Red Beans and Rice

It's been a while since we've done any food blogging, so let me tell you about dinner tonight:

Red Beans and Rice
(adapted from Leon Soniat’s La Bouche Creole)

1 lb. red beans
1 or 2 ham hocks
2 onions
3 stalks celery
2 bell peppers
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. sugar
2 tsp. vinegar
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp. chili powder
1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp. black pepper
salt to taste

Sort and rinse beans. Put in pot with ham hocks, and add 2 1/2 quarts water. Chop onions, celery, bell peppers, and garlic and add to the pot. Add the seasonings. Never let the mixture boil, but rather allow it to simmer gently. Stir the pot 3 to 4 times an hour.

As the beans begin to soften, mash some of them against the side of the pot. The result will be a thick, creamy sauce. When beans have cooked to a cream tenderness they are ready to serve over fluffy white rice.

To serve:

Make 2 cups of rice. Cut andouille sausage into rounds and fry it up. Serve red beans over rice and under sausage.

Red beans are traditionally served on Mondays, but Tuesday is just as good here.

The Saga of Un-Breakfast

I knew things were getting low in the pantry, but it was okay, because we could eat cheerios for breakfast. But no, the box was gone, and as I stared at the empty shelf I suddenly remembered picking up the empty box in the living room yesterday and vacuuming up a bunch of scattered, crunchy Os. Eating all the breakfast, in the living room even: two strikes already. I summoned everyone and had the obligatory yell about how we don't eat in the living room, you know that, and when you snack on all the breakfast food we don't have breakfast the next day.

But there's leftover cake? Yeah, two pieces among six people? No.

Fine, then, how about toast and jam? The only bread was a loaf of garlic bread.

Well, we could make biscuits. Lo, no butter. And no flour.

Yogurt? We finished it yesterday.

Cottage cheese? The day before.

Eggs? Only three.

Milkshakes? No frozen bananas. No bananas at all. Alright, chocolate milk with protein powder? No sugar, not even scrapings at the bottom of container. No oatmeal. No fruit, fresh or canned.

So, to tide us over until the quickly approaching lunch time, we're eating garlic bread (all the garlic carefully removed) and leftover hummus for breakfast. Eleanor, who finds this disgusting, dug up an old container of grits and is making her own meal, though grits with no butter is pretty dry stuff. And everyone is more or less satisfied except for me, because the state of the foodstuffs here makes me mad and it's my own fault for not keeping track of what we have in the house.

I could keep food in the house if only people would stop eating!

You Can't Take Us Anywhere

We had been treated by several dear friends to various Austin food experiences over the weekend: the home-cooked brisket, the funky cafe, the elegant yet sustainably-sourced tea shop. On our last night in town, we decided to step down to the restaurant in our swanky internet-steal hotel to grab a bite to eat. The constraint of our 3:30 am alarm meant that we didn't have either the time or inclination to indulge in the more avant-garde concoctions featured on the main menu, but the drinks menu also included a selection of upscale items that translated into "burgers and fries". We were in the midst of packing up, so we sauntered down in t-shirts, jeans, and soft shoes, because this is Austin, guys.


The dim cellar vaults of the restaurant were inscribed with quotes extolling the twin virtues of knowledge and food. The atmosphere of sobriety permeated down to the burnt-orange carpet. We were whisked past the bar, at which we cast longing glances, and tucked into a table at which even the candles flickered sedately. Someone materialized to fill the water glasses from a bottle. The couple next to us forked their way through the six-course tasting menu with paired wines. She was manicured and coiffured; he wore Texas Yuppie Casual: long-sleeve shirt untucked, fitted jeans, leather flip-flops. They laughed and clinked glasses; she crossed her legs and bounced a platform heel.

When our server appeared and began deferentially to explain the restaurant's philosophy, Darwin uttered these fatal words:

"We weren't all that hungry, and we know it's close to closing time, so we thought we might just get drinks and order off the bar menu."

The waiter paused for a moment, perplexed. His face went blank as he processed this concept.

"We don't normally serve from that menu in the dining room," he murmured.

"We just thought..." one of us started. "But if it's trouble..."

"It's just that we don't normally serve from that menu in the dining room," he repeated slowly, his logic circuits fried by such an unprecedented request. We were appalled by how gauche we had been and begged to order normally. He demurred in tones of great sadness as he slowly gathered up the wine glasses and the original menu ("No, no, we can do that if that's what you like...") and departed. I met Darwin's gleaming eye, and we both began to convulse with silent laughter. 

Our service was attentive, but grave. The drinks ("Your order will take a moment, ma'am, since The Annex is a hand-crafted cocktail") were excellent. The tartare was superb. Two waiters presented our order of Parmesan Garlic Fries. They set before us the plate of stacked fries and then various condiments. "Here's the garlic truffle aioli," our waiter said, "and perhaps you might prefer sauce americaine." It was ketchup. 

The kitchen sent out a sample of the pork belly, which was delicious. Our water glasses were filled again from a fresh bottle. "I bet they fill the bottles with tap water," I said meanly. We stifled our hysterical giggles.


As we ate our complementary chocolate truffle shortbread (it was excellent, of course), the couple next to us haggled with the waiter over their bill; they'd come armed with some internet coupon which had terms and restrictions to which they had paid little attention. Darwin charged our bill to our room and added a hefty tip to compensate for our lack of decorum. When the waiter returned, he was chatty and confidential. Had we enjoyed our stay? How long were we in town? Where were we from? He had been to Columbus once, years before, passing through with a classmate who drove an MG, and they'd been pulled over by this huge cop who wanted payment right then, and his classmate hadn't had any money on him.... We smiled and nodded and kicked each other under the table, and finally escaped to collapse face down on our bed in groans of mirth, fueled at intervals by strangled howls of "Sauce americaine!"

Suppertime, resolved

So here's the last-minute dinner: cracker-bread pizzas. The cracker-bread recipe is quick, and the addition of flax seed, which we keep as a staple, gives the crust a nicely nutty taste even though it doesn't have time to develop lots of flavor over several hours of rising. We always have mozzarella and pasta sauce on hand. The rectangular pizza is pepperoni, which was left over from last week's pizza making (and zealously guarded against young snackers) and the round pizza is bell pepper (frozen, from Trader Joe's) and kalamata olives (another staple; we buy them in gallon jars from GFS). Darwin bought salad and croutons on his grocery run on the way home from work, and we drank water.

Suppertime, I guess

Darwin and I think alike, so it turns out we were about to cross-post about food. However, he's writing interesting analysis, and I was just going to complain about how there was nothing to eat and what was in the pantry was boring, anyway. We're being frugal, and it's kind of dull, to tell the truth. Plus, what's inexpensive is not necessarily what's quick, and contra Darwin, I don't always get dinner started before he gets home, especially when I'm feeling under the weather.

Anyway, I'm completely uninspired by our bare pantry. Guys, what are you eating for dinner tonight? I don't care how lame it is -- we're all supportive here! And if there's a cookbook you recommend, lay it on me.

Capitalism -- When People Sell Things I Don't Like

With the garden currently shooting up, I've found myself again disposed to read gardening and food related books. I finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma last week, and aside from a few gripes in regards to Michael Pollan's understanding of economics, I enjoyed it quite a bit. On the last run by the library, I picked up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. The idea of moving out onto acreage and growing much of one's own food is something that I find interesting. I enjoy gardening, I enjoy cooking gourmet food, and I think there's a cultural and psychological value to remaining in touch with the way that humans have gained food for themselves in past centuries.

However, Kingsolver is far more passionate (and less balanced) in her jeremiads against "industrial food" than Pollan, and more prone to denunciations of what "capitalism" has done to our food culture. Indeed, so much so as to crystallize for me a trend among those who denounce "capitalism" and its impact on Western Culture. Kingsolver had just reached the crescendo of a complaint in regards to large seed companies peddling hybrids and genetically modified strains, when she turned to the subject of heirloom vegetable varieties, and her joy at paging through lengthy seed catalogs full of heirloom seeds.

...Heirloom seeds are of little interest to capitalism if they can't be patented or owned. They have, however, earned a cult following among people who grow or buy and eat them. Gardeners collect them like family jewels, and Whole Foods Market can't refrain from poetry in its advertisement of heirlooms....

So you see, when large agribusiness firms sell farmers seeds for field corn which are genetically modified to repel pests,
that's capitalism. But when catalog and internet businesses build a thriving niche selling heirloom vegetable seeds, and Whole Foods ad men wax poetical over $7/lb tomatoes, that's... Well, it certainly can't be capitalism, can it? Not if it's good.

Pizza Chez Darwin

Pizza is incredible. It's the perfect dinner, and the ultimate comfort food. Everyone loves it: even my two-year-old, asked for her favorite food, chirps, "Pee-ta!" The surest way to be branded as a weirdo and a social malefactor is to announce, "Actually, I don't really like pizza."

Well, we like pizza here (just ask the baby). We've been baking and experimenting with our dough for seven years. When we first were married, we tended to make a very basic bready puffy crust. It was amazingly mediocre -- not very exciting, kind of flavorless, but pretty quick. What first revolutionized our thinking was Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. His excellent overview of the science behind each step of the bread baking process, combined with Pizza Napoletana recipe, instantly transformed our pizza from bland to rustic and tender and delicious.

However, we are tinkerers by nature. Over time we've personalized the recipe through some alterations and additions. We're pretty darn pleased with our crust, so much so that when Reinhart came out with a new book specifically about pizza, American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza, we tried several of his new crust recipes, shrugged, and went back to using our own version. (This is not to disparage the book, which is a delightful read and had an influence on some of our cheese and sauce choices.)

I like recipes that have lots of details about the ingredients and process, so I'll include a both the long chatty form and the "just the facts, ma'am" version.


Pizza Chez Darwin, Long Version

4 1/2 cups unbleached bread flour
Bread flour produces a more elastic dough than all-purpose, but you can use all-purpose and leave out the oil.

1 3/4 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons instant yeast (1 teaspoon yeast if planning to refrigerate dough overnight)
Reinhart calls for instant yeast because you don't have to soak it to activate it, and I quite agree -- you can buy it in bulk packages and it keeps a long time in the back of the fridge. If you only have active dry yeast, one packet ought to do it (2 1/4 tsp.), in which case you probably shouldn't hold it overnight.

2 tablespoons ground flax seed
At some point my mother bought me a package of ground flax seed, saying that it was good for me. I've no doubt that there are plenty of health benefits, but to my mind the real advantage of using flax seed is that it gives even dough that only has an hour or two to rise a deeper, nuttier flavor. You can do without it, of course, but then you wouldn't be making my recipe. Ground flax seed is stored in the fridge -- we stack it with the yeast.

1/4 cup olive oil

2 cups water

Semolina flour for dusting the peel
In terms of pizza prep, semolina is tops for allowing pizza to slide off a peel and giving a bit more flavor to the bottom of the crust. If you can't find semolina, you can use cornmeal, but it's an inferior substitute in every way -- too gritty and chunky.

Prepared pasta sauce
I've tried making my own sauce from canned crushed tomatoes and herbs and spices, but I confess that I don't really find the flavor that much different from using a jarred pasta sauce, which is more convenient. I usually choose the tomato and basil flavor, though a cheese variety also does well.

Mozzarella and parmesan cheese
I buy the big bags of pre-shredded mozzarella. Avoid those "fancy" shredded cheeses that are grated very fine -- the thicker shreds cover better with less, and don't get as greasy. Grating a bit of parmesan over the mozzarella gives a more intense flavor.

Toppings to suit
Some of our favorites: sliced kalamata olives, red onions, bell pepper, garlic, feta cheese or chevre, sun-dried tomatoes, and fresh basil from our garden. We usually eat pizza on Friday nights and don't put any meat on it, but if we make it for company we'll get some prosciutto. The girls don't necessarily eat all the toppings, but they pick them off and then there's more for the adults.

1. Stir together flour, salt, yeast, and flax seed in a big bowl. Add olive oil and water and stir with a spoon until the flour starts absorbing the liquid. Then knead by hand in the bowl for about five minutes.
This is a very wet sticky dough which will stick to your hand, but the wetness is what makes it nice and rustic. It should stick to the bottom of the bowl but not the sides.

2. Pour a bit of olive oil in the bowl and roll the dough around to coat both it and the sides of the bowl. Cover with plastic wrap.
Some recipes call for transferring the dough to a different oiled bowl, but why make more dishes? It doesn't hurt the dough to rise in the same bowl it's been mixed in -- just make sure your bowl is big enough. The dough is sticky enough that you'll need to scrape half of it off the bottom of the bowl and drizzle oil under it, then repeat on the other side. By that point it should move in enough of a mass that you can turn it to coat the top.

3. Allow dough to rise for several hours, or until roughly doubled, or refrigerate overnight. If the dough has been refrigerated, pull it out and let it warm up to room temperature, approximately two hours.
Refrigerating the dough retards fermenation enough to allow the enzymes more time to release more sugars from the starch. Then when the dough is "woken up", the yeast can feed on these otherwise unrealized sugars, making for a bread with a wonderful depth of flavor. It's well worth it -- if you can remember to do it. Frankly, I don't usually think about making pizza more than a few hours in advance. The addition of flax seed is an attempt to approximate the deeper, nuttier flavor of an aged dough without the aging, and I think it works pretty well.

4. Generously flour the counter, and transfer dough from bowl to counter. Sprinkle plenty of flour on top, then divide into four or six pieces. Gently shape each piece into a ball, then flatten into a disk. Flour again, cover, and allow to rest 30 minutes to 2 hours.
This dough is wet enough that I prefer to make six smaller pizzas rather than four larger ones. A longer rest is better, but if you're in a hurry it's not really going to hurt the pizza to rest for thirty minutes, or even less.

5. Place a baking stone on the bottom rack of your oven, and preheat to 500 degrees.
I rarely take my pizza stone out of my oven, except to rinse it once in a while -- I don't really have anywhere to store it anyway. Reinhart recommends 45 minutes of preheating, but I've gotten away with as few as fifteen. Perhaps you're sensing a last-minute theme to my cooking?

Raise the other rack to the top slot to give yourself more room to maneuver later.

6. Generously dust a pizza peel with semolina flour. Shape one ball of dough into an 9-12 inch crust, gently stretching the edges and tossing if you can. If the dough starts to tear, stick it back together, and allow it to rest for a moment before continuing.
Semolina = pizza goodness. This dough is wet enough to stick to the peel if it sits too long, so have all your topping ingredients ready before you start to shape. I can rarely get the dough to stretch more than 12 inches, but sometimes a longer rest will result in a larger pie. If the dough won't stretch for you freehand, you can place it on the peel and tug at it a bit, but you usually won't get much more stretch at that point, and you run the risk of having the dough absorbing the semolina and sticking to the peel when you try to put it in the oven.

7. Spoon some tomato sauce on the pizza and spread it around with the back of the spoon. Sprinkle mozzarella evenly atop sauce, and grate a bit of parmesan on top. Add toppings judiciously.
You don't have to overdo it on any of the toppings. Too much sauce will bubble over; too much mozzarella will run and get greasy; too much parmesan will burn. If you want to top it further, just add one or two other ingredients, but again, don't overdo it.

8. Slide topped pizza onto stone. Bake about 8 minutes.
Hold the peel at a gentle angle to the stone and give it a shake to slide the pizza onto the stone. Once the pizza makes contact with the stone, withdraw the peel smoothly. Sometimes the pizza will stick to the peel as you try to slide it on, and cheese and toppings will spill onto a stone. This is maddening, so I advise any bystanders to stay the hell back. You can generally salvage toppings by scraping them up quickly with a metal spatula and flipping them back onto the pizza. If the pizza refuses to leave the peel, give it up and close the oven door -- don't keep trying in the heat, or the dough will melt onto the peel. Put the peel back on the counter and work some more semolina under the pie. Sometimes a bit of assistance with the spatula will get the pizza onto the stone.

I find that eight minutes is about the right amount of time for the crust to get all golden, the cheese to melt and bubble, and the toppings to bake. Sometimes the first pizza will take a bit longer; sometimes subsequent pizzas will bake quicker. Keep checking, and take it out when it looks done to you.

9. Remove pizza from oven and allow to cool for a few moments before serving.
If you try to cut a pizza right out of the oven, the cheese goes everywhere.

As I'm generally setting up another pizza on the peel at this point, I use a baking rack to remove the pizza. Then it can cool on the rack before being transferred to a cutting board. Stove top burners also make nice cooling racks, though you'll have semolina all over your stove -- a small price to pay for good pizza.

10. Repeat steps 6-9 for remaining dough balls.
When we make pizza for dinner, we put two or three through before sitting down to eat, and then Darwin and I trade off preparing the remaining pizzas throughout dinner. Don't set up a new pizza on the peel more than three minutes before the one baking is scheduled to come out, or your dough will certainly stick. This makes plenty of pizza, but it stores nicely as leftovers.

Pizza Chez Darwin, Short Form

4 1/2 cups unbleached bread flour
1 3/4 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons instant yeast (1 teaspoon yeast if planning to refrigerate dough overnight)
2 tablespoons ground flax seed
1/4 cup olive oil
2 cups water
Semolina flour for dusting the peel
Prepared pasta sauce
Mozzarella and parmesan cheeses
Toppings to suit

1. Stir together flour, salt, yeast, and flax seed in a big bowl. Add olive oil and water and stir with a spoon until the flour starts absorbing the liquid. Then knead by hand in the bowl for about five minutes.


2. Pour a bit of olive oil in the bowl and roll the dough around to coat both it and the sides of the bowl. Cover with plastic wrap.


3. Allow dough to rise for several hours, or until roughly doubled, or refrigerate overnight. If the dough has been refrigerated, pull it out and let it warm up to room temperature, approximately two hours.

4. Generously flour the counter, and transfer dough from bowl to counter. Sprinkle plenty of flour on top, then divide into four or six pieces. Gently shape each piece into a ball, then flatten into a disk. Flour again, cover, and allow to rest 30 minutes to 2 hours.

5. Place a baking stone on the bottom rack of your oven, and preheat to 500 degrees.

6. Generously dust a pizza peel with semolina flour. Shape one ball of dough into an 9-12 inch crust, gently stretching the edges and tossing if you can. If the dough starts to tear, stick it back together, and allow it to rest for a moment before continuing.

7. Spoon some tomato sauce on the pizza and spread it around with the back of the spoon. Sprinkle mozzarella evenly atop sauce, and grate a bit of parmesan on top. Add toppings judiciously.

8. Slide topped pizza onto stone. Bake about 8 minutes.

9. Remove pizza from oven and allow to cool for a few moments before serving.

10. Repeat steps 6-9 for remaining dough balls.

An excess of gluttony

I've been reading Secret Ingredients, a compendium of New Yorker columns on food and drink. As well as containing some delightfully written gems, it's also, in places, a weird catalog of gluttonous overindulgence. The oddest piece was a detailed account of a 38-course meal the author consumed:

We headed into the "second service" without an appropriate break -- say, a five-mile march through the mountains and an eight-hour nap. The courses, naturally, became more substantial. First came an oven-glazed brill served with fennel cream, anchovies, and roasted currants, then a stew of suckling pig that had been slow-cooked in a red-wine sauce thickened with its own blood, onions, and bacon. I leaped forward from this into a warm terrine of hare with preserved plums, and a poached eel with chicken wing tips and testicles in a pool of tarragon butter. But I only picked at my glazed partridge breasts, which were followed by a savory of eggs poached in Chimay ale, and then a mille-feuille of puff pastry sandwiched with sardines and leeks.

... (After a break,) The "third service" loaded even bigger guns, or so it seemed, with its concentration on denser, heavier specialties that tried the patience of my long-fled appetite. From Massialot, we were offered a "light" stew of veal breast in a puree of ham and oysters in a pastry-covered casserole, and a not-so-light gratin of beef cheeks. La Varenne's gray squab was boned, stuffed with sweetbreads, squab livers, and scallions, and was spit-roasted. ...(W)e had wild duck with black olives and orange zest, a buisson (bush) of crayfish with little slabs of grilled goose liver, a terrine of the tips of calves' ears, hare cook in port wine inside a calf's bladder, crispy readed asparagus, a sponge cake with fruit preserves, and cucumbers stewed in wine.

This quasi-pornographic account of palate over-stimulation left me with absolutely no urge to run to the kitchen and grab a snack. Gluttony had always seemed a slightly charming vice -- eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may diet! -- but this resolute slog up a mountain of rich fare just because it's there left a grim and depressing aftertaste. This was compounded by the author's clinical justification for the feast:

At midnight, while sipping a paltry brandy from the 1920s and smoking a Havana Churchill, I reflected that this was not the time to ponder eternal values. I was sitting next to Gerard, who was cherubically discussing the historical subtleties of certain courses. In a way, we were forensic anthropologists, doing arduous historical fieldwork. How could we possibly understand the present without knowing what certain of our ancestors had consumed? (The chef and staff) had led us on a sombre and all-consuming journey into the past.

Sombre indeed. Fortunately, the rest of the book has proved to be quite charming, but it's been hard to rinse the taste of the 37 courses from my mouth.

This Week's Weekly Bread

For comparison with my shopping from last week, I offer up this week's grocery run:

The Darwins, Round Rock, TX
Grocery total: 98.49

The little pink thing in front is a rubber duckie we picked up in the checkout line.

When I was younger, my family ate on a tight budget, which seemed to translate to certain kinds of cheap convenience foods. I remember plenty of kraft dinners with hot dogs, hamburger helper, little boxed potpies, canned vegetables, instant mashed potatoes, kool-aid, "family-size" frozen entrees (Salisbury steak, anyone?). I don't know whether it was actually less expensive to buy certain low-budget prepared items than to get fresh ingredients, or if it was just that if you wanted to eat more expensive items like meat for the lowest cost you bought potpies and frozen entrees.

We're fortunate to have a larger food budget than my family, but I'd still rather forgo lots of meat and buy fresh produce instead. Ah, when the garden comes in...

Our Weekly Bread

A while back, Julie D's food blog Meanwhile, Back in the Kitchen linked to a photo essay in Time Magazine called "What the World Eats". It's a fascinating look at what people around the world eat in a week, and how much they pay for it.

There's probably enough gustatorial diversity in America to make up a separate study, as evidenced by my looking at the two American families featured and thinking, "That doesn't look anything like the way our family eats." And so as an experiment I offer a photo of last week's shopping.

The Darwins, Round Rock, TX
Total for this trip: $112.44
(not pictured: mid-week run to store, bringing weekly total to close to $130)

Now obviously this isn't everything we eat in a week. It doesn't take into account things already in the pantry, like refried beans or flour for the pizza or the farm eggs from the chickens that Darwin's manager raises. But it is a fairly accurate picture of how we shop for food (as this was a trip in which I didn't have to buy diapers, wipes, laundry detergent, or a new broom). We don't tend to buy packaged snacks (the pretzels were an impulse buy after a request from the ladies) or prepared meals, and we don't often eat fast-food or go to restaurants.

I'm curious as to how other families eat. I'll tag anyone who's interested to participate in my informal shopping photo documentary.

Beer Can Chicken (snicker)

What kind of exciting things did we do this weekend? Well, seeing as we had a chicken and a can of beer both just sitting around, we thought we'd try our hand at grilling beer can chicken. It was quite tasty and a hit with the kids, but the best part was the delightful image of the chicken squatting over the can.


Last night I thought this was about the funniest thing I'd ever seen. It's still pretty amusing today. You guys! He's got elbows!

(An animal was harmed during the grilling and photographing of this meal.)

The Myth of Convenience

Convenience foods are simply an attempt to approximate the taste of home cooking, with plenty of added preservatives, fat, and salt to retain flavor even after months of shelf life. Unhealthy, but they save time, right? Well, a new study from UCLA finds that families tend to spend between 30 minutes and an hour making dinner, regardless of whether they used convenience foods or cooked from scratch.

While it's true that a frozen lasagna dish is usually faster to make than homemade lasagna, researchers from the University of California-Los Angeles wanted to find out how convenience foods are used in the real world. After they videotaped family cooking habits, the researchers saw that convenience foods weren't used as a time-saving substitute for the same dish made from scratch. Instead packaged foods offered a way for families to eat more elaborate meals than they would normally have time to prepare.

When families did cook from scratch, they ate simpler fare -- like one-pot meals or stir-fry. In the end, dinner took about a half-hour to an hour to prepare, whether it was made from scratch or with convenience foods, according to the research, which was published in the July issue of the British Food Journal and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a nonprofit group that funds science, economic and other research.

Says anthropology researcher Margaret Beck from the Center on Everyday Lives of Families at UCLA, "When people use convenience foods, they are ramping up expectations for how elaborate a dinner should be."

The study is important because convenience foods tend to be high in preservatives, unhealthy fats and sodium. Nutritionists say parents often justify using the less-healthful convenience foods because they feel the time saved in cooking can be used to help kids with homework or play at the end of a busy day. But the discovery that a high use of convenience foods doesn't really put dinner on the table any faster should persuade families to opt for simpler, healthier fare, say health experts.

The article also notes that most Americans take two trips to the grocery store a week, with an average time of 22 minutes a trip. We usually shop for an hour, once a week. Perhaps our longer shopping expeditions have to do with picking up numerous ingredients for meals. The study suggested that the time-saving effects of convenience foods might actually be found at the store, where it's quicker to pick up one prepared item than six or seven components of that same dish.

Frankly, it's a rare occasion when we have more than two dishes for dinner. We usually make one main dish, such as spaghetti and meatballs or macaroni and cheese. I know there's this shining ideal of the standard three-course meal consisting of a meat entree and a vegetable and a starch, but really, how many people cook like that every night? And here's a confession: we don't eat our vegetables every day. I like to eat fresh vegetables, but I'm not going to make a run out to the store just to pick up one green item for a meal. And since we've none of us come down with rickets or scurvy yet, I think that's okay.

Hungry yet?

Via Suburban CEO comes this comparison of fast food pictured in ads vs. its actual appearance.

Every now and then (usually on Fridays) I get a craving for the perfect burger -- juicy, thick, and on a crusty bun. Sonic, where we usually pick up burgers, is okay, and I remember In 'N Out fondly from our California days. Steakhouse burgers are generally acceptable. But if you want the gen-u-ine article, you gotta make it yourself. Preferably with homemade steakfries.

And speaking of not-home cooking...

I see that the food at Steubenville hasn't improved much since our days there.



The guys from Francis also remain the same as ever.

That's my friend Josh you see in the still.

Here there be cooking

I have an acquaintance who supplements her family's income by selling kitchenware, and yet she says without the slightest sense of irony that she doesn't cook.

I think this is one of the strangest statements to come out of the mouth of anyone (not just my acquaintance) with access to a kitchen. What do you mean, you don't cook? Is it that you don't know how to boil water? You doubt your ability to follow a simple recipe? You're so rich that the financial toll of having someone else prepare your food is something to be waved off? Proclaiming that one doesn't cook makes about as much sense as announcing that one doesn't read, or pay bills, or do laundry. Cooking is not rocket science. It's not magic. How hard it it to boil a pot of pasta and dump a jar of sauce on it? And you'd pay someone $5.75 at the very cheapest joints to do it for you!

Almost any form of prepared food is an attempt to approximate home cooking. It is not difficult (and I do mean that! It's not difficult) to make a home-cooked meal that rivals restaurant food, and blows the store-bought frozen version out of the water. That new-fangled technology, the crockpot, makes it easy for anyone to come home to steaming stew or pea soup or chicken 'n dumplings. Any old pot will boil water for rice or pasta. Baking potatoes: what could be simpler? Put 'em in the oven for an hour! For this, for this we are charged a fee at a restaurant!

I happen to like to cook, but I don't think that's the point. Cooking at home is so easy and so much more cost-effective than eating out that it's just foolish to refuse to do it even if it's not your bag. Cooking is not rocket science. It's not magic.

If you can read and follow directions, you can cook. If not -- well, we don't let kindergarteners touch the stove either.