I love popcorn, and in my 20s it was easier to bring a bag of microwave popcorn to work and have it as lunch. But . . . well, we all knew it was crap then, and what we have found about the additional chemicals since, it had to go.
I still make microwave popcorn, but with Alton Brown’s option. Popcorn kernels, olive oil, salt - put in brown paper bag and crimp the top. Microwave just as before with store bought, and add flavors to taste (for me, just a touch of melted butter). Still good, nearly as fast, and a lot less concerns.
Although rarely, I still miss the fake butter taste and color, because humans are weird.
I hold my knife correctly. That’s probably the best thing I’ve managed to remedy.
Otherwise, I think that using fresh ingredients when appropriate, versus using dried/preserved for convenience has made a large difference. That’s not to say that there’s no place for dried spices/herbs, but that in most cases using say… fresh garlic produces far better results than garlic powder or garlic salt. Same for fresh basil, etc… But for pizza sauce? No reason to go bother with fresh oregano- the dried stuff is easier to use and works the same. (and I have a massive semi-feral oregano plant in the backyard!)
I’m just the opposite. I grew up with full length spaghetti and a spoon to twirl it. Said to hell with twirling it as I got old(er) and started breaking it in half. Also fits in a smaller pot and easier to drain.
Great, now I want some spaghetti.
But yes to butter. I usually have that for breakfast and will stick toast and grits under it to bulk it up.
Hoo boy. Cooking skills change over the years. There are things I used to make that I can’t believe anybody ate all those years ago, but I was learning on the fly. Things really changed for the better after I took a few classes from some professionals, primarily sauces, soups and stews. A Cajun class in New Orleans taught me all I needed to know about roux and mirapoix. And having money to spend means I’ve been able to buy some very good cookware.
I can’t think of any at the moment, though I’m sure I have changed a lot over 45 years!
One I haven’t changed (that my mama taught me!) is to make a slurry of flour and milk to make cream gravy. Scant 1/3 cup of flour pus salt and pepper to two cups of milk, plus some water to thin it as needed. Add to the drippings and whisk whisk whisk while bringing to a boil. Works great!
I saw this done on youtube, the guy said it is an old southern thing to make gravy for sausage over biscuits. He was making it to make the gravy for the Dollar Tree ‘chicken fried steak’ you can buy there, lol, he buys Dollar Tree food to cook ‘so you don’t have to’. He said the gravy was better than the food.
Eating “Italian” food that really isn’t worthy of being called Italian food. Those would be predominantly and especially the white sauce dishes that so many restaurants feature these days. The “white sauce” is generally fatty crap poured over pasta that you can buy for a buck fifty a pound. What’s really sad is that this is becoming more and more common as the the traditional Italian restaurants dwindle in number.
Reminds me of this quote from the end of “Goodfellas”: “Can’t even get decent food. Right after I got here I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and ketchup.”
My culinary practices have gone three quarters of a circle.
I renounced a lot of cheapskate culinary practices when I went from a destitute student to a wage earner. That lasted decades.
No more canned vegetables, only fresh produce. No more instant coffee, only the best coffee beans. No more frozen pizzas, only hand tossed with fine ingredients. No more Minute Steaks, Velveeta and supermarket rolls; only shaved rib-eye, aged provolone and Amoroso rolls shipped from Philly. And so on and so forth.
But a few years back, thanks to aging and a couple bouts of Bells Palsy, my sense of smell and taste degenerated to ~30% of its former glory. So I returned to cheap and easy and just imagine that the foods taste like they did when I got the good stuff. I have a good imagination…and I’m a cheapskate.
I suppose when my sense of taste reduces even further with age, I’ll go full circle—back to Gerbers and breast-milk pablum.
Kind of like the place that we’d go to after choir practice, years ago. One night, one of us ordered the “homemade minestrone soup”–only to find that the pasta in it was alphabet letters.
Yep. The place just opened a can of Campbell’s alphabet soup, heated it, and served it as “homemade minestrone soup.”
