Snarl-grind-crash

[altivo]

Lovely weather today, ruined by the continuous snarl and crash of a chain saw next door as the Brit neighbor continues his vendetta against trees, any trees. One could hope that the ents will show up and stop him by any means necessary, but I'm afraid it won't happen.

I'm also afraid he's going to forget where the property line is some day and start in on the ancient oaks that line our side of it. The seeming border between our lands is laid out by a creekbed in the southern half, where he has been "working" lately. But the creek meanders of course, while the property line is straight. At some points, he owns both banks, but for most of the way, we own both banks of the creek. In the woodlot, we own 18 to 24 feet beyond the creek, on his side. I'm sure he has forgotten this.

The man's a fruitcake. He seems to hate all trees. Why he bought five acres of heavily wooded land I just can't imagine. The previous neighbors there had deliberately let it grow up and even planted more undergrowth to encourage wildlife. They had walking paths through it, but beyond that, never disturbed it. Gary says he has some "pioneer" notion that he's supposed to "clear the land" but I really think he's just plain nuts. This afternoon I chased the oldest of his dogs out of our arena, where the irritating beast was digging holes in the floor apparently looking for chipmunks or something.

Spent an irritating hour at Walmart this afternoon. I've been keeping a divided shopping list, with items I know are less expensive at Walmart listed separately for when I get a chance to go there. The store was mobbed. It seemed that every shopper had at least two unhappy kids trailing along. Plus store personnel were doing inventories or something that involved removing every item from the shelf and putting them back. Perhaps they were looking for someone's runaway hamster? ;p The produce department is always frustrating. Generally overpriced, poorly arranged, and not always in the best of condition, most of Walmart's produce may well best be avoided. Their meats are mostly prepared, precooked, ready-to-microwave. Huh? Once again I'm reminded that no one seems to know how to cook any more. They also put meats out in huge packages that may be great for a family of six with teenagers, but are impossible for a childless couple. I was pleased when I noticed that my receipt had a code and URL on it to file your reactions to the shopping trip. Alas, when I went to express my thoughts and opinions, I found that the survey consists of loaded questions that can't be easily answered, and no way to convey my suggestions or concerns. Of course.

Tomorrow, the Freeport Steam & Antique Engine Association show. This year featuring "horse power" (hard to say just what they mean by that) but I want to go see. Hopefull it will not rain.

Comments

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I was just commenting on the notion that there is no learning necessary at all.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, there's a sort of truth to that as well. Those of us who grew up in households where real cooking was done very often absorb a lot of it almost by osmosis as it were. Unfortunately, males tend to skip over that because they somehow think it is irrelevant or inappropriate. And, at least in the developed societies, we are now at a point where two or three generations have lived off processed microwaved food or take out fast food all their lives, so they had no opportunity at all to learn cooking even if they were interested.

I have actually met people who professed to "have no idea" that you could actually do something like, say, baking a cake starting with flour, eggs, and butter. To them it was all a mechanized factory process that you shouldn't try at home because you couldn't get the ingredients and didn't have all the necessary equipment. Indeed, if one reads the ingredient list on purchased, prepackaged goods, one might easily get the idea that all those ingredients are both necessary and unavailable. Try finding "sodium benzoate" or "BHT" for instance. Lacking any additional awareness of the irrelevance of such things, you could easily believe that it was impossible to bake at home unless you bought a packaged mix that had those ingredients already included.

It's a sad state of affairs, that's for sure.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

*noddles* Actually, I'd be surprised if most people weren't aware of the fact that you can - in principle - bake and cook at home, even if they wouldn't know how to do it themselves; after all, there must be a reason why we have cookers and ovens in our homes (and there also must've been a way to cook and bake things before processed convenience food entered the market).

I don't doubt that there are also some who are not aware and genuinely believe it is literally impossible to bake things yourself (unless you use ready-made mixtures, anyway), but a priori at least, I'd be surprised if they were representative, in the majority, or even all that common.

And, at least in the developed societies, we are now at a point where two or three generations have lived off processed microwaved food or take out fast food all their lives, so they had no opportunity at all to learn cooking even if they were interested.

I can't speak for the USA, but in Germany, I doubt that's true, either. My grandparents' generation definitely knew how to cook, and my parents' generation also still learned how to do so, both at home and (as far as I know) in school; microwaves certainly didn't become commonplace until in the mid- to late 80s.

Of course, for the current generation, it does seem to be true. Myself, I actually attended cooking classes in school, but that was just a voluntary after-hours thing (and to be honest, although it was fun, I didn't learn anything there, either); I've been wanting to learn a bit more about cooking, too, but it seems that most resources suffer from two problems - first, they usually mostly focus on the technical side of things (e.g. "how do you successfully prepare choux pastry dough?") rather than the "flavor" side (e.g. "what ingredients go well together?"), and second, they often involve a lot of hand-waving (usually masked as "relying on experience"). I imagine that this is a reason why I generally find (sweet) baking to be easier to pull off than cooking, too: with cakes etc., it's much easier to find things that go together well, and the technical side of things is usually where the problems lie - but that can be explained quite well, obviously. With cooking, it's the other way around; it seems to be easier (although not easy) from a technical perspective, but figuring out WHAT to cook and how to actually end up with a well-rounded dish that's more than just a mish-mash of disconnected ingredients is much harder.

This is a fundamental problem for me, too, one that runs deep enough to make most resources - books, courses, web pages etc. - irrelevant, as they fail to actually address the right question. (And of course, here's a third problem with most resources, too: there's such an overabundance of information - often contradictory information, too - that for a beginner, it's often impossible to make sense of it all. Too many cooks spoil the broth.)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It is really true in the US, particularly in urban and suburban regions, that two and three generations have lived without doing any significant cooking in their homes. As far as they are concerned, the cooking range and microwave exist only to reheat processed foods, period. In fact, it appears that operations as simple as making coffee are beyond the ability or expectations of many. This is a sort of cultural meme that has taken hold. Food preparation is considered a menial task, of no interest, and unsuited to the efforts of anyone of any self importance at all.

Now, in your own self-described difficulty, I see considerable confusion that makes little sense to me. Yes, cooking requires experience and is best learned "hands on." Because tastes vary so much, there are no hard and fast answers for "what goes together with what" and in fact, if you compare common Asian dishes with typical European ones, you will quickly see major disagreements about that very topic. Asian cooks like to combine sweet and salt or sweet and sour in one dish, and even sweet and spicy hot peppers on occasion. Western cuisine tends to isolate what are called "savory" flavors and aromas from the "sweets."

Learning so that you can "invent" dishes on your own does requiree some exposure and experience, and will still depend on your own tastes and preferences. The best way, in my opinion, to acquire that experience is to cook from recipes, and then experiment with first small and then larger alterations to the basic plan.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, what goes together with what certainly depends on who you ask (and where they're from), but I think there's some universal truths in there, anyway; there's concoctions that nobody would enjoy, and there's many things that people will enjoy even though they're not, historically speaking, part of the culture's cuisine.

Things aren't set in stone, of course, and answers may not be hard and fast, but that doesn't mean there aren't any at all.

That said, cooking from recipes and then starting to deviate from them is probably not a bad plan; still, it's not that well-suited to how I generally tend to learn. I usually prefer having an idea of what I'm doing instead of just blindly stabbing in the dark. (And I'm not calling it "experimenting" on purpose, as that term, to me, would imply that I already have a certain amount of knowledge on which to base my experiments.)

[doco.livejournal.com]

Your grandparents' generation most likely kicks ass at cooking because they *somehow* had to live through the winter of '47. That's one thing all American families lack in their history - either you had to be really good in your field, or you just died off. :P

How much of this has drizzled down through the two consecutive generations is an entirely different thing, though. My parents didn't have a fridge until 1959, for instance..

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Yeah, good point about the grandparents' generation; I didn't want to bring it up myself (you know what the say... don't mention the war ^_~).

FWIW, in my father's family (and neighborhood), it was definitely normal to be able to make good use of all the available food, too - people there didn't have much money to spare. FWIW, even though this was in the same (reasonably large) town I still live in now, pretty much everyone there had their own chickens, rabbits and/or geese, and some neighbors even kept pigs (who, as my father recalls, were always keenly aware of when they were about to be slaughtered - but who, afterwards, also provided the children in the neighborhood with lots of meaty snacks).

It's hard to believe that this was just 50 years ago.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

My parents and grandparents lived through the Great Depression in the US, which had similar effects.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I only barely cook (any books for a cooking simpleton you might recommend?) but I do at least dabble a bit and bake some. And not always from a mix though I'm certainly not above using a mix. But every house we lived in had a kitchen and no special "dining room." In fact, the idea of a dining room seemed very strange to me for a long time - wasn't that just another function of the kitchen, really?

But the effect of that, and living in small, rather cramped housing, was that the kitchen wasn't just for food preparation. It was a waiting area. It was a social area. It was often a central area by design of the house. And I did pick up some things, at least. A while back I was utterly shocked to discover that my housemate had spent almost no time in his mother's kitchen when she was baking or cooking while growing up. He had no idea what the 'toothpick test' was for a cake or brownies. That boggled me. That was one of those "How do you not know that?" sort of things.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That last is a typical American male reaction to cooking detail, though. ;p To most of them, cooking has always been some mysterious thing that women do, or else that happens somewhere in a back room of a restaurant or club, out of sight of "decent" people. Not really a new development there.

Mothers (with children) who don't cook except by heating up processed foods, however, is a relatively new development and continues to expand. I note in particular that the media are portraying this as normal and somehow "cool" both in advertising and in actual story plots.

Cooking books

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, if you're interested in learning more, Cooking for Dummies isn't too bad as a starting place. Any one of the kitchen compendia so often given as gifts to brides is probably a good bet too: Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook, Fanny Farmer Cookbook, Joy of Cooking, etc. These usually explain individual techniques, selection of ingredients, and so forth, as well as giving actual recipes. A used copy from the 50s or 60s might be more instructive than a shiny new one from the bookstore, though. I've noticed that more and more of these classics are shifting into the boxed mix and canned ingredients format, probably due to popular demand and expectation.