Friday, December 12, 2008

Your Dinner Recipes Easy and Practical

By Peter Hallway

Life is faster and fuller than ever. Sure science has made everything easier, but to balance that there's more than ever to accomplish. Personal lives are sometimes left in the lurch. Chores get neglected. Meals are no exception. It's become a constant quest for making dinner recipes easy. It's nice to know there are a lot of ideas around for quick meals.

Forty years ago people cooked a lot more from scratch. If they ate sausage, they bought casings and meat and stuffed the sausages themselves. When they ate pasta they used home made noodles and home made sauce made from tomatoes and other ingredients. Cooking was an all day affair. With far fewer women in the work force that was hard, but not impossible. But as people began to realize they wanted more from life than cooking and cleaning every day, more and more pre-packaged and pre-prepared foods began to appear. Cake baking, for example, slowly converted from mixing flour, eggs, vanilla, milk, carefully melted chocolate and many many other ingredients to opening a box and mixing in some eggs and milk. Today baking a good cake is a matter of about an hour, only 5 or so minutes of which are mixing and measuring. In the old days it could take half a day to properly make a cake. The world has changed.

There are many sources for tips on cooking more easily. One of these is television cooking shows. In the old days Julia Child explained complex recipes while the Galloping Gourmet got drunk on his cooking wine. Today there are hundreds of cooking shows, many focused on methods for regular people to prepare food. From the 20 minute meals to partially home made, techniques include spicing up pre-made elements with some fresh ingredients. This isn't just hot dogs or scrambled eggs. These shows focus on quick and easy pot roasts, fast Veal Parmagen, and roast chicken for working families.

Pre-packaged and ready made foods are a lot better than they were, too. Many grocery stores now carry deli meals including already cooked chickens, meat loaf, pot roast, mashed potatoes and more. It's like buying a restaurant meal at the store, then bringing it home to eat. Many of these foods can be refrigerated or frozen to eat another day. That's another idea. It's often easier to prepare all the meals for the week on the weekend, then freeze them for reheating during the week. Many foods including lasagna are actually better reheated.

Even today it's possible to eat well without eating out daily. There are plenty of places to learn about making dinner recipes easy. Bon appetite.

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