Blog.EmealsForYou

This rant is about the food but it really goes much deeper than that, it’s about maintaining our touch on our own family history.  How many of you have gone to a family gathering and asked a cousin or sibling, “what do you know about …?” The conversation usually turns to an agreement that you should have asked someone who is no longer alive the question years ago.  We constantly allow moments to go by that could and should provide us with family treasures to pass along to the next generation and beyond.  I guess it is like everything else, we expect someone will know the answer to our questions, but those “someones” are getting older and more forgetful.  So the bottom line is one less tie to those who went before us; one less interesting fact not shared.

What brought this on was a recent discussion I had with a good friend about recipes handed down from generation to generation.  She was planning a family reunion and was putting together a family recipe cookbook and fact sheet for all those who were to attend.  Each family was requested to submit some facts about themselves and their families along with a favorite recipe, perhaps one passed down from an ancestor.  This is a great idea and one that should be part of everyone’s family reunion.

Many of the recipes found here and on my website have come from past generations of family cooks.  Some were taught to me, some were shared by those around me and some I absorbed by just being in the kitchen growing up.  One that always makes me smile is a recipe for sweet cabbage.  You see, back in the dark ages when my wife and I were beginning to date she only ate white bread.  No matter how many kinds of breads my family put out on the table she would always ask for Wonerbread, so much so that my father began to call her whitebread.  I mean there was chewy rye bread, hard rolls and flaky horns but she would always say, “don’t you have any Wonderbread?”  Needless to say the great varieties of bread went along with a wonderful assortment of “old country” dishes.  So years later when I was looking for my father’s sweet cabbage recipe, and had tried all avenues with no success, it was whitebread who had somehow written the recipe down.

The moral of the story is to get those stories and recipes before it is too late.  BTW - my wife still makes the sweet cabbage and yes hers is better than mine.

Julia Child, the goddess of cooking, started it all… and I must admit it worked.  Way back when, who’d have “thunk” you could get people to sit in front of their TVs and watch someone cook.  Today we have endless, and mindless for the large part, cooking shows available 24-7.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to anything that works to get more families together at the table eating food prepared in their very own kitchen.  I just would like to see more instructional cooking and a little less cook-entertainment.  Seriously, I want one of those ovens that you throw ingredients into an oven-proof container, pop it into the oven and then open the oven door below it to pull out a fully prepared, beautiful dish.

Here are a few that make easy targets, although I know many of you really like them.  I proceed at my own risk…..

Anyone tired of our all-American girl RR with her EVOO and endless energy?  When she is finished in TV she can get a job at Circ du Soleil as a juggler, carrying all those ingredients in one load, come-on.

How about learning Italian cooking while watching the bouncing boobs?

Do any of you dress up to make almost-homemade meals?

What’s with the guy who will eat anything, and I do mean anything, makes me want to lose my supper, not make it.

There are some good shows.  The Martha Stewart produced Everyday… shows offer quick and instructional cooking.  I like The Barefoot Contessa but do wonder when she makes 4 gallons of soup for two people.  Napa Style provides good entertaining ideas and you just can’t beat America’s Test Kitchen for techniques and solid cooking tips.

Well, it’s time to pull the plug on this show for now, I’m off to the grocery to pick up a box cake mix for my grandson’s third birthday party….NOT!

I had the opportunity to engage in a conversation with a cousin last weekend at a family gathering. She, like a lot of women, is a single mom, working full time and going back to school at the same time. Needless to say this leaves little personal time.

As most of my conversations go we turned to the discussion of meals and meal preparation. I asked her how she handled the daily routine of meal prep. She told me her day started early, dropping her son off at school, then on to work… pick up her son, go home and throw something on for dinner; admitting she probably should do more towards a healthier diet. Cooking the family meal had become a chore, something that was loathed but had to happen. I truly believe she is in the majority in this thought process.

As our discussion progressed I asked her to imagine coming home from work and preparing a warm, bubble-filled bathtub… sinking into the sudsy water for 20 minutes of pure relaxation; rewarding herself for a job, both motherhood and professional, well done. This appealed to her; frankly I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t enjoy this. My next statement was to imagine coming home and taking the same 20 minutes, 20 minutes you will spend anyway on the usual fare, to prepare a great dinner, something she had looked forward to all day. So, this is where it begins. This is the start of the paradigm shift. You need to stop thinking of cooking as a chore and begin to think of it as a reward… something to look forward to. Good cooking takes the same amount of time as bad cooking; you just get more pleasure out of the good stuff.

Stop thinking about the chore and think about the end result, a reward for you and your family. Special meals are normal meals made special by the way we think about them. The other thing is that special meals don’t have to cost more than normal meals; chicken breasts prepared quickly can be very special.(a recipe follows) I’m not advocating forcing yourself out of the old habits and into the new habits 7 days a week. Why not try making one “special” meal a week. You may find yourself enjoying it, more importantly your family may realize just how special you are.

Years from now when the social-anthropologists look back and try to determine when the decline started, they will settle on Bill Cosby and Jell-O pudding. Some of our moms made pudding from scratch; some from a package labeled instant…but the downfall can be traced to the advent of the ready-to-eat pudding cup. In our lay-the-blame society, you know the one without mirrors; it’s easy to say that is when kitchen laziness began.

It all gets back to- how much does it cost? For those few people who can afford it, kitchen laziness must be a very nice thing. Our society rewards kitchen laziness, the inability to push ourselves beyond opening a package to provide food for ourselves and our families. We have a whole slew of businesses designed to prepare our meals, actually just the entrées, in nice little freezer bags so that we won’t have to overwork ourselves in the kitchen. On a diet, not to worry, just order up from the Internet…Get 6 weeks of food for the cost of 4. Let’s not even get into the fast food route.

First let me attack the Diet Plans. Let’s look at what’s missing besides the vegetables, salads et al that you have to provide on top of paying “only about $10 per day” as the ads say. We are missing the self-discipline to use portion control… to limit our daily intake of calories and carbs. Will we stay on these pre-arranged diets forever, how will we learn to push ourselves into better physical shape if the only way we can diet is by checking off a list of meals on a menu? Besides diets don’t work; unfortunately we’ll need to change our lifestyle to really make the difference we are looking for.

Now about those Meal services, Dream Dinners, My Girlfriends Kitchen, etc. What are we really getting for our money? We have ourselves convinced that they are just like going out to dinner only cheaper. Surprise, you still have to cook them, still have to come up with sides or salads to go with them. Just what have we gained except less money in our checking account and bragging rights at the PTA meeting? Come on… take some time and plan you own meals. You will find it refreshing to have control over what you want to eat and not what they have on the menu for that week.

Look, I don’t care how you plan your meals; use your recipes, get recipes off the Internet or cookbooks. Like the Nike phrase, JUST DO IT! Show some discipline. For those who say they can’t plan meals I say bull. The only thing between your family and good meals is your laziness. Get over it. Don’t you want your kids to look forward to good meals at home?

The personal world sometimes mimics the business world, when it comes to running the business of our homes this is especially true. In business, when money matters tighten up; businesses revert to a “Retail Mentality”. This simply means they tend to focus on, “What’s it cost” as opposed to, “What’s my return on investment (ROI)?” Well, I don’t have to tell you times are tough in the real world, the world we call home. The cost of living has risen rapidly while our paychecks seem to shrink. So were tend to follow the business world and look at our cost rather then our ROI.

A simple exercise in this theory is our car. Maybe it is getting a little old, maybe it needs some work. Putting Best Business Practices , another business term, to work we should evaluate how much it would cost to bring it back to decent shape versus how much a new car cost. There are many programs designed to help you with this equation. It just may be that all things considered you may have to spend some money to save more money in the long run (ROI).

I know all of you are now sitting on the edge of your seats wondering how this ties into www.emealsforyou.com . Well friends, the wait is over. Meal planning is a lot like looking at something through the ROI glasses. It may require some work on your part, a departure from your normal routine. It may require spending a few bucks to save even more down the line. As with the car decision above there are tools to help you transition from Retail Mentality to ROI. www.emealsforyou.com is one of those tools.

We did a recent survey of moms on another blog. We asked them to tell us how much they spent on Fast Food each month. We further broke this number down by money spent on Pizza, Mc D’s and other (Chinese, ribs, takeout). Our sampling had both ends of the spectrum as to income. Our highest spent each month was $400 and our lowest was $30. The averages are: Total spent per month $98, pizza = $24, Mc D’s = $46 and other came in at $29. Most of the respondents mentioned that they thought they were spending too much on take out and should try to be better in the future; many saying they should be making better food decisions for their families.

So it all comes back to ROI. If I spend $36 on a 1-year membership to www.emealsforyou.com ( $31if you use the promo code on the right) how much will I save in the long run? I think the more important question is,” How much better will I be feeding my family?”

Cookbooks are like arm chairs; sounds crazy but let me explain. Cookbooks are a collection of recipes; kind of like the arm chair selection in a furniture store. To see whether we “like” the chair, whether it is comfortable or not, we have to sample it. Sit in it, move to the left, move to the right, maybe put our feet up to fully evaluate it. We have to take into consideration the quality of the store we are in. Now let’s look at color and material; lots to do here.

So how does that equate to cookbooks? We have many avenues for cookbooks and recipes. There is the old fashion book, and the new fashion Internet search. We pick up the book, look at the pictures, do a quick scan of the recipes and take it to the cashier. Now, at home with our feet up in our favorite chair, we open that cookbook and find exactly two recipes we think we like. Over the next few days we make these recipes and guess what? We find we like only one. So the end result is one good recipe for the cost of the cookbook, plus not just a little disappointment on our mindset. Each of us has that supposed “special” cookbook. I bought a Charlie Trotter, world-class Chicago chef, cookbook; impressed my friends. I quickly found out that Tuna-Wrapped Oysters with Saffron Infused Tomato Water just wasn’t me. Fifty bucks well spent, not.

Now let’s look at those favorite recipes and cookbooks, the ones with the smudges of chocolate and egg on the pages. The one where you can quickly find the recipe you always cook when you have to have something that works, mainly ’cause the book has so much “crud” on the page that it opens itself to the recipe. Ooohhh! This is my favorite chair, this is my comfort zone.

So what’s your point, you say. My point is you can buy all the cookbooks in the world. You can download all those recipes from the Internet. I am betting in the long run you will return to those old favorites, those recipes from chefs, and friends and maybe your mom that always work and bring back good memories. Sure it is okay; in fact you should be seeking out new “favorites”, just don’t think that more is better. Sit back in that comfy old chair and enjoy your recipe comfort zone. That’s my rant and I am sticking to it.

Maybe it’s a generational thing; the inability to ask questions to become more informed regarding things that effect our health. We have been conditioned over the years to accept what is presented. No. I am not talking about the doctor/patient relationship; although it fits the pattern. What gets to me is our inability to ask simple questions at our grocery stores about the foods they offer us. We go blindly through the pre-packaged meat cases, selecting what “looks” good. Do you really know what had been added to that package to make it look more appealing? Is there gluten added, how about water and more importantly salt?

My eyes were recently opened when I took that NJ trip a few weeks ago. The one where I cooked for a non-fish eater, a non-meat eater and the one that was gluten intolerant. Looking for an easy way out for the travel day dinner I asked my mother-in-law to pick up a couple of rotisserie chickens from Sam’s Club for the non-gluten eater of the group. The rest of us were more than happy to sample some of the fine NJ pizza we missed. Checking with Sam’s Club deli section I learned that both wheat gluten and corn syrup had been added. Who knew? I wound up doing what I advocate most times, buy a chicken, sprinkle it with salt and pepper and douse on some olive oil. Bake at 350 degrees for about an hour and you have a pretty darn good chicken. But I digress; the lesson here is without asking we would have served the Sam’s bird and found out later that we had contributed to a huge headache for the non-gluten eater.

Another example of this is a conversation I had with my local sausage maker. Cincinnati is the home of Findlay Market, supposedly the nation’s oldest open-air farmer’s market. Kroeger’s & Sons Meats has about 45 different types of sausages on display. I asked the owner whether they made a sodium-free sausage, unfortunately they don’t. In our discussion about salt in meat products she told me she had recently asked the local Kroger (national chain) store about the additives to their meats. She was surprised to hear they added both salt and water to their meats. The lesson here is how many of us on some sort of restrictive diet or just being healthier have just assumed meat was meat; nothing added.

Ask the question; what’s in it? What has been added to make it look pinker, to make it moister or just to add to the weight? You’ll be a bit healthier and a lot happier.

I was doomed from the start, born into it you might say. I come by my obsession with making sure others enjoy my food naturally. You see I was born into a family presided over by an old-country Slovak grandmother. Grandmom spoke very little English, when you went to see her she would say, “somethink (her mispronunciation) for you?” Then she would take you into her kitchen and show you all the food she and my aunts had prepared. There was everything from hams and turkeys to sweet breads, cookies and pastries. You would get a plate and she would follow you around the table saying, “eat, eat, eat.”

So you see, now when I am cooking for friends and family I am “forced” to provide as many choices as possible, just in case someone wants something different. The reason this all came back to me is that I am on my way back to New Jersey next week for a family reunion, in-laws, and delayed wedding party. I volunteered to cook for the group. Here is where it gets tricky, some don’t eat meat, some don’t eat fish, one is gluten and dairy intolerant and I am just crazy. I had to come up with a menu for Friday’s dinner, 9 people, with the above conditions in mind. This involved two appetizers, two main courses, including sides and two desserts. Everything has to be cooked from scratch as gluten and diary are hidden in many pre-prepared broths and canned goods. I am cooking the consommé as I write this and freezing it to take with us.

Saturday’s party was a little easier to plan as I had many more choices and a guest list of 35. The secret here is to cook and freeze as much of the food as possible in advance. I chose fairly quick and easy food to prepare on site. This will require some effort but it is doable; the main concern is timing everything to be ready at the same time.

I guess the point of this rant is to say some of us “just have to” go out of the way in our preparation of what we offer our families to eat, our obsession has been bred into us.

We eat first with our eyes. We all hear this and think; what the hell does that mean. Mostly we are eating out of the Micky D’s bag, you know pour the french fries out of the little bag and into the big bag to make it easier to drive and eat at the same time. That’s not where I am going with this rant.

My gripe is when you go to all the effort to make something nice for your family; take the time to put it on the plate in an attractive manner. This doesn’t require a whole lot of effort, just a little skill with the spoon. To prove my point let’s think back to the last time you went through a cafeteria line. After searching through the plexiglass for something that appeared almost edible you made your selection only to have the server slap that puppy down on a plate. What looked almost edible now is splattered across the plate mixing in with everything else on the plate.

So the next time you “plate” the food for your family; think about how it will look to them. I am not asking for rosebud radishes or star shaped lemons, just some semblance of order. Heck, you might even get a , “that looks good mom” out of them.

Gourmet…. Webster’s dictionary defines it as: n. a lover of good eating: an epicure.

Okay, I can live with that. I guess my problem with the word is not as a noun but as an adjective. Gourmet food served here! She is a gourmet cook The food is really gourmet.

The problem with the use of the gourmet title is that to most of us it denotes the very best, top of the heap, special. We form “gourmet” dinner clubs, go out for a gourmet meal or worse of all prepare gourmet meals for our family and friends.

Here is my grip: in order to prepare a gourmet meal we must be willing to shop for the very best of ingredients, cook with only the right pots and pans and on the proper “gourmet” stove. This is not enough, we must also set the expectation of the attendees that they are enjoying a gourmet meal. This in turn requires a specialized knowledge on the part of the attendees; they must know just what makes up a gourmet meal. They must understand not only that it taste good, but that it has the right ingredients, has been prepared with just the right touches and served with impeccable style. Isn’t this just a little too “gourmet”? Talk about putting pressure on everyone.

Let’s get back to the days when friends and family were invited to have a good meal, good conversation and good company. This is not to condone not looking for the best ingredients you can find and afford. Nor is it right to slap something together and not try to make it good. I am a good cook, okay I am a very good cook, but please don’t call me a gourmet cook. This doesn’t mean that I occasionally don’t strive for creating better food, just that I fully accept and appreciate the good cook title. Let the “gourmet cooking clubs” handle the pressure, let’s just lift a good glass of wine and enjoy the food; besides when was the last time you saw a refrigerator magnate that said “Kiss the Gourmet”. nuff said!