More little tidbits about meal assembly joints:
1) They have their own industry association. On the one hand, I can see the need for such an organization - who else to discuss the critical question Is this a fad? No word on the website about how much the answer to this - and other - questions costs. Maybe, like dinner assembly itself, you get the answers for 6 to 12 questions for as little as $200 and change. Hmm. Somehow, I doubt it.
2) Foodmomiac details her experience with Dream Dinners in this series of posts. To be fair, I have looked around for positive reviews of dinner assembly meals other than those published in traditional, mainstream media outlets, to no avail. Lifestyle reporters in particular seem to love dinner assembly, but no word from the food pages. Other than a few negative discussions, of which Foodmomiac was just one, bloggers' mentions seem to be just that they went with friends to one or another such franchise with no follow up as to their feelings about what they ended up eating as a result.
I remain interested in trying a session for myself, in the interests of self-experimentation, of course. Tell me what you think: because I have blogged on this subject and will more than likely do so again, should I share my thoughts, why I'm there and my intention to blog about the experience? I'm not exactly Dooce or Julie here so it's not like my little corner of the internet is going to single-handedly bring down an entire nascent industry simultaneously giving rise to the rebirth of the rice-packet eschewing home cook. (But, goodness, wouldn't that be cool?) I wonder just where the blogger/ever-so-slightly journalist (however faux) line is. Thoughts?
A while back, a commenter asked if I knew of any sort-of home-ec websites for adults or good books that might teach one how to cook. Susie J suggested Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food (which, by the way, has a subtitle that goes "Food + Heat = Cooking", harkening back to another recent post which I wrote before I'd ever really known much about Alton Brown at all) and Shirley Corriher's Cookwise. I don't know anything about either of these books, but I can say with certainty that Sue is a wonderfully accomplished and adventurous cook (not to mention baker) and I think one might do well to heed her advice on the matter.
For my part, I went about things a little differently. One day it was decided I needed to learn to cook. I remember the day - I was a sophomore in college, living off campus with a very glamourous girlfriend in what we thought was a best apartment ever and we decided to give a dinner party. First one of us had to learn to cook something. That I am now writing this blog and she is a chef illustrates just how life-changing the conversation turned out to be.
My point is that sometimes, to learn to book means deciding that one is going to learn to cook and then doing it. I've always held that, gene splicing and hybridizing aside, there is essentially a finite number of ingredients in the world. A huge number, to be sure, but basically finite. Rule out all the things you don't want to eat - for me these include most specialty meats and I don't care what anyone says about it, some fruits and a surprisingly (to me) large number of condiments - and work with what you do want to eat. One you learn some cool things to do with a tomato you pretty much can deal with all tomatoes, no matter the variety. Figure out how to get a batch of bran muffins in the oven, and you've got corn, blueberry, cranberry orange and chocolate chip in the bag, so to speak. The same is true for roasts - beef, pork, chicken, whatever. There are nuances, sure, but the basic principle is the same.
On the way to learning to cook, you may produce some awful stuff. Eat it anyway, learn and move on. I, myself, still cannot make an omelet of any repute but I press on knowing the result will be worth it and the day I can reproduce the gruyere and duck omelet I love at the Black Lab Bistro will be a happy one for me. In the meantime, I eat an awful lot of failed omelets. I also made a lot of cakes before I figured out the basic procedure, starting with yellow cake. Now the whole operation is, so to speak, a piece of cake and I can produce all kinds of cakes in fairly short order. So, unlike, say, ice dancing, which requires some innate talent, becoming a reasonably good home cook just requires practice. More on the order of bike riding, I'd say.
One time you'll follow the directions for a basic pasta sauce of roasted tomatoes, basil, garlic and pepper and think, "Well, the texture is all right, but I think it needs less garlic, more basil and maybe some carrot or something to give it body." And you'll try that next time, and then the third time, leave out the basil but include celery and wine and keep going changing a bit each time until you have a sauce you love and can make in your sleep. Along the way, you'll use it not only over plain pasta but atop toasted bread as an hors dourve or loosened with broth as a soup. Next, remembering the tomato sauce experiments, you'll wonder if you can roast an eggplant in the same way and find out that yes! you can and not only that, but you can grill it, too and - hey! - can tomatoes be grilled? What about thyme instead of basil and white pepper instead of black? And on you go, like a good kitchen scientist, using the results of one thing to inform the next. Some stuff will suck and some will be great, but that's how life goes, isn't it?
I also recommend starting slow. Don't try to produce a four course meal for dinner tomorrow night. Make one thing and buy or open boxes for the rest. And be reasonable - starting with Vitello Tonnato is not a hot idea, but maybe a seasoned veal chop would be great. Grill a chop a few times to get a feel for how veal works for you and how it reacts to heat and your pans and your touch and, before you know it, that Vitello Tonnato is in reach.
So I think this is how you have to start, if you haven't learned in home-ec or at your mother's elbow. Take a deep breath, ignore your woefully inadequate kitchen (believe me, there are very few adequate kitchens in the world and even fewer get used with any regularity - well-outfitted cooking spaces seldom turn up in restaurants for some reason, preferring to habitate in those really big houses that get built when farms get bought up), make peace with your single mixing bowl and one knife, banish the little voice that's telling you that cooking is a pain and you never learned before so you won't learn now and, in the words of a greater writer than I, just do it. Today a baked apple, tomorrow an apple pie and next week an Apple-Rosemary Tart.
For my part, I went about things a little differently. One day it was decided I needed to learn to cook. I remember the day - I was a sophomore in college, living off campus with a very glamourous girlfriend in what we thought was a best apartment ever and we decided to give a dinner party. First one of us had to learn to cook something. That I am now writing this blog and she is a chef illustrates just how life-changing the conversation turned out to be.
My point is that sometimes, to learn to book means deciding that one is going to learn to cook and then doing it. I've always held that, gene splicing and hybridizing aside, there is essentially a finite number of ingredients in the world. A huge number, to be sure, but basically finite. Rule out all the things you don't want to eat - for me these include most specialty meats and I don't care what anyone says about it, some fruits and a surprisingly (to me) large number of condiments - and work with what you do want to eat. One you learn some cool things to do with a tomato you pretty much can deal with all tomatoes, no matter the variety. Figure out how to get a batch of bran muffins in the oven, and you've got corn, blueberry, cranberry orange and chocolate chip in the bag, so to speak. The same is true for roasts - beef, pork, chicken, whatever. There are nuances, sure, but the basic principle is the same.
On the way to learning to cook, you may produce some awful stuff. Eat it anyway, learn and move on. I, myself, still cannot make an omelet of any repute but I press on knowing the result will be worth it and the day I can reproduce the gruyere and duck omelet I love at the Black Lab Bistro will be a happy one for me. In the meantime, I eat an awful lot of failed omelets. I also made a lot of cakes before I figured out the basic procedure, starting with yellow cake. Now the whole operation is, so to speak, a piece of cake and I can produce all kinds of cakes in fairly short order. So, unlike, say, ice dancing, which requires some innate talent, becoming a reasonably good home cook just requires practice. More on the order of bike riding, I'd say.
One time you'll follow the directions for a basic pasta sauce of roasted tomatoes, basil, garlic and pepper and think, "Well, the texture is all right, but I think it needs less garlic, more basil and maybe some carrot or something to give it body." And you'll try that next time, and then the third time, leave out the basil but include celery and wine and keep going changing a bit each time until you have a sauce you love and can make in your sleep. Along the way, you'll use it not only over plain pasta but atop toasted bread as an hors dourve or loosened with broth as a soup. Next, remembering the tomato sauce experiments, you'll wonder if you can roast an eggplant in the same way and find out that yes! you can and not only that, but you can grill it, too and - hey! - can tomatoes be grilled? What about thyme instead of basil and white pepper instead of black? And on you go, like a good kitchen scientist, using the results of one thing to inform the next. Some stuff will suck and some will be great, but that's how life goes, isn't it?
I also recommend starting slow. Don't try to produce a four course meal for dinner tomorrow night. Make one thing and buy or open boxes for the rest. And be reasonable - starting with Vitello Tonnato is not a hot idea, but maybe a seasoned veal chop would be great. Grill a chop a few times to get a feel for how veal works for you and how it reacts to heat and your pans and your touch and, before you know it, that Vitello Tonnato is in reach.
So I think this is how you have to start, if you haven't learned in home-ec or at your mother's elbow. Take a deep breath, ignore your woefully inadequate kitchen (believe me, there are very few adequate kitchens in the world and even fewer get used with any regularity - well-outfitted cooking spaces seldom turn up in restaurants for some reason, preferring to habitate in those really big houses that get built when farms get bought up), make peace with your single mixing bowl and one knife, banish the little voice that's telling you that cooking is a pain and you never learned before so you won't learn now and, in the words of a greater writer than I, just do it. Today a baked apple, tomorrow an apple pie and next week an Apple-Rosemary Tart.
Greetings from suburban Freakinhotadelphia. When the heat index climbed to 115 yesterday - and this ain't no dry heat, friends - we caved and installed our second window air conditioner. We can now shut off three of the main living spaces (like many big old houses, ours has multiple doors off of each room) and remain in relative comfort. Leaving the now-cooled Pullman-style rooms requires yanking open a paint- and heat-swollen door to the sounds of everyone else yelling, "Shut the door!" and gasping for air like a carnival goldfish being transferred from its baggie.
But now the kitchen, dining room and living room are cooler and comfortable, if somewhat messier, what with the toys, books, and DVD that have emigrated from the house's uncooled areas. Having the newly cooly inviting kitchen I decided to can the four pounds of cherries that I pitted over the weekend. Because they were already pitted, the entire operation was a short one - maybe 20 minutes, not including processing. And, cherries are one of the very easy fruits to process, because their liquid can be syrup, fruit juice or water. I used the soaking water in which I stored the pitted fruit in the fridge, and which had a bit of lime juice added to it to help preserve color. So, even more than pickles or jam, cherries are an easy-peasy project for novice canners, using as little as the fruit and water.
I gave my love a cherry.... Jeez. I hate it when I'm a sucker for the obvious joke. Ah, well.
You know how, on The New Yankee Workshop, Norm Abram always interrupts the project of the day to remind his viewers to always read the instructions that come with their power tools and to wear safety goggles? Here's the Hot Water Bath version of that PSA: Every box of canning jars comes with basic canning instructions. Be sure to read and understand them before you're standing in front of a pot of boiling sugar syrup, jam or pickling brine. You can also read this for an excellent primer on the subject. Don't worry, it's not as involved as it looks, you just need to be a little careful and, once you get the hang of it, you, too, can put up eight half-pints of cherries in about 20 minutes.
Good? Good.
To save range space, I sterilized my jars in the oven and simmered the rings and lids. Because I had decided to use the water and lime juice mixture as the canning liquid, so drained the cherries into a pot, added a couple cups of water to make sure that I had enough, and brought the liquid to boil. The cherries themselves were raw packed (that is, put into the jars without heating) and had the boiling liquid added to within a half an inch of the rims. A quick wipe of the rims with a paper towel dipped in the water simmering with the lids, placement of the lids themselves and a good tightening, and the only thing left to do was wait for the canner to come to a good boil. The four pounds of pitted cherries resulted in 7 half-pints of canned fruit. Yum!
Now. What to do with it all? I'm not totally sure. I bet they'd be really great on ice cream, drained or cooked in syrup and with a little Frangelico added in. And I've never eaten cherry crisp, but it sounds great and even better without the commercial pie filling. They could be drained and chopped for muffins, or to add to pancake batter or salads or goodness knows what else. Hmmm...what else?
So that was my evening. What did you do?
But now the kitchen, dining room and living room are cooler and comfortable, if somewhat messier, what with the toys, books, and DVD that have emigrated from the house's uncooled areas. Having the newly cooly inviting kitchen I decided to can the four pounds of cherries that I pitted over the weekend. Because they were already pitted, the entire operation was a short one - maybe 20 minutes, not including processing. And, cherries are one of the very easy fruits to process, because their liquid can be syrup, fruit juice or water. I used the soaking water in which I stored the pitted fruit in the fridge, and which had a bit of lime juice added to it to help preserve color. So, even more than pickles or jam, cherries are an easy-peasy project for novice canners, using as little as the fruit and water.
I gave my love a cherry.... Jeez. I hate it when I'm a sucker for the obvious joke. Ah, well.
You know how, on The New Yankee Workshop, Norm Abram always interrupts the project of the day to remind his viewers to always read the instructions that come with their power tools and to wear safety goggles? Here's the Hot Water Bath version of that PSA: Every box of canning jars comes with basic canning instructions. Be sure to read and understand them before you're standing in front of a pot of boiling sugar syrup, jam or pickling brine. You can also read this for an excellent primer on the subject. Don't worry, it's not as involved as it looks, you just need to be a little careful and, once you get the hang of it, you, too, can put up eight half-pints of cherries in about 20 minutes.
Good? Good.
To save range space, I sterilized my jars in the oven and simmered the rings and lids. Because I had decided to use the water and lime juice mixture as the canning liquid, so drained the cherries into a pot, added a couple cups of water to make sure that I had enough, and brought the liquid to boil. The cherries themselves were raw packed (that is, put into the jars without heating) and had the boiling liquid added to within a half an inch of the rims. A quick wipe of the rims with a paper towel dipped in the water simmering with the lids, placement of the lids themselves and a good tightening, and the only thing left to do was wait for the canner to come to a good boil. The four pounds of pitted cherries resulted in 7 half-pints of canned fruit. Yum!
Now. What to do with it all? I'm not totally sure. I bet they'd be really great on ice cream, drained or cooked in syrup and with a little Frangelico added in. And I've never eaten cherry crisp, but it sounds great and even better without the commercial pie filling. They could be drained and chopped for muffins, or to add to pancake batter or salads or goodness knows what else. Hmmm...what else?
So that was my evening. What did you do?
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