The Kitchen Counter Cooking School Read Online Free Page A

the collection at my local grocery.
    That was the day I met the woman and her daughter, the one with the cart full of boxed and frozen ultraprocessed food products. She was shopping in a store with a bakery, a full-service deli, a sushi bar, a large meat department with trained butchers, a seafood counter replete with water tanks featuring live crabs and lobsters, plus signs bragging that the store carried 129 different varieties of produce, a third of them organic. With all those options, why did she actively select mostly food in boxes and cans?
    We started talking after the butcher demonstrated how to cut up a chicken. “When I make stuff from a box, it always turns out right,” she explained. “I never really learned to cook. Mom made dinner when we were young, but by the time I was in high school, she worked a lot, so my brother and I ate a lot of frozen dinners.”
    She picked up one box of pasta, the kind that makes a side dish in a few minutes. “I know that Alfredo sauce is made with cream, but I would have no idea how to make it.”
    I spent a year in culinary school learning endless variations on cream sauce. I explained a simple technique—boil cream until it reduces and then extend it with a bit of the cloudy water left over from cooking pasta. “That’s it? Oh, wow, I thought it was a lot more complicated.”
    She agreed that if I wrote down the recipe, she’d give it a try. Out went the nine boxes, and in went two packages of whole wheat pasta, a quart of cream, and a small wedge of Parmesan cheese—for roughly the same amount of money yet enough to make twice as many servings.
    This result made her curious about what else we could replace from her cart. Boxes of Hamburger Helper were swapped for ingredients to make simple skillet dishes—onions, garlic, peppers, canned tomatoes, and a block of Cheddar cheese. We visited the bulk herbs and spices area and stocked up on several, including a Cajun blend, chili powder, mixed herbs, oregano, thyme, and red pepper flakes. Her daughter, initially bored by our conversation, took over filling and labeling the plastic bags of spices and herbs. “This is fun, Mama,” she said as she sealed one bag. “We should do this every time we shop.”
    Real potatoes picked out by her daughter (along with a pink peeler) replaced the dehydrated variety. As we stood in the produce section, the woman looked around feebly. “I know that I don’t make vegetables enough,” she said. “I’m not very good at figuring out what to do with them. I kind of avoid anything that requires a lot of cutting something up. I see those chefs on TV and it looks so easy. I guess I’m not very good at it, and it always feels like it takes a long time.” We bought a few bags of a precut broccoli and cauliflower mixture on sale that day, a bottle of olive oil, and some lemons. I wrote down instructions for how to steam and roast the vegetables, then top them with some lemon or a bit of her new herbs and spices.
    I couldn’t stop thinking about that afternoon. I was certain I had overwhelmed her with information. She seemed like a smart woman and a good mom, but when we talked about cooking, she was discouraged, frustrated, and convinced that shortcuts remained the only path she had the time or skill to navigate.
    â€œI don’t mind boxed mashed potatoes” was not the sort of comment that crept into my usual conversations. As a food writer, I’d slipped into what I call “the foodie bubble,” a magical place where everyone talks about ramps, 1 perfect local peaches, and smoked duck prosciutto. People casually name-drop obscure chefs and discuss how many recipes they’ve tried from The French Laundry Cookbook . Don’t get me wrong: Life is great in the bubble. It’s just that most people don’t reside there. Normal people live and shop in the center aisles of the grocery store,