I’m referring to both “lol lmao why am I putting this leaf in” posts and “omg I found a leaf in my chipotle” posts here because both have the same issue of broadcasting their confusion over the internet instead of just looking it up.
You could chalk this up to social media but even before that’s advent you had Jamie Oliver showing you a 30 min dinner that consists of leftover ingredients that are not picked up by his show / cookbook and also assumes you’re cooking on kitchen grade equipment instead of the landlord special like most of his presupposed target audience and feel free to swap him for any number of aspiritional celebrity cooks.
It’s all showstuff. Which can be nice but let’s be honest here, if you’re cooking a lot at home you’ll be eating slop (non derogatory) most of the time because between price and time investment that’s what gets you tasty, manageable, affordable.
But that’s not in the cookbooks, I’m pretty sure I own all of them because if you’re a known home cook they just end up at your house. If you ate nothing but Jamie Olivers Healthy 30 min Dinners (all of them take about an hour or so because they presuppose you start with a 10L boiling pot of water and have the skills necessary to dice a large onion in a minute) you’d end up nutritionally deficient and poor.
But say you were to google lense your bay leaf and find out what it does, where does that leave you? I feel like there isn’t a site in the world that teaches you home economics cooking where you concoct up something healthy, tasty and time saving out of like half a pantry and a capsicum you bought on sale. I speak two languages and I’ve never found one - where the fuck are they?
I am lucky enough to have been brought up cooking wise by a grandma who was a master of this “slop” and feeding a family of six from a small apartment building kitchen with a very low budget. Actual cook books of that time and the home economy class books we got at school were also all about this basic everyday cooking.
I’ve watched probably all the cheffy chef shows and made lots of stuff from them. They are always needlessly complicated and I cut all the corners I can think of when making them, just because I got that grandma knowhow.
These basic home food things are still in books most of all I think. Especially in older ones.
I don’t know about school elsewhere, but we have 1 to 3 years of basic home economics in middle school where everyone cooks. You learn to dice an onion, use aromatics, bake a bread and all of it if you don’t have anyone to teach you.
I also very much think that the sort of wholesome home cooking that was essentially taters, veggies and a protein aren’t in any way slop. The best tasting and most satisfying food I’ve ever had came from my grandmothers low budget kitchen. Difference is she cooked for days at a time typically, I do the same. This way you only spend a lot of time cooking a few times per week.