We got some
gorgeous produce in our
Tanaka Farms CSA box today. It looks almost too pretty to eat. Actually, we often put some of our carrot tops and greens in a vase with Trader Joe's flowers and call that a centerpiece.
At the annual CSA coordinator meeting last year, farmer Glenn Tanaka says that he was surprised by the low number of subscribers per school. If you figure that a school of 400 students has about 200 families and 40-50 staff, then he expected about 50 subscribers per school. Instead, there are about 10 per school.
Are so few families cooking? Or are so few cooking for scratch? Are the veggies too odd? Not novel enough? Leave a comment if you can explain the mystery to us.
I wonder if the art and craft of home cooking is not being transmitted via either family or schools. That is, mothers went into the workplace about the same time that schools stopped offering home economics. Like I mentioned in
How to become a home cook, TV shows and cookbooks from celebrity restaurateurs are not a good way to learn home cooking.
I agree with
Russ Parsons about weeknight suppers. Don't take such an either or attitude to cooking from scratch. Do what you can in the time available to you, with the ingredients you can easily obtain. Improvise.
To me, home cooking is about the pleasure of creating and the pleasure of eating. If it isn't, then it must be Bad Dad's turn to cook. ;-)
Seriously, during Bad Dad's recent 6-week national tour*, I either put mostly pre-prepared dinners on the table on weeknights (cooked during the weekend) or Iris and I went out to eat.
Jennifer LaRue Huget links the growth of child obesity with the decline in home cooking. I am not convinced. Correlation does not imply causality. There were many compounding factors over the same time period.
I am more inclined to agree with
Ta-Nehisi Coates:
The greatest tool in the arsenal of weight loss was not
running, it was not my gym membership. It wasn't buying low-fat foods,
swearing off fried chicken or going low-carb. It was trying to
understand, in as much detail as possible, exactly what I was putting in
my body. It was closing the distance between preparation and
consumption.
...
Cooking--and really cooking from scratch--creates a consciousness about
food. It creates a respect, an understanding of what, exactly, you're
putting in your body. It's not that cooking is magically healthier. I'm
not convinced that, say, my fried chicken has less calories than KFCs.
But that isn't the point. The point is doing the actual work of frying a
great chicken. It's actually having to see all the oil and eggs
(depending on your recipe) used in the process. For me at least, doing
that, has made it unlikely that I'll fry chicken every day, or even
every week.
* From the Monday after we got back from NYC, Bad Dad was scheduled to be home 8 of the following 35 days. His last week-long trip was canceled, to my great relief. But then he and the spectrometer were redeployed to the gulf to take measurements of the oil spill. For two weeks.
He has often said something to the effect that the life a field scientist is not as glamorous as it sounds. Well, that is doubly true for the spouse who stays behind. While trying to hold down a job. While dealing with all the end of year activities at your child's school. While recovering from a medical setback.
Anyway, it was a 6-week slog for both of us, hence the blogging break. But, tonight, we are all home and we had strawberries from our CSA box, picked fresh this morning. We served it with chocolate ice cream, which Iris and I made last night. Hat tip to
Eric and his girls for sharing their home-made ice cream and telling me about
this ice cream cookbook.
Addendum:
Bad Dad would like to tell his side of the story. By his accounting, he was home for much of week 5 and 6. He only had one trip, lasting from Friday through Wednesday. But he then turned around and left for San Diego the next day to help deal with a family health crisis. I stand by my assertion that I spent more time with his dirty laundry in the last month than with him. And that is the secret to the longevity of our marriage (20 years).
