\what's wrong with people?

i cook about 3 nights a week...sometimes. 4. I cook enough so that I don't have to cook every night. Leftovers are my friends. We go out to eat approx. 1/ wk..sometimes 2. I don't think there's anything wrong with people who take their families out to eat more often that what's considered 'normal'. If they can afford to do it, that's their money spent - not mine. You know?

Besides, there are so many awesome places to eat as well as places I just want to try here in Orlando, that If i could go out every night - I would take advantage of it as often as I could - with the occassional exception of some good ol' fried chicken or bowl of cereal or meat loaf ...

I imagine it could get old if you do it every night....but I'd just have to ride it out (if I could afford the eating out everynight)

hey, maybe their proud owners of an Entertainment Book - i know good n' well that I am.

Orlando? ORLANDO! Darn shame you weren't here in April. We had a gathering in Cocoa Beach, and those of us who flew in passed right through your gread nonsmoking airport. I lived there for a year when the world was much younger - just uphill from Lake Ivanho.

Pipe down there plainoldme, or I'm out of a job....

(plainold... we have GOT to get you a real job...)

I love to eat out but hardly ever get to. When I do we go someplace nice so it works out okay.

I cook at least five nights a week. One night we order pizza and one night we'll usually carry out - most likely from the Chinese deli at the grocery.

I love to cook so it's never a problem.

When I get home to eat at 9 I'm really not looking to start cooking up wild rice and chestnut stuffing.

Being able to cook dinner every night is a luxury for some people. I do cook when I have time, but that's not most of the time. It's not always about money.

...WilliamsSonoma...

People who can afford to buy artificially aged furniture can afford to eat out.

Anyway, not cooking doesn't mean not eating at home. I grew up in a two income house, never ate out, but rarely ate a family meal, either. On the other hand, the long hours my folks worked enabled me to get through four years of college without taking out a loan, so I'd say it wasn't a bad tradeoff. And, unlike my first college roommates, I knew how to make myself more than fried eggs and cereal.

Patiodog, Williams Sonoma sells pots and pans and cooking gadgets of all kinds - not furniture. I think thats why plainoldme expects them to know how to cook.

Preparing and eating one's meals at home was once taken for granted in this country. It is not, however, an historical norm for cities and towns in European history. Until quite recently in the history of Europeans (in which i include the colonists of North and South America), cooking was done with fire produced by directly burning the fuel source. On plantation estates in the American South, there was usually a cook house separate from the residence. In areas of population concentration, fires were a very real public danger, which is why curfew was imposed in such areas (from the French for "cover the fire"). I would speculate that Americans, as pioneers, cooked their own meals in the home out of necessity. But at the same time as the settlers at Boonesboro were frying johnny cakes in the skillet, the sans coulottes in Paris were trooping off to the local bakery to pick up their sustenance. According to Carlisle's The French Revolution, before that event, in good times, a working man in Paris consumed about five or six pounds of bread per day. A muslim traveller, Ibn Kaldun, describes the bazzars of Cairo in Egypt, and of Damascus in Syria as having "cook shops" to which everyone resorted for their daily meals. Not too many years ago, archaeologists working in Turkey found what they believe was a cook shop just within the walls of what is believed to be the city of Troy. (Satellite imagery suggests, in fact, that there may be walls well oustide what are now known, and that the walls considered to be the city walls may in fact be the walls of a citidel; this would mean that there was a cook shop in the citidel for the soldiers coming off duty on the city walls.)

Food shops, bakeries and street vendors are commonly described in the cities of Europe and of Asia Minor for literally thousands of years. This would have provided a more efficient use of fuel for cooking, as well as helping to control the use of open fire within a city. It is only within the last century that the majority of the U.S. population has become urban or suburban, and a move toward eating out or eating carry-out is simply traditional in human society, whether or not that is apparent to the most of us.

Really? Who is it that sells all that distressed furniture, then? Someone sends us a catalogue.

(Though I have seen some very expensive, very well-equipped kitchens that go totally unused, except for the microwave.)

Crate and Barrel! Sorry 'bout the mix-up, there..

Williams Sonoma is one place I'd like to max out my credit card. Yes, I'll take that 6-burner, three oven Viking commercial range, a complete set of All-Clad copper core, a second set of Wusthoff knives...

We try to make dinner most nights, but will opt for pizza if we are running late, and will go out for special occasions. We have several friends who simply don't cook for/feed their kids. They wind up with their heads in our fridge when they come over. Kinda pisses us off.

I don't particularly like to eat out, but I'm also too exhausted a lot of nights to cook. So, it's often throw together what you can at my house. Luckily, there's usually lots of good throw-together stuff in the house.

I'd love to be able to afford one of those services where you pick up a meal from the caterer on the way home. <sigh> There's a wonderful Pilipino caterer who does drop-offs at my subway station. I'd love to get one of her parcels each evening.

You could always pop by All The Best Fine Foods at Summerhill there ehBeth, if you don't mind paying $8.00 for a spare 2 cups of roasted potatoes.

I'd rather go with Mayette. And I will. Someday.

Wow! Everyone has missed the fact that this thread is about people who can not imagine cooking without a recipe or making up ways to cook food.

Recipe? We don't NEED no stinkin' recipe!

Sorry, we missed the point. When I was of an age (maybe 13) I'd be in charge of the younger sibs, and the dinner. Cassarole de-jour. Always different, almost always edible, sometimes tasty.

Actually, on this continent, supposedly the original European settlers of Mexico set up diner-type restaurants known as Fondas and that much of the European cooking was accomplished at the bakers, as Setanta says.

When I was in grad school at Wayne State, an historian friend of mine, commenting upon the cooking craze that began with people in food co-ops, observed that each generation reacts to the one before itand that while our (baby boomers) mothers loved aluminum foil and tvdinners, we make our own bread, sometimes from grain we grind. When I told that to someone who isn't very bright she said that she uses more aluminum foil than her mother. Oh, well. Some people are just too literal.

But why can't people just follow the Patricia Wells rule: what grows together, goes together and figure out how to cook without panicking!