The decision to cook from scratch may have many virtues, but ease is not one of them. Or, I can find a recipe for “easy” pad thai, run-literally, run-to the grocery store at lunch, hope that grocery store sells fish sauce, then spend 40 minutes making the dish and 20 minutes cleaning up. The rise of fast casual restaurants from Chipotle to Sweetgreen has made counter-service takeout a dinner option that won’t make you hate yourself in the morning.Īll this means that tonight, I can order excellent pad thai from my phone in under a minute. Kitchensurfing will send you a personal chef at reasonable cost. Food delivery services like Seamless, Munchery, and SpoonRocket carry prepared meals to your home in minutes. Meanwhile, technology has made appetizing, affordable cooking alternatives easier and easier to come by. Not the one-minute pie dough or the quick kale chips or the idiot-proof Massaman curry, every last ounce of which is made from scratch, from ingredients that are sourced and bought and lugged home and washed, peeled, chopped, mixed, and cooked. The problem is that none of this actually easy. Everywhere, there are magazine features proclaiming that making and freezing my own chicken stock is a “no-brainer” homemade Calabrian chili oil is an “easy” way to add big flavor the secret to making effortless breakfast granola is to simply do it in big batches. Just yesterday I read about a new cookbook from the editors of Lucky Peach magazine called 101 Easy Asian Recipes, filled no doubt with obscure sauces and vegetables that I have absolutely no hope of finding at the Pioneer supermarket on the corner. Jamie Oliver published a book of 30-minute meals in 2011, but has more recently shaved the time commitment down to 15.
#Cook fromscratch magazine how to#
Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything empire, launched in 1998, was updated last year with How to Cook Everything Fast. Amazon’s “quick and easy” section is 8,000 titles strong The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is a bestseller.
The disorienting part in all this is that so many of these recipes carry promises of speed and ease. Stop Trying to Raise Successful Kids Adam Grant and Allison Sweet Grant They might as well be skyscraper blueprints, so improbable is the possibility that I will begin making my own nut butters, baking my own sandwich bread, or turning that fall farmer’s market bounty into jars of homemade applesauce.
Every day, when I head to my office after a nourishing breakfast of smashed blueberries or oatmeal I found stuck to the pan, and open a glossy new cookbook, check my RSS feed, or page through a stack of magazines, I’m confronted by an impenetrable wall of unimaginable cooking projects, just sitting there pretending to be totally reasonable meals. I’m also a mother, which means more often than not, when I return from work 15 minutes before bedtime, I end up feeding my 1-year-old son squares of peanut-butter toast because there was nothing in the fridge capable of being transformed into a wholesome, homemade toddler meal in a matter of minutes. Because of this, I spend more time than the average American surrounded by cooking advice and recipes.
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