Cooking Is NOT Hard!

I’ll admit that I’ve been in a funk.  I didn’t realize I was in a funk until I broke out of it the other day. There was some drama related to my adjunct position (as in, I didn’t get my paycheck until a week after I was supposed to get it) and I had a sinus infection followed by a minor cold, so I think that had something to do with it, don’t you?

Anyway, I took a break from writing, yesterday and turned on Oprah.  On the show, celebrity chefs were doing cooking interventions for families. I came in about halfway through the show but it struck me that these chefs were teaching the families basic grocery shopping skills and basic cooking techniques.   Apparently, the interventions were needed because the mothers (who were doing the bulk of the cooking) didn’t know how to cook.  I about passed out when one of the mothers commented that cooking was easy!  She always thought it was going to be hard but she learned that cooking is really easy!

(Mini-rant!)  See!  This is what happened because schools took Home Ec out of the curriculum and we started believing Food Pushers, I mean food producers who convinced us to buy their pre-packaged frankenfood by repeatedly airing commercials about how hard and time consuming it is took cook meals. (Mini-rant over)

Now, one thing you have to know about me is that I do not own a microwave oven.  I had one in the mid-80′s.  My mother-in-law bought a top of the line Kenmore for me because I was teaching First Grade and going to graduate school.  When it died, my husband and I decided that we didn’t need to have something that we used just for reheating things.  That was about 15 years ago and I haven’t missed it a bit.

“But what about how fast a microwave cooks things!?”  Many people ask me, horrified at the thought of not having a microwave.  Well, here is the deal.  I can get a nice satisfying meal cooked from scratch completed in 15-30 minutes.  My secret is that I plan ahead AND I create “planned overs.”  For example, if I’m making hamburgers, I double the recipe so that I have some patties ready to go in the freezer.  I take it out the day before to defrost and I’m set to go when it is dinnertime.  Or, if I cook a roast, I’ll use the leftovers in a dish (usually a casserole or in tacos) later in the week.

My mother hates to cook.  I started cooking for my large family when I was in junior high.  When my husband and I were first married eons ago, my cooking rotation was something like pizza on Sundays, spaguetti on Thursdays, tacos on Friday and so on.  But, I was adventurous and would try out recipes in cookbooks and magazines.  There were some dinners that had to go directly into the garbage, but more often than not, the dinners turned out okay.

When I started collecting the vintage cookbooks about about 15 years ago, though, my culinary skills took off and I discovered that all of those commercials that told us that cooking required slaving over the stove all day were just wrong.  Just out and out wrong.

I promise you that if you try out the recipes that I feature on this blog, you, too, will be known as a great cook and people will never know that you spent no time at all making the mouthwatering dish.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my husband is home for work and I need to fix his dinner!