Time To Cook

I come from an Italian-American family so food has always been an important part of my life and a major topic of conversation. My mom cooked most nights growing up and we always ate dinner together unless one of us had some kind of after school activity that ran late. We would often get together with extended family for Sunday dinners. Now that I have a family of my own I cook dinner every night (yes, every night), usually making enough for all of us to have the leftovers for lunch the next day. I know a lot of people shy away from cooking dinner because it seems like a lot of work. It takes a little more effort than ordering takeout or heating up processed food, but you can actually make a meal in the same amount of time it would take to grab take out or have it delivered.

Likewise, some processed foods take almost as long to cook as a real home cooked meal. I will give you an example. I don't understand jarred tomato sauce. Chalk it up to my Italian heritage, but it has a distinctive taste that overpowers everything and just makes me think, "this came from a jar." It baffles me more because I can make a quick marinara sauce in the time it takes to boil water and cook the pasta (which you still need to do even if you use jarred sauce). Chop an onion and some garlic, sauté them until soft, then add tomatoes (fresh or canned), season with salt, pepper, and fresh basil if you have it and you are done. The result costs less, tastes better, and is healthier than the processed alternative. And it takes the same amount of time as heating the jarred sauce and cooking the pasta. You can also find time while the sauce and pasta cook to make a salad, or add some kind of green vegetable to the sauce. You can chop some spinach and add it to the sauce at the end, or if you have a little more time you can sauté a vegetable like zucchini after you add the garlic and onions but before you add the tomatoes. 

Some might point out that dried pasta and canned tomatoes are industrial products and we won't always be able to just pick them up at the store. Yes, as the industrial food system breaks down they might become unavailable or prohibitively expensive. At the moment they remain a healthy and cheap option and if someone knows how to cook with them now they can adapt in the future. For instance, you can still use fresh tomatoes when in season. The rest of the year you can make a sauce with tomatoes that have been preserved in some way, either jarred or dried during the growing season. The tomatoes might come from your own garden, a local farm, or small grocery store looking to fill a gap left by the collapse of the industrial food system. Using dried tomatoes will require some tweaking of the recipe, but the principle remains the same. 

You can make fresh pasta to go along with the sauce pretty easily. It certainly takes more work than just boiling dried pasta, but it tastes better in most dishes. You can make your own dried pasta as well. This requires about the same initial effort as making fresh pasta, but you also need the right space to dry it over a few days. The plus side is that you then have something you can store for a while and cook up as quickly as store bought dried pasta. Someone could probably make a good small business in the coming years making dried pasta and selling it locally. In any case, people from many different cultures have eaten noodles for centuries. They made them long before modern food processing and they will probably continue to do so once those methods become untenable. To think that pasta will survive the collapse fills me a bit of joy and hope.

I give this just as an example. I plan to keep coming back to the question of sourcing ingredients from outside of the the industrial food system. The topic fascinates me and gives me a lot of, pardon the phrase, food for thought. For now I would like to give a great resource for people who want to eat a good meal, but don't want it to take too long.

First, a quick word on the kinds of things I like to cook. This will help you understand my recommendation. While I sometimes like to tackle a challenging dish, I generally favor meals that don't take too much prep work to cook. Cooking even a "quick" meal can be tricky enough when I have to keep on an eye on my 19 month old son. I prefer cooking nutritious main dishes that can feed a few people. Specifically, I try to make sure that a meal has a carbohydrate, a green vegetable, and usually some kind of protein. I also don't like waste, so I try to stay away from recipes that require me to buy expensive ingredients that will go bad before I get a chance to use the rest of them in another dish.

With all this in mind, my favorite cookbook at the moment is Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Fast: A Better Way to Cook Great Food. It has over 2,000 recipes from all different kinds of cuisines. Most of the recipes are main dishes and many of them take about a half hour to cook. Some take as little as 15 minutes. A few take 45 minutes or an hour to cook, but still only need fairly simple prep. In addition to the recipes it has tips for cooking more quickly and it provides some basic instruction that the novice chef will find very useful. I have only had this book for a few months, but I have made more recipes from it than any cookbook I own. Bittman also put a lot of thought into giving the recipes a user friendly layout. Every dish I have made from this book is good, some of them are great or excellent. If I could recommend one book to someone that wants to start cooking, but does not think they have the time, this would be it.

Next week I will talk more about the benefits of cooking.