Originally posted by: Jeff7
Not the only one. Some people here who've kept up on my threads (both of them) know of my ongoing War on Flavor. Along with that are my other thoughts on the subject:
1) It's just food, it's not a big deal. It's an energy source. Yeah, some things taste good, but, you know, it's really not all that amazing.
2) If they had meal pills, I'd use them, and not be bothered taking up time eating or preparing food.
3) Food preparation is just one of many menial, utterly mindless tasks in life - things that machines should be doing.
Unfortunately, a lot of prepared foods have lots of salt and various other preservative-type ingredients. One of my favorite examples is the ingredient list of Doritos. Cheese-flavored corn chips, that can't be too tough, right? No, those things seem to have a little bit of every last element that occurs naturally.
And because they tend to come in meal-size portions, a lot of excess packing material is used. Plus they're something of a convenience item, so just like $1 20oz sodas in a machine, they are marked up accordingly.
Result: I wind up cooking more often than I'd prefer to. I aim to reduce prep times to less than an hour per thing being made, and I find that most recipes can be modified or streamlined to accomplish this.
I think this goes along with what I was saying.
I only started to enjoy cooking more and mere, as I got older, when it started becoming an event...(well, not completely), but rather as a side-show to a game: "Hey boys! I'm on bring me a big ass burger, grill that shit, and chow down,"
then it becomes "Hey y'all!! Ima bring me a burger, toss some onions in it!"
crowd falls silent. Then exhales a collective, "Whoa..."
Next thing you know, many months, years later....the contests are between certain types of meat, or certain non-indigenous plant matter, how it was prepared--how roasted/braised/grassfed/broasted/blanched/seared/brunzzzzed/unbrunzzzzzzzzzzed--it jsut never ends.
Cooking is 90% social, at least it should be. I find that those that cook are the easiest to get along with, interesting in general to talk with, and well...friendly. Less cloistered in their dealings with the outer world, as it were. (case in point--just returned from a house-warming party hosted by a new postdoc, he cooked 6-7 traditional courses for everyone else in the lab. he's been here for 4 months, the rest of us just about a year. New guy comes from rather different culture, English is good but certainly not perfect...and he has way more local friends than the rest of us lab geeks) Bingo bango.