Patricia - it really is a dying art, and it’s sad. People are always amazed at the amount of time I spent in the kitchen. I’ve always been cooking but only in the last couple of years that I have been really cooking (i.e. from scratch) - and now onto baking. While some people are never home on the weekends, I plan my weekends around kitchen activities. There is an interesting article published last July, in the New York Times website - written by Michael Pollan the food writer. The title of the article is “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch.” He wrote about how cooking has moved from the kitchen to the front of the TV. People don’t cook anymore but they watch others do. Here’s a quote: “But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements.” It’s long but quite interesting. There is a picture on the article of a very nice modern kitchen that is covered with cobwebs. If you are interested, you can go to http://www.nytimes.com and do a search with the title of the article and you will find it.
As a result of this my husband and kids are spoiled when it comes to food. They will not touch a store bought cake, they will not eat canned soup etc etc etc. When my daughter’s go to a b’day party the first thing they comment on, is how horrible the cake and buttercream tasted. They take a piece to be polite but they will eat only one mouth of it.
