I’ve been reading more than a few cooking blogs for a while now, and sometime they’re very well written and I can’t fault their cooking techniques or their blogging techniques. Sometimes they’re awful and spread bold-faced lies about cooking. Here’s my way of combating that:
1. You don’t always need to follow a recipe.
If you have knowledge of chemistry and a basic understanding of why things come together, you can mess with recipes for baked goods. All you need to know with cooking is how to cook your ingredients. Seriously. I rarely use a recipe for making lasagna, stir frying vegetables, frying up tofu. I generally will follow baking recipes because I don’t understand the chemistry, but Michael will frequently dream up recipes or tweak existing recipes based on the chemistry knowledge he has. He almost never uses recipes for dreaming up dinner. Learn a few techniques (boil water, make a bechamel sauce) and the kitchen is completely open for experimentation. And even if you do screw up, how often is it inedible? If it’s a baked good, slather it with icing and eat it. If it’s dinner, slather it in cheese sauce and eat it.
2. Sifting flour is mostly unnecessary.
I know some people think it makes a huge difference. I think they’re full of it. I’m not a professional cook, and looks don’t matter to me. That flour will get incorporated into your dough if you mix it or knead it like you’re supposed to. Plus, a sifter just takes up more space in your kitchen.
3. Prepackaged foods are not Satan.
My mother goes off on high fructose corn syrup and prepackaged food all the time. Eat some canned biscuits every once in a while. It won’t kill you – and while they might not be as good as homemade, they’re a heck of a lot easier and quicker.
4. You don’t need special vegan or vegetarian recipes.
I have loads of vegan cookbooks. Then I realized everything we cook is vegetables and breads and pastas that are vegan, anyway. Plus, if I’m baking, I have egg replacer and soy milk or hemp milk or rice milk on hand. No big deal. If something is hard to convert into a vegan or vegetarian recipe, buy it or cook something else.
5. Cooking isn’t hard.
I know, everyone focuses on how to make everything cute and fancy and they photograph it on their cool dishes. Meanwhile, the rest of us try to throw dinner together in half an hour because we work full-time and have other crap to do. I look at their pictures and wish I could cook and take pictures and post blog entries about all my experiments, but I’m busy. After working all day and solving problems, I want to come home, clean a little bit, maybe watch some birds and play with my cat and then hit the hay.
6. Cooking is, above all, a means to an end.
Wax poetic all you want. I eat because I have to. My husband cooks because I have to eat. And you don’t have to eat cake to survive, so cake isn’t on my top priorities. Actually, it’s not anywhere on my priorities because I’m on a diet. Which brings us to…
7. Obviously everyone who has a cooking blog has the metabolism of a marathon runner. Sure, what they make looks tasty and pretty, but if I cooked and ate everything they make I would be about a hundred pounds heavier than I already am. And I am by no means thin. Either that or they have more friends and kids than I do to eat those goodies before they do. A cake in my house would grow mold before Michael and I could finish it with our restricted-calorie diet.
Cook your own food, but don’t be intimidated by recipes, by having lower quality ingredients, by not having a pretty looking final dish. Heck, don’t even be intimidated if it doesn’t taste great, just chalk it up to learning, get a burrito from taco bell, and try something else next time.
4 Comments
I think I have to argue about what’s implied by #5 and #6.
There’s a big difference between cooking for art’s sake and (to borrow a phrase my mother once used to describe her own need to cook) “provisioning the troops,” and it’s not just that one is hard and one is easy. Provisioning the troops is demoralizing when you’re doing something that could just as easily be beautiful, and that’s why people will periodically indulge their creative side and blog about it.
I like to cook. I would like to spend four hours a day in the kitchen, making things that have never been made before, and to photograph everything I make. I do not like what I do every day after work. Most days it’s not cooking; it’s just preparing food. It’s a chore like any other.
Although preparing vegetables that you will voluntarily consume is a kind of art in itself…
it’s true… there is an art to making food I will actually eat. that’s why 6 exists.
5 is true… the majority of cooking people do isn’t hard and if you choose to take on tasks that a french chef wants to, more power to you. I guess I wish someone would blog about… I dunno… saute-ing green beans with oil and garlic sometimes. shouldn’t we try to get people excited about the crap they have to cook everyday instead of filling their minds with all the hard, expensive, delicious crap they want to make but don’t have time to? isn’t there a beauty to the simplicity of dinner?
what I’ve mostly seen blogged about isn’t provisioning the troops. I’d love to see more of that.
There is certainly a beauty to the simplicity of dinner, but when predictability comes with that simplicity, there is no enjoyment for the one cooking.
There’s a reason pretentious chef-types are always doing seemingly unnecessary new things. Asking someone who can actually cook (and I am by no means saying I am one of these people) to sauté you up some green beans every night is a bit like asking a postmodern artist to take up drafting — that is, while it may be a fine use of their basic talent, it’s creatively constraining.
I don’t think there’s any reason for people to blog about green beans and garlic, because anybody can do it. People aren’t going to get excited about something they have to do every day, whether we’re talking about the blogger or the audience. I suppose it’s human nature.
I think you’re wrong about anybody being able to do it. Some people wouldn’t think to do it. I would think, “ew, green beans, gross, I want broccoli instead.” because I can’t stand canned green beans (except in green bean casserole). Then someone cooks frozen ones up for me by saute-ing them with garlic and I go apeshit.
I also think it’s interesting to see how someone flavors something. Remember when I made that zucchini and lentil recipe and cooked the zucchini with tons of spices and onions and garlic. I cooked the spices first. I wouldn’t have known what spices to use or even how deeply I could infuse the zucchini with the spices, even though it was simple to do.
Or roasting red peppers on the stove (or in the oven). There are tons of tutorials on that, but again, unless I went looking – I wouldn’t have known how to do that (or how much fun it is to squish). I guess all I’m saying is, recipes you may think are simple or brainless won’t be to 85% of people who don’t know what to do with fresh green beans. Or zucchini. Or lentils. We need someone to give us a few ideas.
You can dress up simple food, too. Bento lunches prove that consistently.
I guess the real point is, I get really depressed looking at what people with more time (and arguably, more skill) accomplish in the kitchen and post to the interwebz. I miss the kitchen. I miss having time and space and energy to make my own crazy dinners.
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