Memories of recipes past.

I read this recipe for beef stroganoff this morning and was transported momentarily back to a time long gone:

I used to cook things like this.  

Multi-step, multi-day recipes, long-simmered reduction sauces, homemade pasta.  Recipes that involve cheesecloth and parchment.  Batches of fresh vegetables destined for the compost pile after giving up their flavors to the stock.  

I particularly remember a classic French beef burgundy that I made twice, and an awful lot of Thai and Indian food with fiddly little prep bowls of spices and herbs.  Mark's favorite blueberry coffee cake, the one I have to get up at 5:30 AM to make it fresh for breakfast.  

I still might make food like this for very special occasions, but it just isn't happening right now.

This isn't a character flaw, of course, and I like to think that if I made up my mind to enter the kitchen on a Saturday or Sunday morning and accomplish similarly involved dish by dinnertime (the next day, possibly) I could do it and would probably enjoy myself, especially if someone else agreed to clean up after me.  I am confident I could do it without a recipe, even, unless it involved roast meat in which case I'd have to consult a temperature/time table (but that's just my engineering training.  It's a waste of good brain cells to learn things you might as well look up).

(Another thing that's well worth internalizing if you love to cook and you have a family:  If you enjoy making fancy and involved food, every day or once in a while, you have to do it purely for the joy of creating it and eating it yourself.  Do not put in many hours of work on involved things because you hope to impress and please your family members.  It will end in resentment when you realize you would have made everyone happier had you spent 20 minutes making Emergency Chili and a batch of Tater Tots.  If you must have an outlet for your foodieness, find a good friend who will eat your food and make nom nom nom noises and tell you how wonderful you are, preferably a friend who also likes to cook, and take turns making lunch for each other while all your kids eat English muffin pizzas.)

Well.  There's a reason we let our subscription to Cook's Illustrated slip, you know?  When America's Test Kitchen et al. decide to put out the Stuff I Threw Together In 20 Minutes Illustrated, send me an e-mail.  

Comments

[BettyDuffy]

I love it when Cooks Illustrated titles a feature, "Rethinking Souffle" as though I had ever thought about it before.

Here's my favorite five minute gourmet meal:

couscous, a can of black beans, a small jar of salsa all mixed up with a tiny bit of olive oil. Fast and yummy.

[Cathie]

Cook's Country now features 8 tear out recipe cards with 30 minute meals. It's not 20 minute, but it's close and they are good. I will pull out some that I have for you to look at the next time you are here.