Well guess what – my mentor Harold McGee recommends cooking pasta the way the hikers did! Ever since reading that, I have cooked pasta the through-hiker way and it comes out fine.

The moral of the story is, just do it.

But I’ve been helped by reading cookbooks. I like to keep it simple – and short. Except for braising (which is simple, but lengthy) I never cook anything that takes more than an hour.

In general, just like anything else, there are some people who have more of an innate talent than others. My husband, though he only came to cooking in his thirties, is a fantastic cook: he has a really excellent sense of flavouring (though he usually uses no salt in his cooking),a lot of patience and just amazing “smarts”. I am less talented, but I cook a fair bit and can hold my own in the kitchen.

You just have to keep practicing and finding interesting recipes to try out. I also agree with the fact that something home cooked is almost always better than store-bought food.

McGee is very laid back about all this. I felt very liberated when McGee said in his columns that brining is not necessary, and cheap pots and pans are perfectly adequate for certain purposes.

That said, here’s a hint: you cannot make decent crepes in a regular fry pan, and a good French crepe pan will cost $20 and last forever.

Cookwise:

On Food & Cooking:

Takeway: Just do it. Whatever you come up with will be better than processed crap.

Thanks for the cook book recommendations. I’m curious about your take on pros/cons of each.

Thanks,
Mark

But what scares me about this proposal is that we all damn well know who’s probably going to stay home: the women. And although I would not presume to tell any woman how to lead her life, there is much to be said for women doing things in addition to raising the kids, cooking the meals and keeping hearth and home. I know too much about violence against women to want to see the majority of women back at home with no income of their own. Honestly, I don’t want our society to go back to the “good old days” of Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet. They weren’t all that good.

If anyone has bothered to take the time to read Brenda Watson’s book from the PBS special they will notice that she has studies to back up her information and has worked with Gastro surgeons so I would tend to trust what she says. After doing a bit more research you can see that she has written books due to her own health issues and the fact that she is in the field. Why not share that information? Why not formulate products to meet the needs of people who need it? Bravo for her!

But what I like about the discussion is the focus on this as a societal issue. It’s curious how easily it is to slip into the narrative that this is just about individuals or families when the scale of the problem is national or global. Making meaningful cultural shifts? Not sure I’ll see it in my lifetime. But I’m wondering if what we need is the equivalent of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

I think we’re certainly going to need the equivalent (and coherency) of a large movement in order to get real change.