
Make Dinner: A Home Cooking Manifesto - jcater
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/dining/just-make-dinner-a-manifesto-for-home-cooking.html
======
nogridbag
"The mission: to make each one of us a better cook."

I'm sure this website will help some people, but definitely not me. When I
first started cooking, I wanted to start at step 1. But sites like these
simply throw recipes at you without teaching you the techniques first. There's
a tips section, but it's not connected to the recipes at all.

Luckily, I found Rouxbe.com a couple of years ago. I liked it so much I bought
a lifetime membership (no longer offered). If your personality is like mine
and you want to know explicitly how and why things should be done, I
definitely recommend Rouxbe. For example, when learning how to pan fry, you're
first taught how to properly heat a pan, what sounds to listen to when pan
frying, how to adjust the temperature, what type and size pan to buy, etc. And
of course there's a user forum with professionals to answer any dumb questions
you might have.

------
zemvpferreira
A pan-roasted spatchcocked chicken is one of my favourite easy meals, it's
rewarding to see it glorified in the NY Times. However, I'm a bit disappointed
they'd use it to sell us on a 16,000 recipe database.

Is it really helpful to have 44 years worth of different dinners on your iPad?
Isn't a simple and malleable classic like the chicken dish proof that all you
need to get by are a handful of recipes and the skill to play with them?

(disclosure: I'm the founder of a home cooking tech startup, and biased
against the recipe-library approach)

~~~
ghaff
Personally, I like having the NYT equivalent of Epicurious on my iPad. But I
don't necessarily disagree with your basic point. The 16K NYT recipe database
is somewhat at odds with a KISS philosophy around cooking quick tasty weekday
meals.

------
jasode
>It is a habit as easy to form as a bad one, and more beneficial by far.

>...

>Demonstrably it is more pleasant than a microwaved stew or takeout curry or a
pizza delivered from miles away. Cheaper, too.

It's not "easy" or "more pleasant" if you're stressed for time.

Most of the article's paragaphs focus on _techniques_ or _process_. It's as if
they assume the reader is afraid of pots & pans. Or they think the complexity
of combining ingredients paralyzes the reader with PTSD from high school
chemistry exams.

The main roadblock isn't ignorance of techniques or lack of recipes. (Those
are available with a few clicks of youtube or google.) The issue is _available
time_.

We can read these cooking manifestos and all nod in agreement because the
benefits make logical sense but the real issue is that the cookbooks and
essays don't magically conjure up a nanny to pick up our kid from daycare so
we can multitask the chopping of veggies and stir the tomato sauce. Or we're
young unmarried 20-something and we're working 60+ hours a week to meet a
deadline with no time slot to cook from scratch. (Sounds like those google
catered meals makes a lot of sense for programmer productivity.)

By my personal estimates, home cooking requires 4x to 5x more time than
ordering prepared meals (fast food or Whole Foods deli takeout.) It takes a
significant amount of time to home cook even if you stick to those simple
"cook in 30 minutes" type of meals. (Those 30 minute estimates never include
shopping, meal planning, prep, and cleanup.)

One strategy to compromise between time and convenience is to cook a bulk
supply of a meal (say big pot of quinoa) on Sunday and then eat it as
leftovers for the rest of the week. It's a great idea to batch the prep &
cleanup on Sunday and leave Monday-Saturday simply as microwave reheating
days. The problem with that is many folks are turned off by eating the same
thing every day.

Perhaps with all this trend around "sharing economy" like Uber, a web service
can bring together the folks who have time to cook with the folks who don't
that all live within very close proximity to each other. A web 2.0
manifestation of comparative advantage in economics. A handful of "home chefs"
in the apt or condo complex shops and makes the meals while others pay for
their portion. This may not work for suburban neighborhoods because getting in
a car or walking 10 blocks can be too much friction (distance, raining, etc).

~~~
peterwwillis
Put pasta in a pan, fill it with water, put it on the stove on high heat. Put
pasta sauce in a pot, put it on the stove on low-medium heat. Take out some
ground meat and throw it in a second pan, put it on the stove on high heat.
Put salt and pepper in the meat pan and stir it around with a wooden stick.
When the meat is cooked, put it in the pot. When the pasta water boils, drain
it and put the pasta in the sauce pot. Stir. Done.

You can replace ingredients in dishes like that for variety, like tofu for
meat, cream of mushroom soup for tomato sauce, rice for pasta ('Minute' rice
cooks in 5). But like you say, it's not about recipes, as you can find
thousands of these online.

Time is an excuse. You have the time. Everybody has the time. Everybody has 10
minutes they can spend to make some food to eat. I don't care how many
responsibilities you have, how long you work, how little you sleep, what you
do with your free time, none of that. You have 10 minutes. Cook something.

~~~
istjohn
That's absurd. I heard somewhere that Obama doesn't choose what he eats. He
makes incredibly important decisions all day, every day. He can't be bothered
to worry about what he's going to eat. Not many of us can make meaningful
comparisons between our day-to-day and that of the POTUS, but I certainly envy
the convenience of having my meals chosen for me. Cooking requires making a
number of additional decisions. You suggest finding a recipe online. OK, well
it will probably require ingredients that I don't have. Finding a satisfactory
solution to the problem of choosing a recipe that maximizes tastiness and
health, while minimizing grocery shopping and cooking hassle takes at least
ten minutes for me. Inevitably, I need to buy four or five ingredients. Using
up the leftover ingredients will further complicate future meal choices.
Furthermore, cooking requires planning ahead of time unless you want to make a
(10 minute minimum) trip to the store every day. So now I have to set aside
2-3 hours every week to make a meal plan, write a shopping list, and buy
ingredients? Add an hour or more if you are not lucky enough to have a grocery
store near your daily commute. And now I need cabinet and refrigerator space
for all this and counter space to prepare the meal on.

Cooking's easy for you. Congratulations! It's not for me. You are out of touch
with what day-to-day life is like for a huge swath of folks.

~~~
peterwwillis
You are intimidated by something you don't understand, which is normal. But
nothing is easy until you learn how to do it. You're intelligent, and just as
capable of doing these things as anyone else. Are you going to walk around
your whole life tripping over your shoelaces because learning how to tie them
seems hard?

~~~
istjohn
How condescending. I can cook. You vastly understate the tangible and
intangible costs of home cooking.

------
jckt
Happy to see a cooking thing instead of a Soylent thing on HN (but to each
their own). An article in similar spirit, but more focused on _why_ you should
consider cooking at home, rather than how you would go about doing so:

[https://medium.com/lucky-peach/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-
kn...](https://medium.com/lucky-peach/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-
it-c9a0c05b243d)

------
philbarr
The problem with any of these things is that they're just recipes. What we
really need is something that deconstructs cooking skills into easily learnt,
repeatable practices.

It's like with the very recipe here - it's supposed to be for novice cooks, or
those that never cook at home, to encourage them into home cooking, but at one
point the recipe says:

"When the chicken has cooked through, take it out of the pan and pour off all
but a couple of tablespoons of the fat in the pan, and make a quick gravy."

Novice cook thinks:

\- how do I know when the chicken has cooked through?

\- which bit is the fat?

\- how do I make a "quick gravy"?

Instead, they should have created a "beginner's spatchcocked chicken" where
you learn all of the principles of just that one thing, maybe you also learn
how to make mash potato out of a packet or oven fries. Then "level 2" would go
on to the gravy. And so on...

It's frustrating, as someone who is interested in cooking and is trying to
learn, that there are a million and one recipes out there, but very few things
that teach first principles. For example:

\- how to properly season something (how do you know how much salt and pepper
to put on)

\- knife handling and care

\- classic flavour combinations

\- preperation of all meats, veg, fruits

\- what you should always have in your kitchen (stock, garlic, chilli, etc.)

This is to name just a few. These million and one recipes just end up with you
buying a bunch of herbs and spices you use once, then taking ages over
preparing and washing up after; and some of them are basically the same with
minor variations.

~~~
munificent
I agree completely. The article's principle is great, but the specific recipe
they describe is a disaster waiting for happen for a newcomer.

I found chicken to be the hardest meat to learn to cook: underdo it and you
have salmonella, overdo it and it's cardboard. A well-cooked chicken is a
delight, but it's a pretty narrow range. I found beef and fish to be much less
scary meats as a novice since undercooking them is less of a risk. You can't
undercook salmon, you can just end up with surprise sushi.

Likewise, I _love_ making rouxs, but it took a number of tries before I had an
intuition of the cook time/temp before and after adding the fat.

> \- how to properly season something (how do you know how much salt and
> pepper to put on)

It's hard to have precise rules for that because every piece of food is
different. Chickens aren't made in a factory (yet), so each bird will be a bit
bigger or smaller. You kind of just have to learn it by taste and practice.

> \- knife handling and care

I find youtube videos are really great for technique. Just search for "how to
chop/prepare <ingredient>". I can cut a bunch of fruits, vegetables, and
animals now with confidence.

Taking care of knives is harder. Video doesn't do a good job of showing
tactile details like how much force to use on a honing rod.

> \- classic flavour combinations

What I do whenever I'm in the mood for something is look up a bunch of recipes
for it. If you compare them all, you can kind of get a feel for the ur-recipe
that underlies them. Look at a few of those and you'll quickly get a feel for
what things go together.

> \- what you should always have in your kitchen (stock, garlic, chilli, etc.)

This depends a lot on what cuisines you favor. I think the absolute basics are
salt, pepper, oil, butter, flour, and a few aliums (garlic, onion, green
onion, etc.). If you have those, you can take damn near any vegetable, throw
it in a skillet, and sauté up something tasty.

I'm always surprised by how far "add to pan on medium heat with butter, salt,
pepper, and garlic" gets you.

------
ghaff
I really like the idea. It seemed an odd recipe to start with though. "Ask the
butcher to take out the backbone if you’re nervous about doing that yourself."
No it's not hard; it would take me a minute or two with my _poultry shears_.
The NYT has a great back-catalog of recipes but I thought this intro did a
poor job of persuading non-cooks that this is almost as easy as getting
takeout. (And, truth be told, a lot of cooking will take more time than
takeout when you factor in planning, shopping, and cleaning--even if you keep
things relatively simple.)

------
LesZedCB
I think this is great! My only comment is I wish that the first example was
something where meat wasn't the centerpiece. As a culture, we already consume
so much more meat than is sustainable, maybe a good home cooked meal where a
grain and some vegetables are the centerpiece might encourage fixing that
problem, as well as being all around easier to cook!

------
pbreit
I sort of like the idea but it still seems too complicated for the mere
mortal.

How about the 100 best, simplest ingredients, easiest to cook?

~~~
tptacek
What do you see as complicated about this dish?

~~~
pbreit
I guess it's not that complicated but the whole chicken and large (preferably
cast iron) pan threw me off. Serving a whole chicken strikes me as a rare
occasion at most US dining tables (vs boneless breast, etc).

~~~
tptacek
It really shouldn't be. Whole chickens are one of the most cost effective
proteins you can work with, and they're not at all difficult. They're a much
better option than packaged boneless chicken breasts.

------
hungy4pies
Regarding meal planning: this one calculates the nutritional information and
provides an estimated price for each day, helps put everything in perspective
[https://spoonacular.com/weekly-meal-planner](https://spoonacular.com/weekly-
meal-planner)

------
recalibrator
Flagged for spam. I don't care if it's the New York Times or not. What does
this have to do with anything?

~~~
tptacek
I upvoted this. It's not spam; it's a recipe and a call to action.

~~~
recalibrator
It's a fluff piece.

~~~
tptacek
That's a much more subjective judgement than "spam". Meanwhile: I took a note
to go cook a spatchcocked chicken under a weighted plate this week, so it
didn't set my "fluff" detector off at all. And I cook 5 nights a week.

Here, though: if you though that piece was fluffy, I'll give you an antidote.
The single best cooking video on the Internet:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAekQ5fzfGM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAekQ5fzfGM)

~~~
selmnoo
I'm not sure about the 'best' qualification. That's way too complicated, not
many people have the patience to learn and the time to do all of that. Just
buy the chicken from the store cut up (and, I don't know about you guys, but
where I shop, I can get the meat guy to cut anything up for me for free...). A
lot of times machines are doing this stuff anyway, so cut up meat is pretty
affordable. I particularly don't like cutting up my own meat because my hands
up smelling weird, I have to clean up and wash the cutting boards, knives,
etc. quickly (or else they start stinking up very soon), etc.

~~~
tptacek
This video isn't "how to cut up a chicken".

~~~
selmnoo
Here's a video on how to cup up a chicken:
[http://www.nytimes.com/video/dining/100000002155362/cutting-...](http://www.nytimes.com/video/dining/100000002155362/cutting-
up-a-whole-chicken.html)

The great thing is you can make chicken stock with it. Add the chicken stock
to the pilaf rice you're making, which goes great with the chicken!

