from scratch

My roommates and I have gotten into the good habit of making home cooked meals instead of going out. We are all recent college graduates and are a bit stingy with our money, so eating in seems the perfect solution. However, it occurred to me this evening just how time consuming this habit is. I began my work in the kitchen this evening about an hour before we sat down to eat. It involved cleaning up the dishes from the day, preparing a meal (all the while being careful not to dirty too many more dishes), and baking a cake for a little birthday celebration. After eating the task of cleaning up after the meal began. All combined, I probably spent about two hours in the kitchen. Don’t get me wrong, I really like cooking, but the realization of how much time it takes to cook a meal got me thinking…

When I was in Cameroon I frequently had to make items such as lasagna noodles, ricotta cheese, and tortillas from scratch. We didn’t buy meat that was already prepared. In fact, we had to grind our own ground beef. Cooking was not a simple procedure there. Substituting papayas or mangos for items such as apples was common, and basic things like cake mix and bisquick had to be made from scratch with the raw ingredients. There was something pure about making everything from scratch, and the idea of buying food at the store already made up became foreign to me (contributing to a bit of reverse culture shock when I returned home). It was as if the challenge of cooking creatively, with what was available, made the work worthwhile. I guess you can imagine that cooking in Cameroon was even more time consuming than it is here, but in some ways, I miss the purity of it. Maybe that is one of the reasons that I try to cook as much from scratch as I can now.