Lucinda Scala Quinn - Mad Hungry Cravings

NEW YORK

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Lucinda Scala Quinn

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Crave it. Order it. Eat. Repeat. How could I, as a cook, or as a mom, possibly compete? Takeout meals are just too easyespecially when were busy. And even when were not busy, cooking can seem so hard, liable to be derailed by the smallest inconvenience. Dont have that six-ounce can of tomato paste? Better order in, eat out, get it to go, nuke it, toast it, reheat itor just add water.

Its instinctual to yearn for the food of our mothers and grandmothers tables, but it may be the foods encountered in the outside world that hold the most sway over our imaginations. Ive fed three sons good old-fashioned home cooking day in and day out for more than twenty-five years. Yet, to a boy, as soon as they were old enough to stray from my apron strings, out they walkeddown the elevator, out of the building, and up the block to Broadway, where a whole new table of food awaited them. The fabulous New York City streets were a place of convenience and independence from their we-cook-at-home parents.

And so it was that a bowl of homemade steel-cut oats couldnt hold a candle to the delicious instant gratification of bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll at the corner deli, or else tamales from the lady near the subway. After school, a wide range of snacks tempted my boys: pastry from Starbucks, shawarma from the halal truck, hot dogs from Grays Papaya, fried rice Chinese takeout, or, inevitably, a McDonalds Big Mac and fries.

Often they would fill themselves up before dinner but not really nourish themselves. As a cook and a mom, that really annoyed me. But part of me also gets it: I will never forget my first fast-food French fry, eaten with the babysitter when my parents went out. It was a clever plan, while it lasted, to divert child-me with a boxed burger and fries while Mom and Dad parked me and my brothers with the sitter.

Back then, the suburb of Detroit where I grew up certainly didnt have the many ethnic options of twenty-first-century New York City, but my mom was known to occasionally succumb to the lures of convenience cooking, like the TV dinner. Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, and apple-cherry cobblerall neatly tucked into a divided aluminum containerwas served once a week on TV tables. My brothers and I loved it!

So how to reconcile these two distinct notionsthat we should be eating home-cooked healthy meals, but we also lust to eat things we want and crave? In my resolve to regularly make fresh-cooked food for my kids, I had an epiphany: Copy the food that you want to order in or eat out. Make it tastier and more nourishing. Any time a hankering hits, youre a well-stocked fridge or pantry away from preparing it in your own kitchen.

You know that sloppy, dog-eared file almost every family has of their takeout menus? The thing you desperately riffle through on Tuesday night at six thirty, while hollering out, Do we want pad thai, General Tsos chicken, or Grandmas pizza? Well, thanks to the recipes in this book, that files days will be numbered. Granted, ordering out now and then is a welcome break from the everyday routine of cooking. But remember that home cooking has a lot more value than just the nutritional kindespecially when the bill from ordering in Chinese food is equivalent to half the weeks grocery budget. (And thats to say nothing of the unwelcome side effect of puffy fingers, dry mouth, or a tummy ache from the loads of salt, sugar, and preservatives often added to the take-out food.) The sesame chicken you make at home (see ), will let you have what you crave, at home, but for less money and with more flavor.

how did we get there?

The fast-food economy over the past half century has dramatically changed our home lives from those of our grandparents and their grandparents. Nourishing ourselves and our families in the preindustrialized home meant planning for the growing, preserving, and cooking of our food on a daily, seasonal basis. But for the last few decades the leap from planting a seed, nurturing its growth, harvesting, cooking, and eating its fruit has been a heck of a giant one.

To many moms credit, they persevered with simple home cooking over the yearseven though the modern conveniences were alluring. Meanwhile, newer fangled prepackaged and engineered foods continued to grab our attention. Yet still, its a privileged few across socioeconomic lines who routinely eat fresh-cooked food regularly made with good wholesome ingredients.

For many of us today, cooking has largely been handed over to distant high-volume food manufacturerswhether its procured from a fast-food chain, a restaurant, or the grocery store shelf. Mass-produced food on this scale doesnt mean a cook is chopping onions or peeling tomatoes before they go into the industrial-sized kettle to simmer into a sanitized meal.

Instead, prechopped produce originates from several different specialized suppliers; the onions and garlic from one distributor, mushrooms and broccoli from another. Vegetablesotherwise known as inventoryare cleaned, cut, and shipped in large plastic tubs from the source factory to the central manufacturing location. While this makes good economic sense for the production of industrialized food, there are obvious compromises in the quality and flavor of the finished food we eat. The difference between freshly procured vegetables, hand-chopped in your kitchen before a quick stovetop saut, and the precut ones exposed to oxygen, machines, plastic packaging, and multiple unknown plastic-gloved hands boils down to the simple sacrifice of taste and nutrition.

Many of the so-called fresh bakeries or pastry shops in our supermarkets are not actually creating the bread or desserts at all. These are also delivered premade, ovenproofed, and par-baked to the destined commercial location only to be finished on site. If youve ever had an esteemed bakerys croissantbaked crusty and flaky outside with a moistly coiled puffed dough insidethen surely you must wonder what the heck those flying-saucer-sized, soft and dry throughout, so-called croissants that come from a commercial purveyor are. They are mere figments of their former selves.

ground zero of our health is what we eattime to take out in!

Many of us mothers will admit that frozen pizza, chicken nuggets, and packaged mac n cheese frequently are default mealtime solutions. And if the nuggets and noodles are organic, its dinner served almost, but not quite, guilt-free. Guilt dogs us mothers like nothing else when it comes to feeding our kids. The same cant be said about college kids, though, who live on chicken (wings, not fingers), fast-food burgers, and take-out pizza too. Whether its fingers, wings, or nuggets, a steady diet of any of these is no way to nourish a body. Add in the average employees office break at the java-spot-du-jour for a four-dollar calorie-rich mocha-choka-loca and a cardboard pastry and you begin to realize that for many of us, home cooking truly has been supplanted by distant food-service machines.

Weve reached an imbalanced situation where we spend more money to eat inferior food out, and in the process, we not only jeopardize our health but also deprive ourselves of less expensive, tastier, and healthier home-cooked meals. And there is no healthier diet than fresh foodvegetables, fruits, whole grains, meat, poultry, and seafoodeaten in moderation.