A Rant...

Often I give someone a recipe and they say, "how do you ever find time to make dishes like this?"

OK. I admit it. I like to make complicated food sometimes, where there are little critters to be cleaned, vegetables to be carefully trimmed and par-boiled and shocked in ice water, with stocks and sauces and all of that yummy stuff. I don't do it every day, but a couple of times a week I like to prepare a meal that would not be out of place in one of the finer restaurants in the area. Part of it is the joy of smells and of getting my hands dirty with ingredients. Part of it is that a good meal is a good keystone for good conversation. Part of it is that I need to be in good form when it comes to evaluating the work of chefs. I need my palate to be sharp, and the best way to do that is to get dirty with the ingredients and techniques of cooking.

However, usually when I am giving someone a recipe it is really quite a simple dish, maybe an hour from prep to table, with ample time to make a salad or some side dishes, to set table, select a wine, etc. And I give the recipe and get "where do you find time?"

How do you answer that, especially when you hear the person say later, "did you see that episode when Jerry blah blah blah?"

Part of me wants to say, "no, I did not see that episode, nor any other episode of that stupid show, because I was busy making good food for my family."

Television is such a part of people's lives that they don't see time wasted with it as time that could be used for anything else.

I am not immune to its siren call. Years ago, before Amalia, there was a time when Melanie and I would come home from work and watch the rerun of Friends that one of the UHF stations ran. It was insidious. They ran three episodes in a row. You would watch one, not find it particularly interesting or funny or any of the characters that engaging, but then you would realize that you were watching the third episode in a row.

"Do you like Friends?"

"Not really."

"Why are we watching it?"

"Good question."

Fortunately that habit did not take for long, but my guess is that many of the time-starved folks who are glued to their television sets (does anyone call them "sets" any more? It used to be a stock feature of the fear of urban crime: some youth running down the street with a television set under his arm. I remember talking to a cop on a rainy day. I asked him if crime went down when the weather was bad. "Sure," said he, "no one is going to go running through the mud with a television set under his arm." Now they are just TV's or televisions. What happened to the set? I guess it got stolen...except that it is still ON! Perhaps they regressed to Games or progressed to Matches. Sitting down with a frozen dinner in front of the Television Match sounds like some Japanese inspired reality craze) don't even like the dreck that they watch incessantly.

Did you see that episode when Erik went completely ballistic and threw his risotto spoon at a television set?

No, I was busy running down the street with my neighbor's television set under my arm.

Oh yeah. I saw that show back in the 70's. Scary. We moved out to the suburbs.

Posted by erik at November 3, 2005 11:18 AM