prevailing and developing cultural norms at the time suggested that girls would not grow up to be "just" moms and homekeepers but that they would inevitably avail themselves of any number of lucrative and powerful careers so cooking as an instructional topic was considered perversly out of date. (I can't help but wonder why, rather than dumbing down a topic that was traditionally the province of female students, schools did not respond to the whole career-negates-domesticity thing by putting the subject on boys' required schedules. That they did not says to me that either no one really believed that girls truly would grow up to engage in professional work, gave any thought at all as to who would be making the food we would be required to eat career or no, or could not conceive of a future in which women would not be the designated cook despite the potential presence of a chosen career. I have my suspicions which might be true, but it's all too depressing to think about for long.)

I am not a scholar (nor do I play one on my blog) so I don't really know if any of my theories are on the right track. I do know that my experience wasn't terribly unique - of all the women I know who took home economics in school, none of them credit it with teaching them anything enduring or especially valuable. And today, of course, schools are under so much pressure of all kinds and classes like home economics or life skills or whatever are back-burnered even more than they had been when I was a teen (waaaaaay back in the 80s, for those of you keeping track).

Whatever the reasons for home ec's slide, I think that cooking as a skill was further hampered by the advent of the advertisingeverywhere culture (AEC) we live in (seriously, I was thoroughly gobsmacked to discover advertisements on the inside doors of the toilet stalls in a national chain restaurant that a) I will not name and 2) I will never visit again). The AEC made it much easier for FoodProcessing Conglomerate, Inc. to convince newly careered women and homemakers alike that cooking for oneself or one's family is drudgery, a chore, something to avoided and/or reduced at all costs and - behold! - we have this handy product which you can open, warm and serve without breaking a sweat.

The result is that we now have a major food company that gives away a million dollars annually to the person who can most creatively use its frozen, boxed and canned products (last year's winner made stuffing out of frozen maple-flavored waffle sticks), any number of "cook"book authors who claim to be able to save you time and money by helping you fake out dinner guests with things like Naan-Style Flatbread made out of canned pizza dough, and an entire populace who thinks that meal preparation is either some kind of daily chore to be endured only by referencing some "meals in 20 minutes" website or an occasional thing you do for people you want to impress. And all the while the AEC keeps beating its drum...cooking is hard, cooking makes you suffer, open a box, open a box, open a box.... I haven't even thrown in yet the existence of those products the packages of which proclaim "Includes Meat!"

O.K., this is getting long and I've got to run to pick up the kids. Would you be shocked to know that I've got more to say about this? No? Good, because we haven't yet covered those mom's night out meal-assembly places, OAMC, a host of new books aimed at helping the beleagered and over-worked to feed themselves, children's cookbooks, Alice Waters, the war on poverty, or my new manifesto. Oh, and the jerk sauce I made the other day.

For a while now I've been pondering what it means to cook. Can one be a cook and have absolutely no interest in food from a creative standpoint? Can "assembling" meals be the same thing as cooking? That is, if I make a ground beef dish with dehydrated noodles and cream sauce brought back to life with a cup of water and serve it with a green bean casserole made by opening a total of four cans, and then mixing and heating their contents, have I cooked? Or, if I open a poly bag of frozen vegetables and meat into a skillet and heat them so that the frozen sauce encasing them melts and warms through, is that cooking?

As with most things, I think the lines are pretty blurry. If, that is, if lines exist at all. I certainly don't make everything my family eats from scratch, or even near-scratch in the case of the Tastykake treats that Brainiac seems to acquire whenever he leaves the house. Then, of course, there's ketchup, pasta (a convenience food that even anti-convenience-food folk seem to have no problem with), sausages, and on and on. I make some of our broths but not all, some of our pickles but not all. You see where I am going with this, right? Is there anyone out there anymore who does the Ma Ingalls thing, churning butter, salting pork, grinding wheat (although even Ma Ingalls used white sugar for company, not to mention tea leaves and commercially roasted coffee)? I make soup noodles from time to time, am interested in making all kinds of ketchups and regularly bake bread (from commercially-produced flour), although I've never made pitas, tortillas, matzoh, lavash or any of the other scores of bread products we eat. But, on the whole, I procure a heck of a lot more than I actually produce.

Then again, I have had the experience more than once while grocery shopping of having someone point out that my cart contains ingredients to make food rather than prepared foods to which one merely adds water or applies heat.

I don't really know where I am going with all of this. I wish I had a point, but I'm not there yet. I do know that I am a moving target, cooking-wise. Since I work at home in somewhat sporadic bursts I have a great deal of control over my own schedule and am able to make chicken broth or pizza dough or a batch of mango jam in between my other daily activities and responsibilities. It's easier for me than, say, a single mom working two minimum-wage service jobs or a woman who sits at a desk writing briefs for 12 hours a day, to put a "cook" meal on the table, as opposed to one for which many boxes and cans are opened and contents heated.

On the other hand, some of the things that I make which my family loves to eat the most are ridiculously easy and scarcely qualify as cooking. Roast chicken, comes to mind. With roasting chiken all you really need is a chicken and time, heat application at its most sublime. Soup's the same way - leftover veggies cooked in seasoned water, what could be simpler?

So, maybe time really is the magic ingredient rather than being invested over who made the broth. And it's something that is so scarce anymore. I know from experience that four not-over-programmed individuals can still result in one over-programmed family. If, on top of our over-programmedness, I added a full-time out of the house job I'd do a heck of a lot more assembling and heating.

Hm. As I said, I wish I had a point, but I do not. These are things that I've been thinking of for a while now and I'm no closer to understanding the various inputs and methods involved in cooking for one's family than I was at the beginning. I should say here that I'm not looking in all of this to judgment - there is no way on earth I'm going to come down on a mom who is just looking to get through the day sanity intact and trying to get some food on the table in the bargain. I, too, can be a master assembler. To wit, my chili recipe, a triumph of assembly and heating:

Brown however much ground beef or finely chopped steak you want in a large saucepan. When about half-way browned, add a couple fistfull's of chopped onion and a couple cloves of chopped garlic. When the onion is translucent, add two drained cans of drained kidney or black beans (or a can of each) and a drained can of petite dice tomatoes. Add a packet or a couple tablespoons of chili seasoning and a squirt or two of Frank's RedHot (the lime variety is particularly nice). Allow to cool slightly and taste to adjust seasonings. May be served over biscuits or rice, if desired.