So, What Would Phoebe Do had a post a bit back in which she basically argued that cooking can be a hell of a lot of work, and those people promising fast and easy simple recipes need to stop lying to people:
because food and health writers whose topic of choice is home cooking do this for a living, their entire concept of how much cooking interferes with the life of someone whose life doesn’t revolve around cooking is warped, warped, warped.
I enthusiastically agreed, because I have this argument with my sister all the time. If you do not cook regularly, cooking is a big-ass hassle, and it is enough of a hassle that it makes it very difficult to develop the habit of cooking regularly.
However, Phoebe missed a few items on her list.
I decided to make quiche, because it’s really handy to have some real food around that requires nothing more a microwave to create a meal. I have eaten quiche, so I know what it’s supposed to taste like. I have made quiche, so I know it’s not that hard to get edible and that 6 eggs and 2 cups of milk requires TWO pie shells even though none of the recipes tell you this. I don’t need to spend 30 minutes trying to decide which quiche recipe on the internet I should follow, because I have How to Cook Everything on my phone and I am going to just trust Mark Bittman.
So I am happy and optimistic about the quiche plan, even though I don’t cook. I am going to use ingredients from my trip to the farmer’s market this morning to make pesto for pesto quiche, even, because I love pesto.
In the Grocery Store:
- wonder exactly how 4 oz of basil correlates to 2 tightly packed cups and maybe I should just spend $10 on two packages of organic basil but that seems fucking ridiculous.
- peer at labels and price per oz to try to figure which of the 25 fucking brands of imported extra virgin olive oil I should buy
- wish pathetically for a grocery store that only offered each item in a single brand.
- read labels on pie crusts looking for whole grain ingredients.
- stare hopelessly at the eggs, wondering what’s the difference between free range and cage-free and access to outdoors and does omega-3 mean they put some kind of injection into the eggs or what?
- since I am at the grocery, decide to buy brown rice. Google to figure out whether brown rice is healthy or I have to go all the way to the $9/lb wild rice. Ponder whether I am more likely to enjoy long grain brown rice, short grain brown rice, short grain brown rice (pearled), or sweet brown rice. Wish I could call my mother and ask her but she’s traveling this weekend. Note that this is a high-stakes decision, because if I have to add “overcome the memory of the nasty-ass food I cooked last time” to the beginning of any intent to cook, it’s not gonna be good.
At Home
- change clothes and put on apron because I am a messy cook.
- start to prebake the pie crust per the recipe, worry that I have no aluminum foil, wonder what the fuck a pie weight is, think that maybe prebaking the pie crust is only if you actually made the pie crust, curse Mark Bittman.
- call my mother on the cell to settle the prebaking issue.
- scale back plans to make pesto-cheese quiche and spinach quiche in favor of getting a goddamn cheese quiche in the oven asap.
- resist urge to cry, say fuck it, and order pizza. Turn up music instead.
- skip the recommended fresh basil because I don’t know whether to include the stems and am pissed about how the fuck I’m supposed to only wash a 1/4 cup of basil when it’s on a fucking stem still.
- guess I needed the fucking pie weights. Tamp down the blown up pie shells, hope they are browned enough, since I can’t really tell with the whole grain spelt flour.
- wonder what “beat until well-blended” means when I have 2 cups of grated aged cheese that is not going to blend without some sort of machine getting involved. Decide it can’t really matter because how you can screw up cheese and eggs and milk, but curse Mark Bittman anyway.
- feel smug about having the necessary two pie crusts ready.
- put the quiche in the oven. Realize I just exerted all that mental energy on making something completely unhealthy.
Maybe the thought of the basil rotting will convince me to cook again soon, but maybe not.
ETA, from my comment, because I think this sums the heart of my issues: I went from happy to fucking furious, as little annoyances accumulated from 5pm to 7pm. What food is worth that?
17 October 2010 at 4:38 am
Amen.
Speaking as someone who used to cook all the time and then joined the tenure track and gradually transitioned to almost never cooking myself (resorting to restaurants, ready made/frozen foods, reheating, and eating cold food, etc.) I am mystified about why people who cook regularly don’t realize this themselves. I like quiche, too, and I wouldn’t have had the content or technical problems you had (how much basil do I need to buy, what is a pie weight, which kind of eggs to buy), but if you said to me tonight, make a quiche, I’d think, ok, I am not sure if the pans got unpacked in the last move, better make sure to buy pre-granted cheese, do I have a knife handy to chop up that spinach, what about a drainer in case I get frozen, etc., etc. I.e., I know a fair amount about cooking and know that much beyond a grilled cheese sandwich or a quesadilla is going to involve dirtying more stuff than I’d like to or locating equipment that may be AWOl or rusty or whatever. I think most regular cooks overestimate the regular non-cook’s tolerance for frustration, but I still don’t understand why since they have plenty of their own and should know what’s involved…
17 October 2010 at 6:59 am
Basil: no stems. Leaves only, usually.
For what you’ve got and are wondering how to use without spending hours in the kitchen: slice the leaves and do a 3-minute sauté in a pan with some olive oil, garlic and chopped tomatoes (goo & guts removed), then toss the whole mess with cooked pasta of your choice (angel hair is great for this). Or put some on a premade pizza crust) with fresh mozarella and sliced tomatoes or grilled vegetables (also store- or deli-bought, to save time).
But this doesn’t address the greater philosophical question about “easy cooking,” about which you’re right on the money, I think. I think of cooking as a weekly task, rather than a daily one, and end up throwing over an entire day to shopping and cooking something that I can reheat and eat for the rest of the week.
And if you ever decide to make pesto, it freezes nicely.
17 October 2010 at 9:23 am
I do like to cook, but yeah, it takes some time. My partner and I tend to cook together, so we get some time to talk and hang out together, but our bad habit is that we decide to start dinner when we’re hungry, and then it takes like an hour and a half to make anything, so we’re REALLY hungry by the time the food is ready, and also it’s kind of late in the evening by that time.
17 October 2010 at 5:40 pm
Yes. My parents also do this, and a side effect there is a lot of hungry annoyed bickering during the prep. Not worth it.
I wasn’t even hungry during this episode, having bought chowder around 3pm. Yet it still drove me over the edge.
17 October 2010 at 12:35 pm
Next time you see pie weights, think dried beans. You’ve probably got some in the back of the cupboard somewhere.
17 October 2010 at 3:22 pm
Yikes! Now I know why I never make quiche. Still, I think the difference between are lists is in part about the fact that quiche, even with a prebaked crust, is not as straightforward as stirfry, but also a question of what PG was saying in a comment to my post – cooking never gets easy, but it does get easier. The endless-choice dilemma is one of the simpler obstacles to overcome – when in doubt, just pick the cheapest. Store-brand if possible. This saves some money but even more time. That said, you’re right to point out that this is a step those unaccustomed to cooking will have to get through, one that even “simple” recipes just assume home cooks have already figured out.
17 October 2010 at 4:09 pm
This made me laugh, because I feel totally intimidated by most cooking.
Quiche is something I’ve figured out pretty well, but it still takes time. (One sort of quiche, at least.)
17 October 2010 at 4:54 pm
Like anything, cooking does get easier if you make it a habit. If you drive, think of how complicated driving a car was when you started. Yet after you’ve done it a few dozen times, most of the complicated steps become habitual. And it can be hard to understand why a new driver is flummoxed.
I’m the cook in my household, and I have a t-t job. In other words, my life doesn’t revolve around cooking. But I don’t find cooking very onerous, because I plan meals about a week at a time and buy all the ingredients in one trip to the store. I have ten or so simple recipes that I make quite frequently, with some more complicated recipes thrown in the mix from time to time.
Learning to cook is a lot easier if you choose a small number of simple recipes to learn, and cook them over and over (within your limits for boredom). Once you’ve mastered the techniques required for those recipes, you can move on to more complicated ones if you want.
I do have to say that it’s more fun to cook for someone else than just for yourself. Back when my wife and I were in a commuter marriage we would cook when we were together and often eat leftovers or prepared food when we were apart.
17 October 2010 at 5:02 pm
Brian, I think you’ve nailed something (crossed in posting). I started driving late, and I remember EXACTLY how complicated it is. That cooks cannot give me the same understanding is what is really aggravating.
17 October 2010 at 4:59 pm
Thanks, all.
I actually made the pesto while the quiche was in the oven, out of pure anger. (Y’all shoulda seen how viciously I was cracking those eggs.) Thanks, NPhD. I called my mother about the stems. Sometimes I forget to ask the google things about food.
The quiche is so-so; I would have preferred it with some veggies in there to make the texture less custardy. The pesto is not as good as the sample at the farmer’s market, despite following the recipe pretty exactly, but it makes a fine topping for the quiche.
Re the pie weights, to be fair to Bittman, he did mention dried beans. But since I don’t cook, no-the-fuck-way do I have dried beans in my cabinet. (Okay, he also said raw rice, which I had just bought though don’t normally have. And it’s totally my fault I don’t have the foil you are supposed to lay between.) But seriously, FLG, that you could think the person in this post has dried beans in the back of her cabinet puts you in the warped food-writer category. I’m gonna assume you were being funny and doing that on purpose.
One point that I didn’t articulate, but comes through clearly, I think, is that if you are aiming to cook in order to eat more healthily, that requires even more knowledge and debate in the grocery store. Also, I’m obviously a person who likes to make informed decisions and isn’t poor, which creates way more stress for me in the grocery.
And just to seem a little less pathetic than this post—I have become relatively adept at polenta from the rice cooker under some sauteed mushrooms or a premade sauce. But that gets boring, and still requires a 20-30 minute wait if very little actual labor. For health, I needed something that would replace the instant gratification I get from eating chips&salsa for dinner.
I also want to emphasize that I went from happy to fucking furious, as little annoyances accumulated from 5pm to 7pm. What food is worth that?
17 October 2010 at 5:41 pm
OK, re: making informed choices, I, in turn, should have mentioned that my regular supermarket (for boring reasons I’ve explained on my own blog and won’t go into here) is a Whole Foods. Even if you’re looking for, say, organic, or whole wheat, there’s often a “365″ option. That may not be the case at all supermarkets, but my sense is it’s increasingly getting that way. Then, with things like meat or vegetables, you can pick whatever factor you care about (local, low-fat, etc.) and go with that option – the multibrand factor isn’t such an issue with lettuce.
17 October 2010 at 6:13 pm
Yes, agreed. I have a locally owned Whole Foods-type market, and that’s what I did with the olive oil. That’s also a big selling point at Trader Joe’s, that you can just trust the store brand. But again, it requires repetition and consistency to get to the point where that works—it was only yesterday that I realized this was the low-price store brand (I think). And normally I shop at multiple stores, which means I don’t recognize the-brand-I-got-last-time, don’t memorize where things are, etc. So for efficient grocery-store-going, which is clearly a prerequisite for smooth cooking, I am going to have to break a lifelong habit of shopping by sales. That’s hard. I don’t see food writers talking about it (although I think the Engine2Diet book that my sister talked me into trying for a month devoted the first chapter to setting up the kitchen. It didn’t take fully, but I picked up a few things).
I’m clearly a pretty indecisive person, and yes, I deal with that by leaning on a lot of “rules” for myself. But developing those rules for cooking is tricky, & not helped by the way they keep changing the “science” on what’s healthy every other day.
17 October 2010 at 8:01 pm
[...] trying to make quiche practically sent me into a mental breakdown, how in the world is it that I can deal with sewing, [...]
17 October 2010 at 10:02 pm
I definitely agree that one of the problems with all the cooking stuff is that you’re (often) trying to do all this crap at the end of a workday when you’re already hungry. This is why all my efficient cook friends cook big stuff on the weekend, but I never enjoy doing that.
(And why is quiche unhealthy??)
17 October 2010 at 10:07 pm
6 eggs, 2 cups of half-and-half, and 2 cups of grated cheese? high-fat, zero veggies. I cling desperately to the whole grain spelt crust.
I *was* actually trying to spend a Saturday afternoon cooking something to last me all week.
17 October 2010 at 11:59 pm
My mind and keyboard didn’t sync up. That was supposed to say:
You’ve probably got some in the back of the cupboard somewhere [next to the white truffle oil.]
19 October 2010 at 1:46 am
I would be MORE likely to have truffle oil (which is delicious) than dried beans.
19 October 2010 at 2:03 am
Hey, dried beans are delicious too, when you soak them and then cook them, and then drizzle some truffle oil over them….
19 October 2010 at 5:21 pm
[...] not about the quiche. Quiche IS easy, and forgiving. The grating and mixing and cooking of Saturday’s quiche was perfectly smooth, didn’t even spill it getting it in the oven. I actually made quiche [...]
2 December 2011 at 3:56 pm
free adult passes…
[...]Why I Don’t Cook « Prone to Laughter[...]…