Curly Sue wrote:

On Mon, 20 Mar 2006 08:05:15 -0500, ~patches~
wrote:

Curly Sue wrote:

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. 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.

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

I'm very familiar with what educated women do. In the past women who
disliked cooking would have been stuck at home (or in a menial job)
with the expectation that their function in life was cooking (etc.)
and passing down that knowledge to their daughters. Now, such women
have other options. The well-off women you speak of who do cook, have
careers, buy exotic ingredients, etc. are doing it because they enjoy
cooking rather than because they have to. And they are probably doing
a better job of it than someone who dislikes cooking.

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

True, however before the (sad) advent of the "home meal replacement"
type fast food chains, the fact was that someone had to cook, or you
would starve - it's that simple. Now it's quite common and acceptable to
the man to cook, though oddly in the pro chef world it's been just the
opposite.

My theory is that there are seven days in a week, so assuming a two head
family unit, you each cook three days a week and eat out one day.

Pete C.

Nancy Young wrote:

"~patches~" wrote

wff_ng_7 wrote:

Squirrels are funny! I toss out peanuts to the blue jays so one Christmas
I got the idea to put out the leftover Christmas nuts. DH was not amused
cleaning them out of the downspout We live on the water now so have a
problem feeding wildlife although I still toss our peanuts to the blue
jays each morning. I have one fat blue jay that follows me around when
I'm outside, bold as anything!

They're too much! I never see them around then I put out
peanuts, the screaming meemies come out of nowhere.

The squirrels have their own feeder when I get around to filling
it. I remember like yesterday, the kid next door ... maybe he
was 10. He stood there with his little 10 year old chin dropped
as far as it could, eyes huge, staring at this squirrel sitting on this
seat in front of a box of nuts, lifting the lid taking a peanut at a time
and eating it.

First time he'd seen it in action. Hilarious.

This past Sunday morning I heard this most interesting hammering noise.
I'm sure most people wouldn't give it a second thought. But I recognized
it for what it was: the distinctive sound of a woodpecker.

I have to chase them from my window, they hammer a pretty good
hole. Never do see what the heck they're looking for.

a really messy bird. We have a lot of hawks of which I kind of have a
love hate relationsip with. They are gorgeous birds but bring a whole new
meaning to natural selection!

I chase them away if I catch them ... was easier when I had
Rascal ... I'd let her out and bark and she'd run around like a
nut barking and it would make the hawks go away ... yes, I know,
they have to eat, too ... but not my birds, and most especially not
my catbirds.

nancy

If you find a woodpecker pecking at your house you need to carefully
investigate what the infestation might be (ants, termites, etc.).
Woodpeckers have very good senses and if they're pecking at it there is
a very good chance it's because there is food there.

Pete C.

Pete C. wrote:

Orlando Enrique Fiol wrote:

wrote:

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.

Does anyone else think Americans are bombarded with ethnic cuisines? I
know I grew up primarily with Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Italian
foods, although my family liked foods from other cultures and my mother
often learned to cook foods about which I'd inquired or in which I'd
expressed some interest.

Orlando


Perhaps that's part of the problem, the potential average new cook is
overwhelmed with the wide array of cuisine's that are seen today and
they can't seem to find a direction to start learning.

Pete C.

You might have a point. I grew up in a small town with no fast food
restaurants and only one actual restaurant. Fast food was frozen pizza
or school cafeteria food. Dinner was meat, potatoes, and vegetables.
Plain, old fashioned, country cooking, nothing fancy. To this day, I
still do a lot of cooking this way. Then fast food restaurants came on
the scene and I discovered Chinese food etc so it opened a lot more
opportunities to experiment with food. Now there is food network where
you can get recipes and learn techniques on just about any type of
cuisine and the internet makes it even easier. My kids are a lot more
adventerous cooks than I am! It's no surprise that new cooks could
easily be overwhelmed with the choices. One problem with some new cooks
is they expect to do gourmet cooking right away and fail to realize that
first you have to find your cooking style then build on that.

~patches~ wrote:

Pete C. wrote:

Orlando Enrique Fiol wrote:

wrote:

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.

Does anyone else think Americans are bombarded with ethnic cuisines? I
know I grew up primarily with Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Italian
foods, although my family liked foods from other cultures and my mother
often learned to cook foods about which I'd inquired or in which I'd
expressed some interest.

Orlando


Perhaps that's part of the problem, the potential average new cook is
overwhelmed with the wide array of cuisine's that are seen today and
they can't seem to find a direction to start learning.

Pete C.

You might have a point. I grew up in a small town with no fast food
restaurants and only one actual restaurant. Fast food was frozen pizza
or school cafeteria food. Dinner was meat, potatoes, and vegetables.
Plain, old fashioned, country cooking, nothing fancy. To this day, I
still do a lot of cooking this way.

I grew up in a mid sized town so there were a decent number of
restaurant options and we did visit them periodically. My mother wasn't
a particularly good cook other than baking so what I was initially
exposed to was not overly complex. Probably the modest start with actual
cooking and the exposure to a variety of cuisine's at restaurants helped
to build both my cooking confidence and my interest in trying new
things.

Then fast food restaurants came on
the scene and I discovered Chinese food etc so it opened a lot more
opportunities to experiment with food. Now there is food network where
you can get recipes and learn techniques on just about any type of
cuisine and the internet makes it even easier. My kids are a lot more
adventerous cooks than I am! It's no surprise that new cooks could
easily be overwhelmed with the choices.



One problem with some new cooks
is they expect to do gourmet cooking right away and fail to realize that
first you have to find your cooking style then build on that.

I think it's the same with most anything people have to learn, the kid
taking drum lessons want's to do it all on day one, not spend many days
practicing the basics. With cooking it was just a function of the bar
was set lower before people had exposure to so many different cuisine's
which mad for a shorter learning curve until you were able to cook what
everyone else was cooking.

Pete C.

Michael "Dog3" Lonergan wrote:

I know I've got it. I couldn't find it but found 2 badly battered
cookbooks.

you could lightly dust the cookbooks with flour before battering them;
that might help.

-goro-

"Pete C." wrote:
The critical part here is the yards. There are far too many 4,000+ sq.
ft. micro mansions squashed into tiny postage stamp lots that provide
absolutely no play area for children. When I was looking for a house the
requirement was an absolute minimum of two acres, you can easily add on
to a small house, it is far more expensive and difficult to add on to a
small lot.

I don't have kids, so the issues might be quite different. Here in the city
I have minimal yard space (a 10' x 12' patio with 1 to 3' of garden border
around it), with a 60' x 80' common courtyard beyond that. But within a very
short distance (10 to 15 minute walk), there are vast tracts of public
parkland, much of it river front. That is my space. (There are smaller parks
right in my neighborhood.) I think newer cities tend not to have some of the
vast parks that cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
Washington, DC have, and that's certainly true of the suburban areas
virtually everywhere. If you don't got the green space on your own property,
you don't got it at all. There's a dearth of convenient park land in much of
suburban America. Anyway, it's a different way of doing things... private
green space vs. public green space.

When I was a kid in the 1960s living in Philadelphia, we had I guess what
would be a rather large house on a quite small lot. Though it was a twin or
duplex, it had 6 bedrooms and 3-1/2 baths, and a 2 car garage on a 39' x
170' lot, built in 1926. To some, that would be a small lot, but with 5
kids, we didn't seem to think so. We did have the closeby parks in that city
too.

The big problem is that nearly all development in recent decades has
centered around micro mansions and apartments, i.e. pseudo high end and
very low end. There has not been nearly enough development of decent
mid-range neighborhoods with 2+ acre lots and 1,500-2,000 sq. ft.
houses.

Around here that would be a developer's dream... to demolish and rebuild at
a higher density! ;-) There have been at least two major land deals in this
area that involved buying up entire neighborhoods built in the 1950s/60s
with 1-2 acre lots and relatively small houses. The developer will tear down
ALL the old houses and built townhouses and condominums in their place,
along with some retail and office. Land near major transit lines has just
gotten too valuable to leave at low density. Of course, stuff such as this
has gone on for centuries. Midtown Manhattan was farmland once, was
residential once, and is now skyscrapers.

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

In article .com,
"Goro" wrote:

Michael "Dog3" Lonergan wrote:

I know I've got it. I couldn't find it but found 2 badly battered
cookbooks.

you could lightly dust the cookbooks with flour before battering them;
that might help.

-goro-

Boo, hiss... Bad pun. lol
--
Peace, Om.

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

wrote:
I've found that as long as you don't choose an insanely busy time to ask,
many restaurant chefs will step out of the kitchen to answer a quick
question. I know a couple of professionally trained chefs, and when I've
asked about certain things, it's been hard to get them to shut up. :-) Sort
of like gardeners, fishing addicts, and most other happy obsessions.

The Puerto Rican chef at the restaurant where I play every week has
struck up quite a food related friendship with me, to the point that we
bring in things for one another to try nearly every week and talk a lot
about preparing different foods. I think he's surprised that a blind
musician like me is so into cooking.


Orlando

wrote:
Compared to 30-40 years ago, I'd say yes. There were few to no cooking shows
introducing other cuisines, so restaurants were the primary place one might
encounter them. A typical city might have a few Italian and Chinese
restaurants, and that was the extent that most Americans were exposed to
ethnic food. Next came Mexican (or more likely Tex-Mex), followed by a whole
slew of others. At the same time cooking shows started appearing on TV
(around when cable became popular). It might be hard for some younger people
to believe, but at one time you only had three channels to watch, ABC, CBS,
and NBC, and they didn't broadcast 24 hours a day. Not much room for
programming under those circumstances.

More accurately, do you think Americans feel overwhelmed by so much
ethnic cuisine, or do they just view it as exotica? I imagine there are
still parts of the country unfamiliar with most ethnic cuisines and
happy to keep it that way.

I know in our house growing up (1950s,60s), my mother's only adventures in
ethnic cooking were Italian and Chinese. I remember a food company that used
to heavily advertise the fixings for Chinese cuisine, but the name escapes
me at the moment. Of course, one also saw Manischewitz products in the
supermarket if there were any Jews in the neighborhood. We were also exposed
to some other ethnic cuisine from our immigrant relatives from Germany and
the Ukraine, but that was about it.

I fondly remember my mother's Indian food, which she learned to prepare
simply because we both enjoyed it whenever we ate it in restaurants.
The rest of my Indian adopted second culture took off from food and
music.

Orlando

"Orlando Enrique Fiol" wrote:
More accurately, do you think Americans feel overwhelmed by so much
ethnic cuisine, or do they just view it as exotica? I imagine there are
still parts of the country unfamiliar with most ethnic cuisines and
happy to keep it that way.

I think there's a tendency in America these days (perhaps the whole world?)
to try and do it all. I think that's a mistake. I think a lot of people are
overwhelmed. There's an old saying about being an apprentice of everything
and a master of nothing. There's a lot of truth to that as it applies to
cooking. I think that's partly what Lidia Matticchio Bastianich was getting
at when she said focus on one cuisine. I've found it often takes making a
dish many, many times before I get it right. If I only make it once or a
couple of times, I may never know what the dish is really like. I think a
lot of people dabble in cuisines making recipes only once, producing a slew
of mediocre results over time, rather than progressing to making something
great with a single recipe.

I'll do my adventures in ethnic food in restaurants for the most part. In my
fifties, I'm still trying to master a lot of things in American food, which
itself has things from other cultures, though mostly European. There are so
many things I haven't even tried to make that I want to some day. Absolutely
mundane things like chicken fried steak.

I know there are people and also whole areas of the country that are
unfamiliar with any more than the first few ethnic cuisines that became
popular. There are vast differences between various areas of the USA, and
between rural, suburban, and city, and exposure to ethnic cuisines is just
one facet. I was reminded of that fact when I visited NYC a few weeks ago.
That's me coming from Washington, DC, a city with some similarities in terms
of ethnic diversity, and me having lived in the NYC area in years past. I
can't imagine what someone from the rural south, for example, might think of
NYC. You might think you're getting a good idea of what a city is like on TV
or movies, but you really aren't.

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

"Orlando Enrique Fiol" wrote in message
.. .
wrote:
I've found that as long as you don't choose an insanely busy time to ask,
many restaurant chefs will step out of the kitchen to answer a quick
question. I know a couple of professionally trained chefs, and when I've
asked about certain things, it's been hard to get them to shut up. :-)
Sort
of like gardeners, fishing addicts, and most other happy obsessions.

The Puerto Rican chef at the restaurant where I play every week has
struck up quite a food related friendship with me, to the point that we
bring in things for one another to try nearly every week and talk a lot
about preparing different foods. I think he's surprised that a blind
musician like me is so into cooking.


Orlando

How's the mofongo at that place?

On Mon, 20 Mar 2006 13:59:40 GMT, "wff_ng_7"
wrote:

- 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.

It's not always a search for the perfect house. In expensive cities,
people with families can't afford a house, period. They are forced to
drive longer distances in order to find living quarters, especially
space suitable for more than two people. Living in Manhattan, for
example, to be close to a job and/or to be close to the cultural
facilities now entails unbelievable sacrifices in space for a family,
with dining rooms and closets being turned into nurseries etc. There
was an article in the NYT a while ago about couples who bought
relatively modest apartments several years back thinking that they
could sell later and move into a more family-sized apartment.
However, when the kid is on the way, because of the run-up in prices
in the past few years, they find that they can't afford a bigger
place. They are stuck. We're not talking huge houses, it's the
difference between a couple in a studio apartment (or 1 bedroom if
they are lucky) and a family of 3 in a studio. At some point, they
will probably have to move to the outer towns, Long Island or further
upstate. 30 yr ago I had a friend who lived in Queens and she slept
on the couch because her family's apartment wasn't big enough.

As far as having a nice house and never being there, some people with
kids live further out because of the school district. Some parents
make big sacrifices in commuting so that kids can get into the best
school districts. Or they might have bought a house years ago when a
15 mi commute was 20 min, but now is a nightmare because of
congestion.

I wouldn't make those choices myself, but saying that people choose
long commutes just for the sake of a certain type of house leaves out
many more important factors.

Another reason not to learn to cook is that if you live in NYC, you
don't have to!

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