Tragedy

Last week, when drawing up the weekly dinner menu, I decided to make a pumpkin soup. Okay--I decided Karel should make a pumpkin soup. In the course of grocery shopping, then, I diligently bought a pumpkin, and put it in an obvious location, the basket where I keep the currently-in-use bread and stuff-that-should-be-at-room-temperature, like bananas and slowly-ripening kiwi.

At least, I thought it was obvious there. Somehow, when Tuesday night came around, Karel looked everywhere but the basket and decided that I'd forgotten to get the pumpkin and went out and procured two more. He used one for the soup, so on Saturday we still had two pumpkins floating around, twiddling their thumbs, waiting to be put to good use.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Dutch pumpkins aren't like American pumpkins. Pompoenen are a lot smaller, for starters, and I believe they are of a different breed than their American counterparts. Besides being smaller and more deeply orange, they are also a bit sweeter. And nobody carves them up into jack-o-lanterns. Differences aside, though, you can pretty much treat them like any other gourd, which is to say "roast until tender, scoop out flesh, and enjoy". Dutch recipes, strangely enough (yet typically Dutch), call for the thing to be hacked apart and/or peeled, and then boiled. Newbies to the Netherlands and pompoenen in general should disregard any recipe advice that tells you to peel a gourd, and just hack it in half and pop it in a hot oven for about 30 minutes. Trust me when I say it's safer that way.

So on Saturday morning, as Karel was about to leave for work, I wondered aloud what to do with the pumpkins. "Maybe I'll try a pumpkin pie," I mused.

"I never had one. What is it?"

I may not be the most perfectly-integrated expat, but I certainly don't go about wishing for things like Thanksgiving and whining about missing fireworks on the Fourth of July. I don't bake apple pies (too much work, peeling all those apples) and I don't go about comparing Nijmegen to New York City. But somehow, Karel's confession that he'd NEVER HAD PUMPKIN PIE brought out a wave of Americana in me and I decided right then and there that he was going to get some. Well, as close to pumpkin pie as you can get with a Dutch pompoen, anyway. Never mind that I'd never made pumpkin pie before and never mind that I had no idea where to start, or even an idea of which recipe I wanted to use. Karel's gastronomic innocence with respect to one of America's finest traditions needed to be remedied, and damned if I would stand by and let him flounder in culinary darkness.

I didn't use a recipe, but trust me when I say making a pumpkin pie from scratch is so easy you almost don't need one. Roast the pumkin for 30-40 minutes, until the flesh is tender, and then scoop out the "guts" (seeds, stringy bits that hold the seeds in place). Separate your pound of flesh from the skin and set it aside. I did all this the night before, but there's no reason you can't do the next step as soon as the thing cools down enough not to cook the egg.

I used condensed milk, but you can also use cream--put the pumpkin and a bit of milk/cream (1/4 cup, thereabouts) into a food processor, and add an egg. Liquify everything--the consistency should be like that of a milkshake. If you need to, add more liquid. Add cinnamon, powdered ginger, nutmeg, allspice, cardamom, etc etc to taste. If you were an idiot like me and didn't make sure to get sweetened condensed milk, you can add a bit of sugar. I used dark brown sugar (~ 2 Tbsp) a bit of normal sugar (~ 1/4 cup)/

I go through the trouble to make pie crust, in part because the stuff sold in supermarkets is a bit too fluffy for my taste. Usually it goes off without a hitch, but as you can see from the overbaked bits, somehow I managed to flub it this time. Nevertheless, as the crust plays second fiddle to the divine filling, I decided to proceeed.

The end result was a velvety smooth hunk of delicious sitting in a decadently flaky crust, and every bit as delicious as I remember pumpkin pie to be--better, even, since it wasn't over-sweetened and you could actually taste the other stuff in it. I'm actually kind of hoping Karel will think it's not quite for him, because it'll leave more for me.

Allerhande Everywhere

Every two months or thereabouts, the Albert Heijn publishes another edition of its in store magazine, the Allerhande. Like most free publications, it has more ads than content, and, as expected, is geared to "help" you make budget-conscious and nutritious meal choices for your family--by shamelessly plugging Albert Heijn products whenever and wherever they can. Nevertheless, it is one of the few things that suits my Dutch reading level--hindered more by my lack of patience than my lack of understanding--as the articles in it are short and brief and there are lots of excellent pictures of food. Though stamppot never did manage to look sexy.

The Allerhande is stuffed with recipes: 10 ways to make soup! 15 ways to make stamppot! A week's worth of dinner ideas! Special (but easy) recipes for the holidays! These recipes are not especially complicated, and they actually produce quite a decent meal--what I like to think of as "in-law" level food; as in, something you'd serve your in-laws to show that you can cook, but not something so delicious that they'll want to invite themselves over every day. Much though I love my almost-in-laws, our apartment is small, and stressing about food is something I hate doing.

I am a rather lazy cook, to tell the truth. I'll cheat whenever I can, and there have been days (mostly when Karel's working) that I've taken a can of something from our pantry, and a fork, and called it a meal. It's not that I don't enjoy the process of cooking. It's more that it takes me a while to get into my little groove, and most days I just don't have the time to settle into a rhythm. Karel, on the other hand, loves cooking, but his work schedule is so erratic that we might manage to have dinner together once a month.

But next week, Karel is at home. And that means lots of good eats...based entirely on stuff out of the Allerhande. Even the stamppot that we'd decided to make came out of the Allerhande, and with the sole exception of our weekly spaghetti, there isn't a single recipe on it that we've thought of ourselves. It'll be a strange week, full of food that we wouldn't normally eat--zuurkool and pompoen and spitskool and paddenstoelen fond (actually, the recipe called for a bouillon, but I couldn't find it). That I am actually looking forward to eating these very Dutch things is a bit scary. But not nearly as scary as the thought that, if we like the things, and if they aren't too terribly complicated to make, we might actually start depending on the Allerhande for future meal suggestions.

Fancy-Pants Dinner: Cheat

This week has been kind of unusual for me: I stopped by the Albert Heijn on my way home on Thursday to get food.

But not just any food, oh no: a friend of ours had been invited to dinner on Friday, which meant that after a long day of doing lab stuff, I would have to come home and make a dinner. Karel, having just come off a night shift, would hardly be in any condition to handle getting food to his mouth, much less the sharp pointy objects that tend to be involved in making food.

So...I cheated.

Here are two things I've come to realize about making nice dinners: 1) Risotto is always impressive, and doubly so if you pony up for the fancy mushrooms, and 2) any sins of the meal can be repented for with a chocolate fondant cake.

Risotto is relatively easy to throw together: chop an onion, and fry in olive oil until translucent. Add the raw rice, and stir constantly for a few minutes, until the grains become translucent. The only real secret to risotto is the next step, which is to add hot broth to the rice until it's covered. If you use cold broth, then the temperature difference "shocks" the gelatinous outer coating of the rice that had been cooked, and it falls apart and you get more of a congee mix than a real risotto. Check on it every 5-10 minutes or so, and add more liquid as needed, but stir it as little as possible. Cook until the rice is tender (~30 minutes). For this reason alone, it's the perfect fancy-pants cheat if there ever was one.

I make risotto with mushrooms, and you're supposed to fry the mushrooms with the onions, take them out, and add them back to the risotto at the end. So far, nobody has complained when I add the mushrooms at the 15-minute mark. Don't slice the mushrooms too thin, and you'll end up with a creamy risotto with chunks of decadently tender mushrooms.

As for the chocolate fondant cake: supposedly a notoriously fickle dessert, one that chefs always screw up on shows like MasterChef and TopChef, the truth of the matter is that once you've gotten used to your oven, it's REALLY simple to make. Recipes abound all over the place, but it doesn't matter which one you use as long as you remember to set the timer when you slide the cakes into the oven. It is simply a matter of knowing your oven: 11 minutes at 200° C in our oven works great, and produces a cake with a thin layer of cake and as much gooey middle as feasible. Dorie Greenspan's recipe says 13 minutes at 400° F. And no, I don't use ramekins: we have silicon muffin cups, which are so much easier to handle.

I always set aside the ingredients mis-en-place before I sit down for dinner (when we have guests--the recipe I use serves 6). Then it's merely a matter of taking fifteen minutes to melt the chocolate, beat up the eggs, stir it together with the flour and cocoa powder, and bake. For truly fancy-pants dinners, Karel likes to make his own ice cream to accompany it, but most people are so agog by the fact that you can make a chocolate fondant cake at home that the ice cream, as tasty as it is, tends to be an afterthought. A bit of fruit syrup (from a jamming episode gone dreadfully wrong) elevates the fancy-factor by ten.

I even cheated on the main course, which was a roasted chicken: I used one of those pre-seasonedbradzakken chickens, which is a plastic bag which the chicken is baked in. The plastic bag traps the steam, and the end result is a juicy, tender bird with as much effort as it takes to turn on the oven.

There are, of course, times when anything less than real cooking will simply not do. But there are also times when spending time with a dear friend is more important, and the veneer of good food is good enough.

Cone cabbage

Right around this time of year, the first of the winter vegetables comes trawling in. The Brussels sprout, the beets, the winterpeen (carrots you can build houses out of), the first pompoen (don't be fooled--pompoen are not pumpkins). It's always a bit sad, to taste the last of the tomatoes--they never taste quite as lovely as they do at the height of summer, and are fit only for sauce. And nothing reminds you of how dreary the winter can be like boiled cabbage.

The spitskool is an early cabbage, and despite its phenomenally pointy shape, it tastes much the same as any other cabbage, although the pointy end does allow you to get more tender leaf per plant than you'd typically get out of their normal, round counterpart. Needless to say, this is a favorite of the Dutch for precisely that reason.

Whatever possessed me to put a spitskool on the shopping list this week, though, is a mystery. The C1000 flyer has 10 produce items on sale for €1 per unit every week, so there was no reason to fixate on getting cabbage. Given what horrors my mother used to visit upon me in the form of cooked cabbage, it's a wonder that I ventured to tackle it at all. At any rate, it went on my list and Karel, who did the shopping this week, dutifully bought it and put it away in the fridge, where it proceeded to loom at me and laugh at my naivete for two days: who did I think I was, to try to make a cabbage taste--well, like anything?

Unlike my mackerel fiasco, I had looked up a few recipes for spitskool before this weekend, and even picked out a recipe to follow. Still, as the hour drew near for cooking it, I began to entertain grave doubts about the palatability of the recipe. It was, at its essence, fried cabbage, flavored with curry. And as much as I love simple foods, it just seemed a bit too simple for Karel.

So I set about complicating the recipe: I made a roux flavored with a few spices, chopped some onions, and cooked them in the roux until they were translucent. Added the chopped cabbage, and poured in some vegetable broth (I cheat, and use bouillon cubes). Returned it to a boil, let the cabbage cook until just-tender, and then took out my portion. To Karel's, I added ham cubes. It was a very homey dish, in the end--the liquid ended up being almost like a gravy, which was just as well since I'd also made mashed potatoes. Not particularly daring in any way, but neither did it bring back the terrible cabbage-memories of my youth.

I Call This "Potato Redux....Redux"

The sentiment that the potato is the national vegetable of the Netherlands never feels more true than at the start of autumn, as the summer produce fades and the winter staples of stamppot and erwtensoep regain their places prominence in the Dutch diet. Your average Dutch diet, that is. Karel, besides sucking at being Dutch, has fallen head over heels for a potato salad that I concocted. This salad is a spin-off of a potato-green-asparagus salad that he'd made in the spring, back before I discovered steamed asparagus and all its orgasmic glory. Like everything else I enjoy cooking, it has only three essential ingredients (potatoes, smoked salmon, a mild onion), only one of which requires cooking. I wish I could say that some of it came from my mother as well, but truth be told her potato salad never quite tasted as good as this, and plus it was string-theory-complicated.


I've included a recipe for the mayonnaise that I make specifically for this dish. You could always use the stuff in a jar and just whisk some chopped dill into it; I always make it because we don't use mayonnaise that often, and stuff in a jar always goes south between potato salads. Obviously, know the risks of raw eggs before making this. Salmonella can be delicious, but it can also be deadly. That being said, if you're not pregnant, very young, very old, immunocompromised, or allergic to eggs, you'll probably survive.

Potato Salad

~1/2 kg vastkokend potatoes, cubed

1 shallot or 1/2 white onion (zoete uien)

100-200 g smoked salmon

1 Yowling Noodle

1 celery rib (optional)

Hardboiled egg (optional)

~1 Cup mayonnaise, with ~2 Tbsp dill mixed into it

string beans or broccoli or asparagus, if making an accompaniment

Peel and cut the potates into cubes no bigger than 1 inch (that's 2.5 cm) across. Dutch potatoes are annoying in that they are sometimes no bigger than a large pea, so when you buy them check the package and make sure it has a decent collection of large-ish ones (size of a baby's boot) to save yourself some effort. I use a cheese-slicer-thing to peel the potatoes, drawing the blade towards my thumb. The advantage of this is that the peels will not fly all over the place and you can save a ton of clean-up time by dumping the peels directly into a bowl. The disadvantage is that you lose a relatively large amount of edible potato, but still less than you would if you used an aardappelmes.

Cook the potatoes. You can either put them in boiling water for about 10 minutes, or microwave them for 7. The advantage of boiling is that you can steam the vegetable (string beans, broccoli, or asparagus) at the same time (8, 5, and 10 minutes, respectively). Regardless of how you opt to cook your taters, you must use vastkokend potatoes--kruimig potatoes will disintegrate when you try to toss them later. While the potatoes are cooking, finely chop the shallot or white onion. Cut the smoked salmon into strips. Do not stab the cat. Do not add his little furry butt to the salad. Do cuddle him and give him a smidge of salmon--outside the kitchen--and then shut the door. Ignore.

Cut the celery into small cubes, and slice the egg, if using. When the potatoes have finished cooking, drain them and let them sit on the counter for about 15 minutes or so, to cool off a bit. Toss everything together and let them chillax in the fridge for an hour or two.

Mix about 1 cup of mayonnaise into the salad, toss well. Rewarm the accompanying vegetable. Serve. Fend off one hungry Noodle. Threaten to send him back to the dierenasiel. Toss him a sliver of salmon anyway.

Enjoy.

Mayonnaise

1 egg yolk

1 Tbsp lemon juice

1/4 tsp salt (maybe less, depending on your taste)

Pepper to taste

1/2 tsp mustard of choice

1-2 Tbsp honey

~1 Cup oil (depends on the size of your egg)

handful of chopped fresh dill

Good strong arm and wire whisk

or

hand mixer, set to "low"

Heavy bowl

plastic wrap

Whisk everything except the oil and dill together in the bowl. Still whisking, add the oil to the slurry drop by drop. When about 1/2 C is left, you can start adding it spoonful by spoonful. You may need some more oil to get the consistency right. When it's right, add the dill and mix well. Put it in the fridge; cover it with a skin of plastic wrap. I alternate between using the whisk and the hand mixer--when my arm gets tired, that's when I switch.

My choice of oil is either sunflower, canola, or what's called sla olie, for salads. Olive oil, besides being pricey, is very dense, and furthermore it gives the mayo a weird flavor. I suppose you could give it a try if you wanted.

Just Like Mom's

My mother is a simultaneously wonderful cook, and a very bad one. She can make really good food if she wants to, but most of the time, since it's just her and my father, she doesn't really want to. Most of their meals, near as I can tell from our weekly phone conversations, involve lots of vegetables, a little fish and rice, and no sauce. Healthy stuff--boring stuff, even by my standards, but as this was what I ate growing up, mostly, I'll make something similar for myself if Karel's out working. Karel, on the other hand, was spoiled by his professional-chef-brother-in-law since he was eight, and a main course of vegetables without adornment is not only boring, it's damn near inedible. Personally, I'm willing to put up with boring if it means getting things chopped, cooked, and cleaned up in 30 minutes or less. Karel would rather eat cardboard.

But when she wants to cook something well, oh boy--not even Karel, finicky though he can be, can resist her dumplings, though now that I've learned how to make them, I suppose they really should be "my dumplings"...like all other family recipes, there is no recipe, just a bit of this and a smidge of that and a whomping serving of some other thing. Happily, I've been able to replicate the dumplings and the dipping sauce even in the relatively food-restricted Netherlands, and when we have space again in our freezer Karel can stuff his own damn dumplings.

One of the things my mom used to make very infrequently was something that you can call "Chinese Pancakes", although they only resemble pancakes in the sense that they're flat and made with flour. The translation literally means "onion and oil biscuit", and if you're going "eewww" right now I can't say I blame you. But to me, these chewy bits of fried dough were like manna from the heavens when I was little, mostly because my mom only made them every few years at most. I loved the way the chewy layers peeled away from each other, and no matter how many scallions she put in, they were always a delicious sweet rarity in the dough. For whatever reason, I got a craving for them last week and called my mom for the recipe. I was afraid she wouldn't remember, as the last time she'd made them for us, I was in high school or something like that. She, in turn, was surprised that I remembered what they were.

But it turns out that she did remember how to make them, and, unlike the mind-maze of instructions required to replicate her dumplings, they're actually pretty easy to make:

1. Make a dough with flour and water. The exact proportions of flour and water don't really matter, but it's about 3:1--as long as it sticks to itself more than it sticks to your fingers, it's fine. Add a bit of salt. The recipe that I've linked to recommends 1/4 teaspoon; my mother made it without salt.
2. Roll out the dough into a thin sheet. My mother was terribly vague as to exactly how thin the sheet should be; my own sheet ended up being about 3/8 of an inch thick. Spread both sides with a layer of oil.
3. Sprinkle green onions (sesame seeds, if you're using them) all over the sheet, and roll it up tightly into a long thin rope. I
4. Coil the rope into a circle, and then flatten the circle into a pancake.
5. Coat a skillet with oil and pan-fry on a medium flame until each side is mottled, crispy, and slightly burnt. If you're doing this on a cast-iron skillet, it takes a little longer than 5 minutes per side.
6. Let it cool and enjoy. Or, if you're like me and haven't had this in a million years, don't let it cool, burn your fingers, and enjoy it anyway.

Karel, as expected, was less than enthusiastic about these. It's one of those things you really just have to grow up in, I guess. But yeah, it tasted just like Mom's.

Pudding proof

Karel has a relatively small collection of relatively expensive liquors. Unlike most Dutch people of his and his father's generation, see, he doesn't like genever (and, having tasted it, I can't blame him) except as something to "warm" him up on a cold day's hunt. Nor does he like beer. Instead, he goes for wine and, when the occasion calls, really nice Scotch. Preferably single malts, and preferably Islay.

So the Oban that sits in our liquor cabinet is a bit of an anomaly. Karel serves it to guests, mostly, since he a) drinks whiskey once in a blue moon, and b) prefers the Laphroaig. I'd bought it for him because I thought he should try something that was not his usual thing. He liked it well enough, but not so much that I had any reserves about using it to make the butterscotch pudding this weekend, much to the surprise, dismay, and delight of my friends, for whom I'd made it. Dan and Amanda had helped me move the last few bits of my things back to Nijmegen, and in return they got kitties and dinner. And this utterly decadent butterscotch pudding.


I don't cook mise en place very often. I'm more of a "throw it together and see how it goes" kind of person when it comes to cooking and baking, but for making pudding, I've found it goes a lot easier when you've got everything meausred out ahead of time. Making pudding is like going sky diving: you can't stop halfway through. Plus, once the milk mixture starts boiling, it goes really quickly.

Ingredients are: 1/2 cup of light brown sugar, 3 Tbsp water, 1 3/4 cups whole milk, 1/2 cup cream, 3 egg yolks, 1/3 cup sugar, 1/4 cup cornstarch, 1/4 tsp salt, 3 Tbsp butter, 1 tsp vanilla, and 2 Tbsp Scotch whiskey. Preferably a strong single malt--if you can bear to part with yours. Interesting Dutch factoid: most of the Dutch pudding recipes you'll find are flour-based, and consequently cornstarch is not found in the supermarkets, but in the "toko" shops.

Mix the brown sugar and the water and set it on a medium heat until it boils. Once that starts, add the cream and 1 1/2 cups of milk to the pot and wait until that boils.


While you're waiting, set up the food processor and whir together the egg yolks, the last bit of milk, the sugar, the salt, and the cornstarch. You could also use a hand mixer and a large bowl, but it will get a little tricky when it comes time to add the milk (see below). However, it's not impossible and I've done it when making creme anglaise, but it does require an extra level of coordination that prohibits operating a camera at the same time.

When the milk starts a-boiling, start the food processor a-whirring and add the milk in a thin stream. If your depth perception isn't blown to bits by using the camera, don't miss the food processor. The goal is to temper the egg yolks, not to cook them.


Once it's all mixed together, return the pudding to the pan and let it cook until thickened, stirring constantly. This is actually a lot of fun, as the thickening is rather sudden and palpable. You want it to get to the point where a few bubbles start coming up, but no further.


Then...you pour it BACK into the food processor, and let it whir while you add the butter, the vanilla, and the Scotch. Let it all blend evenly, and then pour it into your pudding conveyance containers. Press some waxed paper/plastic wrap to the top if you're not fond of pudding skins, and refrigerate for at least 4 hours.



All in all, it is delicious--very buttery, very Scotch-y, and definitely not to be served to small children. It was an...interesting experience, having had this after a small glass of port. Let's just say I slept very well that night.

French cooking Dutch vegetables: the perfect sprout

My boyfriend has snitched the copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking that was given to us this Christmas for his train-reading. I find it funny, almost, because we can't afford half of the meats that are listed, and even if we could, I don't eat any of it. Plus, in spite of all my insisting to the contrary, he maintains that vegetables are more difficult to cook, and so will never use a good third of the book.

Personally, I never believed that. But then again, I also find baking easy, but apparently that flummoxes most people, too.

Vegetables are all about timing, just like baking is all about measuring. Julia Child's book likes blanching, where you boil the vegetable until just-cooked and then dump it into a bunch of cold water. It works really well, and the vegetables keep their amazing shade of just-done-to-perfection green for days on end. I did this to a whole package of Brussels sprouts on a Monday a few weeks ago and they were still green on Thursday.

I'm a bit of a Brussles sprout fiend--I've been known to eat a whole package in a single sitting (I think I was craving fiber). I love them so much that I have to consciously not buy them on the weekends, lest I bore my boyfriend to death. I like them fried in a pan, but if your significant other is like my boyfriend and deathly allergic to anything so heretical, here is the recipe for the perfect Brussels sprout, cooked the Dutch way, to a French standard:

• Brussels sprouts, trimmed: hack off the bottom, and score a cross into the bottom of the sprout. This is so that the hot water can get into the center. Personally, I've never known this to make the least bit of difference, but we're going for authentic-fusion-icity, here, so the little X it is.
• 1 pot of boiling water, a bit over 2 liters for 500 grams of sprouts. Americans: that's a little over a half gallon per pound. You can use a lot more water, but not a lot less, because what you want is a rapid return to boiling, because that's when the sprouts are cooking.
• Dump sprouts in the water, and return to boiling, for 8-9 minutes.
• Drain and immerse in cold water. When they've cooled, let them drain and dry. Julia Child says that you should spread them out on a sheet to dry. I think that's a little excessive.

Now, at this point, you have a bunch of cold, sprouts. Heat up some butter in a pan, and toss the sprouts in and warm them up, and if you're going for all-out Dutch-ness, a sprinkle of nutmeg. Otherwise, salt-and-pepper to taste.

But the point is, do not try to keep the cooked sprouts warm. Reheat them--even in a microwave, if it comes to that--just before serving. This is why blanching works so well when you're only cooking for one and have vegetables for five.

Screw Michael Pollan

As much as I love food, I don't like cooking. It's a messy business, for starters, and even when it succeeds in being clean, the imprecision with respect to amounts ("correct seasonings") and the need to use your own judgment about what constitutes "gently wilted" leaves me feeling curiously impotent in the face of uncertainty. I'm better at it, these days--I think even my boyfriend will agree to that--but there's a reason why my shelf in my student house is lined with Cup-a-Soups.

I used to feel vaguely guilty about them, and the fact that ramen is a more-often-than-I-care-to-admit staple of my diet. After all, say all the foodies, instant food isn't really food. You should go to the market (never mind that it's a Wednesday market in Maastricht) and buy fresh, whole vegetables from the eco-stall (actually no such thing--I'm pretty sure Dutch vegetables grow on plant 'roids) and relish its transformation (read: sweat bullets figuring out how to cut the damn thing) into something exquisite (anything is exquisite with enough truffle oil).

The Dutch supermarket is full of culinary shortcuts: packages of pre-chopped vegetables in different combinations for things like stir-fries or macaroni, whole chickens in "steaming sacks"--plastic bags that somehow don't melt in the oven, trapping in the steam as your chicken cooks. Potatoes come peeled and chopped and serving-sized. You don't even have to select your own spinach--it comes in a bag, pre-washed. Meat comes pre-marinated, and there are even such things as soup-packets, where you get a bone and a few different kinds of meat for making soup stocks.

And here's the kicker: I think these things are great. I can't help but think that the US might be eating a lot healthier if people stopped making healthy food sound so damn inaccessible and instead focused on making healthy foods easier to prepare. In my corner of the US, food deserts aren't really an issue, at least, as defined by the availability of healthy eats within a certain distance. But just being there isn't the point--eating right involves getting the food inside you, too, and when your Average Joe doesn't know a blender from a bouillabaise, let's just say that making food simple is a good thing.

Click here for an interesting essay on why fast food isn't necessarily evil--and why I no longer feel bad about all those Cup-a-Soups.