AND: Trying to calculate how much money you'd save if you cooked at home. There are too many variables, I think, but: "Over 10 years, the average meal out costs about $15 with time and labor costs included versus $13 without. Compare that to $9 and $4 for home-cooked food. This means that cooking for yourself saves about $6 per person every meal when you count time and labor costs. Excluding time and labor costs, the savings is even greater at $11 per person per meal."
Here's an infographic highlighting how much better you'd eat and how much money you'd save if you ate at home, even where the chosen restaurant is a very inexpensive one.
Here's "A restaurant chef's advice to his sons: Cook at home most of the time":
I have three sons. When my oldest son was getting ready to leave home for college, that last summer that he was home with us he said, “Let's go over some of the dishes that we love to cook at home.” We went over our canon of dishes -- different pastas, roasted chicken, braised duck, mashed potatoes, polenta -- the things that are comfort food, the things we really love to cook. He just felt like he needed a remedial moment for that summer to go over them. We did that and we had a great time.Here's his "booklet" — "12 Recipes."
He left, then the phone calls started to come in: Does the chicken go with the breast side up or down when you're roasting it? What were the ingredients in that pasta with the cauliflower? How hot do you turn the oven?
I was happy to talk to him of course. I was really happy that he was actually cooking. But I felt like, "I will put together a booklet for you. I'll just make a little family cookbook, a little binder of recipes, from father to son."
ALSO: That "booklet" highly praised as a set of essays about cooking and family life, and it's said to inspire into giving similar help to your own children when they leave home. I remember when I first needed to learn to cook, back around 1971. I used — God help me — "Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit" by Adelle Davis.
I think I still have that fiendish thing! Somewhere, on some shelf, reminding me I need to finish my Marie Kondo-style decluttering because it does not spark joy.
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68 comments:
What in this content-free article attracted your attention?
Duh. You want the express lane to obesity? Dine out every night. It's as bad as eating prepared foods at home.
And $27 for 12 stinkin' recipes??? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
There are quite a few things that perturb me but what people think about restaurant food doesn't make the list. Maybe I'd feel different if my parents had purchased that Tuscany farm house.
"What in this content-free article attracted your attention?"
I was searching the proposition restaurant food is worse than home-cooked food. I'm interested in whether that's true, why it would be true, etc.
But I supposed I should move on to the real question that concerns us: What is Donald Trump doing now?
Braised duck is a canon dish?
Megan McArdle does this, too. She likes to cook, so an easy-peasy recipe for her is a complicated gobbledy-gook for those of us who don't. When you don't like to cook you end up buying a bulk box of frozen taquitos and a salad kit for dinner. Cheaper than restaurant food, but not more nutritious or delicious. And if you're a foodie, you're pretty tired of the chef-shaming.
"And $27 for 12 stinkin' recipes??? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it."
It doesn't say $27 when I click on it. So... you're really outing yourself as a troll. Is that what you want?
One thing I like about 12 recipes is that you might really make all 12 and if you did, you'd have a full repertoire. It happens to be his family's home cooking, so it's interesting to see that and maybe try to think of your own equivalent.
Most cookbooks have many more recipes, but I think studies have shown that when people buy cookbooks, they only make approximately ONE thing in it.
I love duck, but I almost never get it -- not in a restaurant and not at home. And the reason is, you've got to competently deal with that layer of fat. That's what could make it great but is likely to end us leaving it disgusting. Really learning to make the duck that you want, the duck of your dreams, is very valuable.
It is actually $14 for the "stinkin' recipes".
So agree with this post and its sentiments. It is such a tragedy that so many people - men and women - don't know how to cook at home. It has become almost second nature for people to eat out or to order a take-out.
We continue to teach our teenagers to cook meals. The recipes have been written down carefully. Another set of recipes is being prepared that covers the immediate family - brothers and sisters. Hopefully, it will make a difference to our kids.
Thanks for sharing the post.
But I supposed I should move on to the real question that concerns us: What is Donald Trump doing now?
We could talk about Hillary. Is she still running?
Ann Althouse said...
One thing I like about 12 recipes is that you might really make all 12 and if you did, you'd have a full repertoire. It happens to be his family's home cooking, so it's interesting to see that and maybe try to think of your own equivalent.
Most cookbooks have many more recipes, but I think studies have shown that when people buy cookbooks, they only make approximately ONE thing in it.
This is why Mrs. Tank has 500 cook books.
Luckily, she is a great cook, so she can buy as many as she wants. If there were no internet, she'd have 1,000.
I've actually never had duck. I come from people who made spiedies as a signature dish; my husband's people throw a lobster in a pot on special occasions.
I once went to a meeting with a very overweight friend. For dinner she wanted to pop into McDonalds. I convinced her to try a cafe-style jerk chicken place. Her face! She'd never eaten anything like that in her life and wouldn't have tried it if I hadn't pushed.
So, I suppose if you want someone to cook something at home, first they have to be forced to taste it and like it in a restaurant.
What happened to the Fannie Farmer Cookbook
You can cook spaghetti in a rice cooker, the only puzzle being how to keep the stuff from sticking to the bottom of the pot in small amounts, which seems like it ought to be possible by adding oil or butter.
Rice sticks too, but you expect that.
Let it soak overnight and it all comes loose, the spaghetti more than the rice.
The rice cooker offers the opportunity to steam veggies above it, is the advantage.
Hey, duck is easy to deal with. Made roast duck with noodles again last week. Recipe from pack for duck breasts works perfectly:
Place skin side down in a cold non stick pan on a medium heat without oil for 6-8 minutes or until golden brown. Pour off the fat regularly and seal the other side for 30 seconds. Place them skin side up on a rack in a roasting tin in the middle of the oven.
Rare - 10 minutes
Medium - 15 minutes
Well Done - 18 minutes
When the duck is cooked rest in a warm place for 10 minutes. Slice as thick or thin as needed.
The fat literally pours out during the pan-frying stage.
Try french-bread with layer of duck slices with favorite fillings. Yum!
I used to eat at Bob Evans but haven't been to a restaurant in 15 years, even for coffee.
I get what I want at home. Most things I share with the dog, if they're not bad for dogs. A curiously large number of ordinary foods are.
That makes all meals occasions to the dog.
The dog can distinguish different wrapper sounds from the next room and is instantly there if it's a food I share, and not if it's not.
There's one theory that it's scent that the dog is distinguishing, difficult to test because scent travels at infinite speed according to the diffusion equation albeit in infinitely small amounts, but is probably limited to sound speed or so. But it seems not to be scent. It's way too fast for the distance.
If offered a cup of plain yogurt with a milkbone stuck in it, the dog eats around the milkbone until the yogurt is gone. Apparently it's two meals to a dog, not one.
I never cook. I go out to dinner, don't eat dinner, or order take out.
The take out options near me are divine dolls.
tits
Savoring is not a dog thing. The best most succulent meat is gobbled down with the same speed as anything else.
The most exciting meal of the day for the dog is rice chicken and peas. This is bounce off front legs impatience to put down exciting. Other foods merely attract intense interest expressions.
It's not clear how a restaurant experience could work for a dog. My dinner with Rex.
"Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit"
I read that book in 1970 and remember where I was living at the time. She died just a few years later and didn't lived to a very advanced age.
Admittedly we come from a New Orleans & French food tradition We eat better at home without cookbooks. It is always cheaper too
I am at the point where I really need to not eat out. We were in Kalispell last weekend, and I ran out Fri and Sat nights to pick up restaraunt food for my partner. She is a great cook. Very inventive. Partly it was hanging around the kitchen with her French grandmother. And partially, it was having to been married to a classically trained chef. If he had lived, I have little doubt that they would have had a successful restaraunt. But, now, we mostly eat salads. Beautiful salads, but salads none the less. Essentially lettuce, a lot of different beans, she gets peas, chicken or tuna, different cheeses, and some salad dressing. Done artistically, of course, but also mixing everything pretty well, so I don't eat the meat first. Then 20 minutes of visual appreciation, followed by 10 minutes with my nose. Then we can eat. I am apparently being trained to appreciate good food. When we cook something more interesting, she spends the time trying to teach me the basics. Why things are cooked in the order they are. Why you use this pot or skillet for this or that. Why you don't wash it out, etc. The guy who owned the place we stayed last weekend raises elk and bison, so we had to buy a bunch of both. Amazingly, 30 summers in MT, and she has never tasted elk (but loves to cook with bison). Expect it will stay in the freezer for a bit though, like the beef her ex drops off that was grass fed at the farm next door. As usual, her eyes are bigger than her (and my now) stomach. She is looking forward to her kids and grandkids spending a week here this fall so she can cook for people who eat more than salads.
Funny thing is that she learned her love of cooking with that grandmother. And then sheraised two daughters who had little interest in cooking, so spent as little time as possible in the kitchen growing up. Sons were better. The son coming up uses a lot of her lessons when he barbecues, but doesn't get to cook in the kitchen that much. Of course, I can't barbecue either, which was the root of our first fight, nearing 20 years ago now. She made some of her signature bison and pork meat burgers (guy this weekend that led her that he uses olive oil to keep the bison meat together) and expected me to cook them on the grill. Good luck there. Between us, most ended up in the coals. Old enough for Medicare now, I have never learned that skill. And really have no intention of doing so. She keeps trying though.
Oh neat. This is my wheelhouse!
I love to cook but I also love recipes, cookbooks, cooking essays, old church cookbooks, the booklet of recipes that came with your electric skillet that your mom bought in 1958....I love thinking about how people communicate about food, especially across time and space.
To that end part of what I consider my (very humble) life's work is testing recipes for my family and recording the keepers for posterity. I rewrite everything according to my own style and editing guidelines and maintain a database of my recipes. I have the requisite 3-ring binder/page protector/scrapbook paper cover setup but it's not a bunch of magazine rip-outs--it's beautiful; orderly; carefully curated and constantly updated. Yesterday I made spiced pecans for the millionth time and decided I wanted to slightly re-write the directions for step 4, so I did, and replaced the recipe in my binder.
This summer one of our projects was to make my older kids (14, 12, 10) their own recipe binders. They designed their own covers then went through the files and printed everything they wanted in their own books. This is a head start on their lifetime recipe books, and also enables them to cook my dishes when they're at their dad's (we're divorced) which I believe brings them a sense of comfort. They all love to cook with me and I look forward to many happy years of same, including the phone calls where they ask my kitchen advice.
It's also important to put in the time learning to follow recipes and gaining experience so that you can put together a meal without recipes. I try to teach them that, and it's also why I include recipes (or in other words written instructions) in my girls' books that I obviously don't need a recipe for.
It's very enjoyable to hit that point in your home-cooking life where you've been doing it long enough that you usually read recipes for inspiration only and also that you can see lovely ingredients and know what to do with them without consulting the authorities.
@I Have Misplaced My Pants
Lovely and wonderful. As you imply, a recipe is a living thing. Improve it each time to suit you and your family.
Donald Trump was across the lake. He seems to think he can win New York.
The duck of my dreams = duck ragu, every fall, made from duck leg quarters with sofrito, tomato paste, and roasted red peppers. I crosshatch the skin on the leg quarters, brown them well, and use the rendered fat to cook the vegetables with. Most of the fat remains with the skin, which I remove and render later for another use. Many dishes are improved with a tablespoon of duck fat.
"rice cooker"
A Chamorro acquaintance on Guam once told me, "You can cook anything in a rice cooker. Rice, soup, vegetables, Spam, hot dogs,..."
Paco Wové said...
"rice cooker"
A Chamorro acquaintance on Guam once told me, "You can cook anything in a rice cooker. Rice, soup, vegetables, Spam, hot dogs,..."
You can cook anything in a crock-pot too.
I do a lot of crock pot stuff.
Some foods can be prepared better at home. Italian dishes are generally better, and anyone can make a better hamburger than McDonalds. But Chinese and BBQ should not be attempted at home. You can limit weight gain in BBQ places by forgoing the fries. Sadly, there is no known way of eating chow fun or egg foo young dishes without getting fat...... Gravy, gravity, weight gain--they're all interconnected in a plot to drive you crazy. You can be fit or you can eat well. You can't do both.
I live in a place that has generally crappy restaurants. So it's pretty easy to eat at home.
It is such a tragedy that so many people - men and women - don't know how to cook at home.
Why? We're all working, well, except those who sit on their asses all day living off the rest of us who are. When our economy could sustain one worker and one who stayed home, we could cook at home. High taxes and high cost of living have made it nearly impossible for that to happen anymore. Personally, I blame feminism.
The market has just adjusted to the demand that exists, even though that demand is artificially inflated by government. Gee, that's an old story, isn't it?
"Blogger Ann Althouse said...
I love duck, but I almost never get it -- not in a restaurant and not at home. And the reason is, you've got to competently deal with that layer of fat. That's what could make it great but is likely to end us leaving it disgusting. Really learning to make the duck that you want, the duck of your dreams, is very valuable."
I get it at fine restaurants that offer it any chance I get. They generally know how to cook it properly. I haven't even tried it at home. Hard to find at the market and I don't want to waste time and money perfecting it.
As to the return on cooking at home, I think it is underestimated. The marginal cost of a high quality restaurant meal is more than what is stated. The cost difference goes down as you move toward prepackaged options. For example, the dollar meals at McDonalds would have a much lower marginal cost over the home version.
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
But I supposed I should move on to the real question that concerns us: What is Donald Trump doing now?
8/5/16, 7:20 AM
Right now, Donald Trump is making love to a beautiful woman.
Ann, if you really want to get rid of "Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit," send it to me. I was trying to buy a copy a few years ago and had trouble finding it.
My mom read the Adele Davis book and incorporated many of the lessons into her meal preparation/planning. But Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer was her bible. And her bible has a prominent place on my bookshelf - I refer to it frequently. Looks like it is out of print now.
rhhardin said...
Another advantage to cooking pasta in a rice cooker - you don't fill your house with hot, moist air. Even with our stove exhaust fan on, an open pot of boiling water renders the living room uninhabitable in the summer for a good hour.
Learn a few good dishes, be on the lookout for more (probably my only interest in going to a restaurant these days), and enjoy the food and wine with family and friends. The really BIG savings in eating at home is in alcoholic beverages. It can be 10-1 or more.
My mother was a fabulous cook. She followed recipes, mostly hand written, but seldom measured anything except by the "handful" or "a touch" or "a bit," etc. My wife is also an outstanding cook, but she's a mathematician, so extremely anal, and she needs to know precise measurements. Since she lived with us at the time, I asked my 97 year-old mother to teach my wife how to make some of the dishes (biscuits, chicken and dumplings, coconut cake, pecan pie were the top four for me) so my wife could keep the recipes alive. Yuge mistake. My mother would just take a handful of of this, a quarter handful of that, cut off a slice of something else and have the whole thing mixed and ready to go in the oven while my wife was still trying to convert my mothers "hands" to the metric system. My mother would also change the recipe slightly everytime she made something, so it was never exactly the same. And, her "handfuls" would vary by how many were required - one handful was usually a closed fist, while multiple handfuls were often "clawfuls." Drove my wife crazy, and she never really got any of mother's recipes properly duplicated. Most were close, but while close is usually good enough for an engineer like me, it isn't nealy accurate enough for a mathematician. I did eventually learn to respond affirmatively when my wife asked me if the so-and-so she made was as good as my mother's because it really was good enough. The other thing I learned was that a happy home needed to have the same number of kitchens as adult females residing therein since they just don't share cooking space all that well. But, we still miss you every day, Mom.
When your wife is the best cook on the planet why go out?
I just wish she'd pass some of her skills on to all her young cousins.
If you just buy duck breasts, duck is easy.
Method 1: Put a cast iron pan on medium to medium low heat. Put the very cold duck breast in the pan fat side down. Render the fat from the skin, removing the fat as it renders. Some people are really careful about this and remove it with a paper towel. In any event, make sure you never let liquid fat come up to the level of the meat. You should be able to get the skin very crispy and render exactly the amount of fat you want while keeping the meat raw. Once you are at that stage, you simply turn up the heat, season the duck, and cook the duck breast as you would a steak.
Method 2: If you have a sous vide setup it's easy to get the internal cooking perfect. You can take the trouble to season the breast before vacuum sealing them, but the ones I buy come vacuum-packed, so I just throw them in the water bath at 135 for an hour. (135 is medium rare.) If they are frozen, I throw them into the bath during the heating process and wait two hours. Remove, pat dry, season, do the same rendering trick as above a little quicker - at a higher temp. Flip to crisp the meat side in the last minute.
My sister-in-law is an incredible cook. My brother is also a pretty good cook. She and my brother don't eat out very much, because for the most part they get better food at home than at a restaurant. Having eaten at their table, I agree.
I liked jaydub's story about different cooking styles.
Adelle Davis advocated adding dried milk to just about everything, if I remember correctly. I also had that book.
They had told us for many years how saturated fats were bad, so we ate margarine instead of butter only to be told later how much more dangerous margarine was than butter. Best advice: Eat real food and ignore the experts. Just as with child rearing, experts don't know shit!
Bruce Hayden
Amazingly, 30 summers in MT, and she has never tasted elk (but loves to cook with bison).
Bison is readily available in grocery stores.
My Montana cousins eat a lot of elk, courtesy of their hunting skills. I suspect that if you are not a hunter, your access to elk will come from the freezer of a hunter.
Relatively few people like cooking. Even fewer are actually consistently good at it. Throw in ethnic foods and the chances of getting it done right at home are even slimmer. There is a reason restaurants exist.
If a dish takes a long time to cook and then has a short window of perfection, it's better at home. Roast chicken is the classic for this.
On the other hand, one reason you see so many fried foods at restaurants is that they can do it so much better and more cheaply than you can at home. Their fryers hold temperature more precisely than I can on the stove top, and they have filters to clean the oil after every batch of things like chicken.
When our economy could sustain one worker and one who stayed home, we could cook at home.
I have always cooked for myself and I have worked most of my adult life. It takes a lot more time (and money) to go out than it does to prepare a simple meal. The key is to keep your kitchen stocked with staples. It takes some thought and preparation, but after that, it's a lot easier to cook than to leave the house for 90 minutes and give someone else your hard-earned money.
I don't cook every night, but on weekends, I make big batches of stuff and freeze it. My husband and I go out to eat maybe once or twice a month. We eat very, very well.
When our economy could sustain one worker and one who stayed home, we could cook at home.
It's still possible.
Imagine how much money a family can save by making everything at home, gas, commuting costs, and child care. We only eat out on Fridays and usually it's Little Caesar's pizza, which my kids love. Spouse and I believe we can make things at home better than most restaurants. America's Test Kitchen is wonderful.
Several years ago, my wife and son got me a grill for Father's Day. A nice, four-burner gas grill, with built-in thermometer, elevated rack, and side-burner for, well... sides. I've gotten pretty good at the basics—steak, chicken, asparagus and potatoes up on the rack—but I've always really been interested in BBQ, so for my birthday I got a couple of really nice books on Memphis-style BBQ to go with another great grilling book I found back in the day when we actually browsed bookstores. So to enable pursuit of that, I bought a smoke box for my gas grill. Neat idea: it's triangular, so it just sits in between the flame guards. Put wood chips in it and smoke away.
What I've discovered in learning to grill well, and hopefully soon BBQ well, is:
1. It's meditative. Go out with the equipment, the meat, veggies, and a glass of wine, and get in the zone. It's wonderful.
2. You and your family will greatly appreciate the results.
3. Studying it, practicing it, improving at it confers the same sense of accomplishment as learning to do anything well.
To those who discuss lack of time, I have a simple solution: watch less TV. That will also dramatically improve your quality of life all by itself.
Birches: America's Test Kitchen is wonderful.
Come for the banter between Christopher Kimball and Bridget Lancaster; stay for the cooking information!
Mid-seventies I was learning from "Laurel's Kitchen". Haven't thought of it in awhile and wonder what happened to the women who collaborated to write it. Wonder also if it was a west coast thing mostly.
Althouse, I write as a former busboy at a popular fish restaurant.
Restaurants exist not to produce good food, but to produce a profit.
If a patron will pay to be served the sweepings off the floors of a hog farm abbatoir, there is a restaurant that will serve that. And call it something French.
Eating at home allows you more control over the food you eat than restaurant dining, where the French-named entree may be far too close to that mentioned above for dining comfort. Any other consideration such as tastiness can be modified by simple training.
I love to cook too, and will spend hours pouring over cookbooks when entertaining. My husband and I divvy it up - if we want Mexi, he's on deck. Something French, then it's me.
Ann, try the crispy roast duck recipe from The Joy of Cooking. I guarantee you will like the results. There's some prep on the front end that you need to do, but after that, it pretty much cooks itself. I've done it both in the oven and on the grill - grill method is best. The skin gets super crispy and the meat falls off the bone. And save that duck fat! Roast potatoes in duck fat is scandalously good!
@ Paul
I have a woman crush on Bridget.
Birches: I have a woman crush on Bridget.
Which merely reinforces the good taste you already exhibit by watching the show. Bridget reminds me of the female leads in 40s films: beautiful and smart as a whip. Someone you underestimate at your peril.
No, Ann, I beg your pardon. I actually considered prefacing my remark with "this is not an attack on you, but the article," but considered that it would be passive-aggressive and unnecessary. Seems I was wrong.
And the $27 was retail. As AMZN sale prices are dynamic, I used that figure instead.
To the extent that the article said anything, I disagree. Chiefly that there is something wrong with trying to maximize your ingredients. Apparently you are just supposed to spend huge time and money hunting super ingredients and do little with them.
How nice for the 1% that can, I suppose, eschew "commercial" celery. Of course that advice only feeds the 1% and the rest can...?
A valuable remark might be along the lines that restaurant cooking depends on techniques and equipment and supplies not readily available to the home cook. On the other hand, restaurants have other priorities driven by the commercial element, such as time sensitivity, so that you cannot for example expect a six-hour Italian gravy to be served in an Italian restaurant, only the quick sauce, bumped up however (salt, fat, MSG, etc).
No long simmering in general, except for a place that centers on that proposition, e.g. the trendy ramen places that pride themselves on a ten hour, fourteen hour broth simmer.
It's a valuable question you had in mind. I just don't think much of the insights provided by Ms. Panisse as the answer.
I like to order whatever dish the restaurant sort of founded itself on. There are usually one or a few dishes that made the person decide that he could open a restaurant. They were his inspiration. The rest of the dishes are menu filler.
$12 for the kindle version is an outrage when the hardcover is $14. Publishers really don't want to make money from ebooks, do they?
Apropos the earlier "troll" post, it is $28 on amazon.ca
"And $27 for 12 stinkin' recipes??? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it."
I've owned several dozen cookbooks in my life, and I don't think there are any that have three "recipes" that I've cooked more than twice. Now, I've learned many techniques that I use all the time from books by Jacques Pepin and Julia Childs, but there are only a few dishes where I go back for the recipe. That seems to be the type of book Twelve Recipes is aiming for - 12 basic dishes that you will never need a recipe for once you've made them a couple of times.
Yeah, but 12 recipes should be free as a sample for the rest of the book. I'm going to pay for a beans recipe? A toast recipe? Yeah, no.
You can get just about any recipe off the internet. You can make stuff up on your own.
A simple recipe for shredded pork for enchiladas and tacos an shit.
You get on of those huge 20 dollar pork roasts from Sams Club and cut it up into thirds or quarters depending on how many people you want to feed. First thing in the morning toss that thing in a crock pot along with a cup to a cup and a half or water, three tablespoons of chili powder and 3/4 tablespoons of cayenne pepper( more or less depending on taste). Turn the crock pot on high and go get ready for work. When you leave the house turn the crock pot on low. When you get home turn it off and use two forks to pull the meat apart. You can substitute chicken or turkey breast. You can just make it plain and when you get home add BBQ sauce and let it simmer for another hour or so.
Cheap and easy and delicious.
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