On Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:46:08 -0600, "jmcquown"
wrote:


I once bought a book for a friend called "How to Boil Water". There is no
such thing as a stupid cookbook if it actually helps people learn how to
cook.


I think a new addition will be out in 2010 or so. I wish I had seen
this before making a nearly identicle post.


jim

ensenadajim wrote:
On Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:46:08 -0600, "jmcquown"
wrote:


I once bought a book for a friend called "How to Boil Water". There
is no such thing as a stupid cookbook if it actually helps people
learn how to cook.


I think a new addition will be out in 2010 or so. I wish I had seen
this before making a nearly identicle post.


jim

The first chapter explains how to boil hot dogs. And wait! there's more!
You *can* make grilled cheese sandwiches!

I should say the woman I gave this cookbook to wasn't illiterate and she was
a very good friend of mine. For her 20th birthday I gave her a copy of the
'Good Housekeeping' cookbook. She was a newlywed and I figured it would be
a slightly better choice now that she'd figured out how to boil water

Jill

"Michael "Dog3" Lonergan" wrote in message
...
"Doug Kanter" hitched up their panties and
posted :


"Goomba38" wrote in message
...
Old Mother Ashby wrote:
Donald Martinich wrote:

Cooking 101: Add 1 Cup of Simplicity
As Kitchen Skills Dwindle, Recipes Become Easy as Pie
By Candy Sagon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 18, 2006; A01


snip article about loss of cooking skills

Haven't you been reading the Food Snob thread? GO AWAY!!!

Christine

I haven't... and I'm disheartened by the article in The Post. :/
Goomba

There's a fabulous cookbook that's been around forever. It explains
all the terms described in the Washington Post article. Mention it
here, and a handful of insipid little ****s will belittle the book
because it never was, and still is not trendy. But, it takes the place
of an important thing in cooking: the passing down of knowledge from
one generation to another. I'm not sure why this continuum of
knowledge has been interrupted, but I suspect it's related to
two-income households. There was a time when kids came home from
school and found someone cooking. And, not just cooking, but doing it
slowly and deliberately, in a way which might catch the attention of
little kids. (Forget teenagers). This type of thing was gone for a
couple of decades. It still is, in many households.

Doug, what is the name of the book?

Michael

"Joy of Cooking". Now, get ready for the insipid ****s to arrive with
comments. Two of them are regulars here.

"aem" wrote in message
oups.com...

* That more wives work outside the home doesn't mean jack as to
whether kids will learn about food and cooking at home. It may mean
there are more opportunities for the kids to learn from Dad as well as
Mom.

Two votes for this thought. But, there *are* still households where one
parent or the other simply does not cook. This is usually NOT because of
lack of ability, though.

The Bubbo wrote:

Curly Sue wrote:


I'm not so much concerned about the loss of cooking skills due to
women having other options, but instead the disregard for teaching
good eating habits (nutrition) to children.

Sue(tm)
Lead me not into temptation... I can find it myself!


case in point...
today in line at the grocery store, the woman in front of me was very very
large and she had two kids with her. Her cart was just packed full of
pre-packaged food, candy, treats, and other unhealthy items including 4 cases
of soda. It just made me crazy, I completely understand the occasional
indulgence but the legitimate healthy items were few and far between in that
cart, even the frozen vegetables came in their own cheese or butter sauces.

Of course, I could feel all self righteous at that moment because my cart was
full of things like okra, collard greens, plantains, fennel bulb,
spinach...and on and on. Of course the 15 pack of mac and cheese was already
at home in the pantry so it was a false self righteousness!

anyway, it just made me sad that those kids won't be taught proper eating,
just how to cook convenience and stuff it in.


What I find odd is how anyone could stand in line, anaylze someone
else's purchases, then feel self righteous because their food choices
were somehow better. I figure it is none of my business what others
buy. I hate standing in line anyway so I have a lot of ebooks on my
PDA. Once in line, I pull out my PDA and amuse myself. The good thing
is because of my shopping habbits this doesn't happen often.

"~patches~" wrote in message
...


You'd be surprised at how many women have educations, have careers, and
have kids yet still find the time to cook. If anything the cooking skills
have increased in this segment of the population. Educated people in
general tend to be more health conscious. Educated people with careers
tend to have more money so can buy more exotic ingredients if they choose
without the worry of breaking the bank. There are stats on educated vs
uneducated that indicate both of theses comments. I'll try to find the
link.

The connection to education level tends to be true in many health-related
studies, whether they involve dietary habits, or rates of certain diseases.

"Michael "Dog3" Lonergan" wrote in message
...
"Doug Kanter" hitched up their panties and
posted :

"Joy of Cooking". Now, get ready for the insipid ****s to arrive with
comments. Two of them are regulars here.


I have the book and have used it many times. I bought it when I was in
college. I never learned how to cook at home. It's a great book but I
have
not opened it for years. I'll have to dig it out and take a look. IIRC
it
was wonderful for people wanting the basics and learning how to cook.

Michael

After a point, I think it functions as an encyclopedia. I have a nice recipe
for making bread which requires a "biga" (like a sourdough starter). I'd
never had any left over before, and it needed to be "fed". I didn't know
how. Out came "Joy of Cooking", which explained it nicely. I suppose many
people go to the web for this sort of info, thinking it's faster. It's not.

~patches~ wrote:

What I find odd is how anyone could stand in line, anaylze someone
else's purchases, then feel self righteous because their food choices
were somehow better. I figure it is none of my business what others
buy. I hate standing in line anyway so I have a lot of ebooks on my
PDA. Once in line, I pull out my PDA and amuse myself. The good thing
is because of my shopping habits this doesn't happen often.


I was wondering if anyone else would comment on this. I don't even see
what's in other people's shopping carts. Why on earth would I care if I
did notice? And if I did notice, how could I know what the people were
doing with the groceries? A fat woman might be buying the junk food as
part of getting supplies for an office party. It could be part of her
job. (I don't speculate on people's sex lives either.)


As for what to do in line, the PDA is the wrong way to go. If you do
that, you'll miss the chance to read (but not buy) Archie comics and The
Weekly World News.


--Lia

"~patches~" wrote:
You'd be surprised at how many women have educations, have careers, and
have kids yet still find the time to cook.

I think a lot of it has to do with time management and priorities. Here are
a few factors that I think lead to the "lack of time" perception:

- The siren call of technology. People think things like microwaving frozen
dinners is saving a lot of time, but often it is not. For a family of four,
in the time it takes to sequentially microwave four dinners, one "real"
dinner serving four could have been prepared.

- Programming every minute of the children's time. In driving children
around to all these activities, it doesn't leave much for cooking and
eating. Plus the different schedules of multiple children's activities can
make it impossible to have everyone home at the same time. There's something
to be said for giving a child some of their own unprogrammed time to do
things and interact with others in an unstructured way.

- Long commutes. Some people insist on having the "perfect" house and then
drive hours a day getting to and from work. That time could be spent on
other activities, cooking being but one of them. At some point one has to
say what good is the perfect house if you are never there.

Of course, if you don't know what you are doing cooking, and don't have the
interest, even an infinite amount of time isn't going to help.

I think a lot of those older cookbooks, such as "Joy of Cooking" and
"Mastering the Art of French Cooking" put a lot of emphasis on methods and
less on recipes than a lot of current cookbooks. The thought was if you knew
the methods, you could come up with your own recipes fairly easily. But it
seems as people these days clamor for recipes even if they have no idea how
to cook. They are not interested in methods, they want instant
gratification. You see that here on rfc quite often. I know sometimes I'll
post an idea (general methods and ingredients without amounts), and almost
instantly there's the "recipe please" requests. I can't respond, because for
the most part I don't use recipes.

There was a very short article in the Washington Post last week interviewing
Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, that gave some advice that I think is very
good, kind of like the Nike "Just Do It" ads:

Washington Post: You had the benefit of cooking with family in the kitchen.
What advice do you have for people who are learning on their own?

Lidia: Don't become a slave to the recipe. Follow it the first time, yes.
But after that, don't worry so much about the measuring. Really.

Washington Post: Easy for you to say.

Lidia: Young people. They're busy working, they're bombarded with ethnic
cuisines and they try to do it all. They should focus on a single one --
like Italian. They should just get in there and do it.

(Full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...r=emailarticle)


--
( #wff_ng_7# at #verizon# period #net# )

jmcquown wrote:
Donald Martinich wrote:
Cooking 101: Add 1 Cup of Simplicity
As Kitchen Skills Dwindle, Recipes Become Easy as Pie

Unfortunately, PIE isn't easy.

By Candy Sagon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 18, 2006; A01

At Kraft Foods, recipes never include words like "dredge" and "saut."

Would that be "saute"?

I believe that "saut" (or is it "saute"?) is the 2nd personal informal
tense of the verb "sauter". I'm not sure that it's ever used that way
in cooking, though it is used that way in ballet (more commonly 2nd
personal formal "sautez").

-goro-

You can read the rest of the article. It's the brim of the Vernal Equinox
and as my Scottish grandmother would say, "Tis a bra bricht min licht nicht
a nicht!"

Jill

"Goro" wrote in message
ups.com...

Doug Kanter wrote:
"Curly Sue" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 20 Mar 2006 02:47:46 GMT, "Doug Kanter"
wrote:


"Curly Sue" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 19 Mar 2006 21:30:27 -0500, Goomba38
wrote:

Old Mother Ashby wrote:
Donald Martinich wrote:

Cooking 101: Add 1 Cup of Simplicity
As Kitchen Skills Dwindle, Recipes Become Easy as Pie
By Candy Sagon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 18, 2006; A01



snip article about loss of cooking skills

Haven't you been reading the Food Snob thread? GO AWAY!!!

Christine

I haven't... and I'm disheartened by the article in The Post. :/
Goomba

I'm not so much concerned about the loss of cooking skills due to
women having other options, but instead the disregard for teaching
good eating habits (nutrition) to children.

Kids can learn good nutrition, and go outside the home to find it. But,
to
get it at home, it usually requires the ability and willingness to put
some
time into preparing decent food.


Eating habits are learned at home. Kids who are not impressed with
the importance of health at home are not going to seek it outside the
home.

One thing about cooking per se, is that it has become a hobby that
some people will learn because they like to do it rather than because
it's their function in life.

A hobby can be set aside for a while and it won't negatively affect your
life in a big way. Eating is not a hobby.


Most of the people lamenting the loss of
cooking skills are talking about loss of cooking skills of women.
Apparently women many women today would rather get an education and
have a career than agonize over "dredging." Good for us. In
addition, there still are parents who need to work long and hard to
keep up and cooking is the least of their worries.

Correct - some people envision women when they think of this subject.
But,
not all people.

Wow. This did not even occur to me, though it retrospect, I see your
point.

I guess that since "most men" did have the Art of Cookoing in the first
place, it would be hard to lose it.

-goro-


Like any societal change, this one requires 2-3 generations (or more) to
change. My teenage son has other things on his mind, like talking on the
phone all day while functioning as a heavy weight to keep the sofa from
flying out the window. During his occasional moments of partial awareness, I
rag on him about how he might want to spend some time with me in the kitchen
so he learns, and doesn't starve to death when he's living on his own. What
would sons have been told in the 1950s? Maybe nothing? Would there have been
the unspoken expection that as soon as they were done with college, a woman
would magically appear to cook for them? I don't recall what I absorbed when
I was 8 years old. What I *do* know is that in college, there were plenty of
guys whose entire relationship with women involved having someone to do
their laundry.

"wff_ng_7" wrote in message
news:gzyTf.10573$bu.2925@trnddc04...

- Programming every minute of the children's time. In driving children
around to all these activities, it doesn't leave much for cooking and
eating. Plus the different schedules of multiple children's activities can
make it impossible to have everyone home at the same time. There's
something to be said for giving a child some of their own unprogrammed
time to do things and interact with others in an unstructured way.

George Carlin did a fantastic routine on this very subject. It's called
"**** the Children", although that title doesn't really describe the
conclusion he comes to in the end, which matches yours: "Leave them the ****
alone!" My son's got an mp3 file with the routine - I'll be getting it from
him later this week, if anyone's interested. Really funny, but all of it
true.



I think a lot of those older cookbooks, such as "Joy of Cooking" and
"Mastering the Art of French Cooking" put a lot of emphasis on methods and
less on recipes than a lot of current cookbooks.

Exactly! And, for reasons I cannot explain, many people cannot focus on
boring things like learning the right way to mix certain ingredients. Joy of
Cooking will take a whole page explaining why you should overmix this or
that, but who reads that stuff? Instead you hear "Let's go out to IHOP - my
pancakes never turn out good for some reason". Five minutes of reading
would've solved the problem.



The thought was if you knew the methods, you could come up with your own
recipes fairly easily.

Right. There are a huge number of skills which are common to many recipes.
But, some people think that even if they've grilled steaks successfully a
million times, they're incapable of grilling pork chops.



Lidia: Young people. They're busy working, they're bombarded with ethnic
cuisines and they try to do it all. They should focus on a single one --
like Italian. They should just get in there and do it.

I think that woman's brilliant, based on her comments.

~patches~ wrote:


What I find odd is how anyone could stand in line, anaylze someone
else's purchases, then feel self righteous because their food choices
were somehow better. I figure it is none of my business what others
buy. I hate standing in line anyway so I have a lot of ebooks on my
PDA. Once in line, I pull out my PDA and amuse myself. The good thing
is because of my shopping habbits this doesn't happen often.

I finally got bored with my PDA a couple years ago so i don't really carry it
with me anymore.

I'm an observer, I watch people. I watch people's shopping habits, I watch
people at restaurants, I watch how people drie and how they negotiate the
skyways and how they bag my produce at the farmer's market. I pay attention
and I notice things. The guy behind me bought 2 half gallons of 2 percent milk
and 1 half gallon of chocolate milk. He paid with cash.

The guy behind him was buying chips, soda and his girfriend talked on the
phone and grabbed impulse gum. I did nt see how they paid, I was gone by then.

I always check out other carts, what could be more interesting than watching
the eating habits of other people? it's like a lesson in anthropology. I think
that honestly that may have been one of the reasons I stopped using the PDA,
it ended up being an expensive gameboy for me, I mean how often do i need to
whip out my grandmother's address when I'm at the hairdresser? It just became
a green beeping distraction.

Though I do sometimes miss playing Drug Wars during my layovers.

--
..:Heather:.
www.velvet-c.com
Step off, beyotches, I'm the roflpimp!

"Julia Altshuler" wrote:
~patches~ wrote:

What I find odd is how anyone could stand in line, anaylze someone else's
purchases, then feel self righteous because their food choices were
somehow better. I figure it is none of my business what others buy. I
hate standing in line anyway so I have a lot of ebooks on my PDA. Once
in line, I pull out my PDA and amuse myself. The good thing is because
of my shopping habits this doesn't happen often.


I was wondering if anyone else would comment on this. I don't even see
what's in other people's shopping carts. Why on earth would I care if I
did notice? And if I did notice, how could I know what the people were
doing with the groceries? A fat woman might be buying the junk food as
part of getting supplies for an office party. It could be part of her
job. (I don't speculate on people's sex lives either.)


As for what to do in line, the PDA is the wrong way to go. If you do
that, you'll miss the chance to read (but not buy) Archie comics and The
Weekly World News.

I guess I don't look at whats's IN other people's shopping carts, but I most
certainly do look at what's on the conveyor belt in front of and behind my
order. I'm not sure if it is self righteousness as much as it is just
curiosity. I do wonder about the single male with a big stack of frozen
dinners. And I'm pretty sure it's not for an office party, etc. I do wonder
about those who don't use the store's club card (week after week, so they're
not making a one time visit to the store). Even with no conscious planning,
they could be saving a fair amount of money. I might see something a person
has on the counter I'm not aware of and it might give me some ideas. Since I
buy slightly odd produce at times, often the cashier asks what it is, and
sometimes how to use it. I don't mind explaining what one might do with it.
And I don't mind if other customers behind me in line overhear the
conversation.

I'm an observer of life, and I want to see what's going on around me. I
don't have to be entertained with electronic gadgets. You can learn a lot by
being aware of your surroundings and what's going on. Maybe I'm a busybody,
I don't know. A couple of years ago I had a neighbor who might have appeared
to be a nice single mom with two small kids. But if one was more observant,
one would see a drug addict/alcoholic with two small kids who rarely went to
school and who got into various types of mischievousness due to lack of
supervision. I'm not sure if she was technically a prostitute, but she got
various "favors" in exchange for sexual services. I remember one "regular"
who came around in his fancy car saying to his friend "the bitch stood me
up", when he didn't get what he came for that day. She drove her kids around
in her unregistered, uninsured, uninspected car, without a drivers license.
One day when she went out on a drug buy at 4 AM, the police spotted her,
arrested and booked her, and impounded the car. She was eventually evicted
for nonpayment of rent. That last part, the eviction, is probably all a lot
of the neighbors knew about the situation. If someone had intervened, in
some way, I think she and her kids could have been helped. I know I pondered
for a long time calling the truancy people at the school system about the
kids, but never got to it before she was evicted. I'm pretty sure it's just
going to be another cycle of inner city kids that repeats.

--
( #wff_ng_7# at #verizon# period #net# )

In article ,
"Doug Kanter" wrote:

Right. There are a huge number of skills which are common to many recipes.
But, some people think that even if they've grilled steaks successfully a
million times, they're incapable of grilling pork chops.

lol Too true!
I've only gotten those perfect since I bought a contact grill!
--
Peace, Om.

"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." -Jack Nicholson