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Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Quotable

Last week I mentioned a book that I had received and was starting to read called An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler. I'm still only about half way through but there are some amazing things that I'm learning that I felt needed to be shared. I am completely in love with the way she speaks about food, and her philosophy on cooking.


If we are to weed, today, through all the advice for how to eat better, and choose what we ourselves feel most able and like best to do, we must regain our faith that cooking can be advantageous, something that helps eating well make sense. 


[This book] doesn't contain "perfect" or "professional" ways to do anything, because we don't need to be professionals to cook well, any more than we need to be doctors to treat bruises and scrapes: we don't need to shop like chefs or cook like chefs; we need to shop and cook like people learning to cook, like what we are- people who are hungry.


Resources for simple cooking often do more harm than good. A fast-and-easy cooking magazine I picked up recently seemed contrived to scare its readers off. The magazines advertised recipes for "boil-and-toss pastas" and "last-minute omelets" ... ALL pasta is "boil and toss". A lot of perfectly wonderful meals are "boil" alone. You don't need a shortcut for either, but to reserve the three dollars you might have spent on the magazine and use it for buying salt and decent olive oil ... There is plain deceit in hawking "last minute" omelets. Omelets happen almost instantly, no matter what you do to speed them up or slow them down. Suggesting there are special "last-minute" ones is akin to selling tips for breathing air more rapidly- if you have an egg, you have a meal that needs but a quick tap to be cracked open. 


I can't wait to finish reading, and then read this again and again! Or maybe I'll let you borrow it haha

3 comments:

  1. I might have to check that book out and add it to my never ending to-read stack.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's is an intersting perspective! Maybe I'll have to give that book a try, too.

    ReplyDelete

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