Growing up, the only things I knew how to cook were boxed mac & cheese and what we called “casserole”: noodles, peas, tuna, and cream of mushroom soup (we didn’t even bake it, just mixed it in a pot). I don’t really even remember what my mom cooked for dinners, except for spaghetti, plus vague memories of liver and onions. And Sunday night was waffle night (Dad cooked).
College was dorm living and cafeteria eating, for the most part.
When I got to grad school, I acquired the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. I made a lot of their chicken dishes (chicken legs — the chicken breast, at the time, was much more expensive), and a lot of Hamburger Helper.
And after leaving grad school and getting married, Hamburger Helper remained a mainstay, along with chili-mac (yes, boxed mac & cheese with a can of chili), and boxed noodle dishes with peas and maybe a can of chicken or tuna. After we had kids, and they started eating real food, I wasn’t above making a plate of chicken nuggets to go with the boxed noodles, or with mac & cheese as a side.
During our stint in Germany, they didn’t have Hamburger Helper, and the mac & cheese was imported and triple the price, but they had, even better, sauce packets of all kinds — just add noodles and meat, and a few other ingredients. Large quantities of the meals I made came from these packets.
It’s not that I couldn’t cook. It’s that I didn’t have a feel for what kinds of things I could actually make (along with the limitations of a baby or toddler and the time limit that maybe one episode of Bob the Builder is fine to get dinner ready, but not a second one).
Oh, and for quite some time, there was a Boston Market on the way home from work, a convenient solution to mealtime woes.
So finally, upon returning back from Germany six years ago, I got into the practice of going to the library, checking out cookbooks, photocopying the recipes that looked good, and trying out such appliances as the crock-pot (not too many things that truly cook all day, but useful when I worked at home or could prep something during the baby’s nap), the Foreman grill (very convenient for tossing some marinated-the-night-before meat on for a quick dinner), the rice cooker, etc.
And — well, I do OK. It helps that my husband isn’t a gourmand; the aforementioned crock-pot round steak with mushroom gravy (cut the steak into pieces, add a packet of dry onion soup mix and a can of cream of mushroom soup and a 1/2 cup water, crock for something like 8+ hours, serve over mashed potatoes) is one of his favorites. The kids are picky, but that’s their own tough luck. And most of our meals center around “what meat do I have in the freezer, and how can I prepare it?” with vegetables a bare afterthought. I try to have a meal plan in mind when I go grocery shopping, but sometimes I just make it up as I go along during the week, and there’s always pasta with smoked sausage and frozen veggies with jarred cheese sauce as a back-up. But in any case, I’ve gotten to the point where I can put something reasonable on the table, reasonably fast.
So — see, now I’m finally getting to my point! — when I read about families where they simply don’t eat at home, or depend on carry-out, this is what I think:
1) Come on — are there really substantial numbers of non-cooking families out there?
2) Cooking isn’t that hard. Really, it’s not, if your standards aren’t too high and you’re willing to eat the flops that happen every now and again, or, in the case of something really awful, pull the chicken nuggets out of the freezer.
3) On the other hand, it took me quite a long time to progress beyond Hamburger Helper. (And my husband freely admits that, if he were in charge of the cooking, he’d be getting Chinese takeout a lot more frequently. Yes, we have ended up with the same division-of-labor that we rejected pre-children.)
4) Learning to cook ought to happen as a child/teenager. But I admit that I’m afraid to let my middle son anywhere near a knife, even though he’s interested. (Maybe it’s the scar I still have from when my mom taught me to cut up an apple at about his age.) My oldest is entering high school next year, so in principle that ought to be the right age. But then, for a typical middle-class kid, it’s off to college, land of cafeterias and ramen noodles — until the next generation repeats the same mid-adulthood self-teaching.
5) But, let’s face it, this 21st-century business of marrying and starting a family late, if at all, and having a long gap in-between where a young person is removed from family life, is hardly conducive to being able to cook — and cooking for a family is quite different than cooking for oneself, as I can see with my unmarried sister.
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