Okay, I am a bit of a hypocrite. I confess that I really like convenience foods. I use them. My kids love them. But, have we gone too far? For instance, my last post discussed a Pecan Pie Cake. Sounds delicious! It turns out I didn't have time to make it...nor the money. A bag of pecans from a discount shopping center was $8! Paco had a fit. (I would have also needed to buy dark brown sugar, light corn syrup and something else - also a mixer becuase mine broke.) I ended up buying a mix to make pecan bars - just add water and butter. They were delicious. I also bought a chocolate peanut butter bar mix - just add water! Now, the second purchase turned out to be a very good idea because I forgot for the millionth time in our friendship that our hostess doesn't like nuts. But, finally, here is my point: how many of us bother to make things from scratch anymore? The pecan bars were a huge hit. Paco and our host raved about them. I would bet that it wouldn't have made a difference if I had slaved for 3 hours versus the 15 minutes it took to make them.
Please keep in mind, I can think of a few people that would absolutely appreciate home-made items. My sister Marsha, for instance. Or, even my mother. However, for the most part, people just don't care anymore. If you added eggs and water, that's enough to make it home-made rather than store bought.
So, here's the question...is it really enough to add two or three ingredients to make it your own?
1 comment:
Holy moly! This is such a huge issue and something I'm getting ready to discuss. I just read a book called "Made from Scratch" that includes an rumination on what, exactly, can be called cooking (vs. assembling or merely adding a few ingredients and heat) or, more specifically, cooking from scratch.
I'm sure that the pecan bars were great - they sound yums. I wonder, though, if anyone who ate them had ever eaten a "scratch" equiv. to even know what they might have been missing.
In any case, in addition to taste I take issue with ingredients lists that read more like one of our high school chemistry experiments than food and with advertisements that tell kids that a certain brand of canned soup is "better than homemade".
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