Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [66]
Working people’s cooking, of course, will develop an efficiency ethic. I’m shameless about throwing out the extraneous plot twists of a hoity-toity recipe and getting to its main theme. Or ignoring cookbooks altogether during the week, relying mostly on simple meals I’ve made a thousand times before, in endless variation: frittata, stir-fry, pasta with one protein and two vegetables thrown in. Or soups that can simmer unattended all day in our Crock-Pot, which is named Mrs. Cleaver. More labor-intensive recipes we save for weekends: lasagna, quiches, roasted chicken, desserts of any kind. I have another rule about complicated dishes: always double the recipe, so we can recoup the investment and eat this lovely thing again later in the week.
Routines save time, and tempers. Like a mother managing a toddler’s mood swings, our family has built some reliable backstops for the times in our week when work-weary, low-blood-sugar blowouts are most likely. Friday nights are always pizza-movie nights. Friends or dates are welcome; we rent one PG feature and one for after small children go to bed. We always keep the basic ingredients for pizza on hand—flour and yeast for the dough, mozzarella, and tomatoes (fresh, dried, or canned sauce, depending on the season). All other toppings vary with the garden and personal tastes. Picky children get to control the toppings on their own austere quadrant, while the adventurous may stake out another, piling on anything from smoked eggplant to caramelized onions, fresh herbs, and spinach. Because it’s a routine, our pizzas come together without any fuss as we gather in the kitchen to decompress, have a glass of wine if we are of age, and talk about everybody’s week. I never have to think about what’s for dinner on Fridays.
I like cooking as a social event. Friends always seem happy to share the work of putting together a do-it-yourself pizza, tacos, or vegetarian wraps. Potluck dinner parties are salvation. Takeout is not the only easy way out. With a basic repertoire of unfussy recipes in your head, the better part of valor is just turning on the burner and giving it a shot. With all due respect to Julia, I’m just thinking Child when I hazard a new throw-in-everything stew. I also have a crafty trick of inviting friends over for dinner whose cooking I admire, offering whatever ingredients they need, and myself as sous-chef. This is how I finally learned to make paella, pad Thai, and sushi, but the same scheme would work for acquiring basic skills and recipes. For a dedicated non-cook, the first step is likely the hardest: convincing oneself it’s worth the trouble in terms of health and household economy, let alone saving the junked-up world.
It really is. Cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. The gains are quantifiable: cooking and eating at home, even with quality ingredients, costs pennies on the dollar compared with meals prepared by a restaurant or factory. Shoppers who are most daunted by the high price of organics may be looking at bar codes on boutique-organic prepared foods, not actual vegetables. A quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Globally speaking, people consume more soft drinks and packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh ingredients are the mainstay of rural, less affluent people. This link between economic success and nutritional failure has become so widespread, it has a name: the nutrition transition.
In this country, some of our tired and poorest live in neighborhoods where groceries are sold only in gas station mini-marts. Food stamp allowances are in some cases as low as one dollar a person per meal, which will buy beans and rice with nothing thrown in. But many more of us have substantially broader food options than we’re currently using to best advantage. Home-cooked, whole-ingredient cuisine will