Time Saved...II

I constantly see evidence that Americans are being persuaded by advertising and so-called experts that none of us can do anything to enrich our lives without spending a great deal of money. From the multi-billion dollar fitness industry to the people who have convinced American parents that the best way to develop a child’s mind is to have that child spend hours each day staring at hundreds of dollars worth of videos, we’ve been sold the idea that our lives can’t truly be satisfying without msssave outlays of cash.

An example? I received the following e-mail from a gentleman who saw one of my articles, Time Saved, Money Wasted, on The Dollar Stretcher website. (The article is also on this blog.) Although I appreciated his compliments on my writing, certain of his assumptions were so typical of the “anything good must be expensive” philosophy that they made me want to bang my head against a wall.

Here’s what he said: (I added the the emphasis to a certain paragraph by bolding it.)

Hi there... Just ran across your article
(http://www.stretcher.com/stories/05/05oct24b.cfm). I agree with you that the pre-wrapper potatoes and pre-peeler onions are crazy. I do think, however, that there's a real distinction between those two items and the other food-related ones you cite (pre-marinated chicken, for instance).

Ok, so I'm a home cook. I like cooking. When I buy things like potatoes and onions, it's because I'm actually going to cook with them. In that sense, then, there's no downside for me to buy "normal" potatoes & onions and prep them myself.

But for people buying things like microwave popcorn and pre-marinated chicken, I think their perspective is different. They don't *want* to cook. They don't want to deal with the hassle of cleaning anything. They're genuinely willing to pay the markup for the convenience of not dealing with those hassles. A lot of these people don't even have the basic tools necessary for prepping the food. If you factor in the capital costs of having a well-stocked kitchen, it is actually cheaper for a lot of people just to buy prepped food.

Anyway, I do share your outrage at the whole pre-wrapped potato. That's absolutely crazy.

Keep up the good work,
--Steve

Okay, Steve, thanks for the compliments, but....

To premarinate chicken, you need a zip-close plastic bag. Costs a few cents, takes two seconds to throw away. So how does buying premarinated chicken save you from any kind of “hassle” other than pouring a little marinade on the chicken, putting it in the bag and sticking it in the fridge the night before, which takes all of thirty seconds? (And a whole half-second’s worth of forethought.) In the example I cited in the article, the difference between the plain chicken and the premarinated chicken was more than $3 per pound. Cook two pounds of premarinated chicken and you’ve paid $6 to save thirty seconds. Does that make any kind of sense?

Popcorn? Microwave popcorn takes three minutes to pop. And you do have to stick around and watch it to make sure that bag doesn't catch on fire. Buy regular popcorn—at a quarter the price—heat some oil, add the popcorn, let it pop.......three minutes, from switching on the stove top to pouring the popcorn in a bowl! I know, because I've timed it. But if you asked most people, they would swear that microwave popcorn cooks much, much faster......because the microwave popcorn industry tells them so. And yes, you do have to wash a pot. Takes twenty seconds.

So buying the four-times-the-cost microwave popcorn saves you twenty seconds.
And costs you at least a $1 extra for the same amount of popcorn. So you’re buying time at a cost of $3 per minute or $180 per hour. Does that make any kind of sense?

Second point....

It’s obvious Steve has bought into the insane idea that cooking is a complicated, time-consuming job that only experts equipped with hundreds of dollars worth of specialized equipment and years of training can do well. This is ridiculous. The Europeans and Asians and Africans and Latin Americans who run little hole-in-the-wall cafes and cook for huge families in tiny kitchens a quarter the size of the modern American culinary palace probably laugh themselves sick over this idea.

I own three pots, two frying pans and do most of my cooking using two burners (I don't use the other two because I'm too lazy to clean them) and a counter-top toaster oven. Yesterday, I took all of thirty seconds to throw a piece of meat into one of those plastic bags, pour in a little teriyaki marinade and put it in the fridge. I just finished eating my teriyaki steak (broiled on a piece of tin foil in the toaster oven) and it was delicious.

My dinner also included a salad it took five minutes to put together....rinsed and ripped up some romaine lettuce, threw in some drained mandarin oranges, poured a handful of walnuts from a bag into my hand, crunched them up , tossed them in, pulled some leftover chicken from the fridge and chopped it up, added a chopped green onion,a few store-brand raisins from a snack box, a little Thousand Island dressing and I was good to go. Used one bowl, one knife (rinsed between choppings) a chopping board it takes ten seconds to wash and one fork. I figure this salad cost me less than $1. Yes, I could have paid $4.50 for a take-out salad , but why? Why buy five minutes at a rate of $42 per hour?

This morning, I used two small silicon bowls (bought on sale for $5) three eggs, a little more of the chopped onion and chicken, some cheese and some frozen spinach and made myself two quiches for breakfast. Again, it took five minutes to chop the ingredients, then brown the chicken and onions while I got out and whipped the eggs. Popped it into the T-oven, went and checked my e-mail, came back fifteen minutes later and ate. A chopping board (rinsed between choppings and I always chop meat last) one frying pan to brown things, a mixing bowl and the two silicon bowls. If I’d had a family to cook for, I’d have used a larger mixing bowl and pie tin. Cost? Less than $1.50. And yes, I could have bought two slices of quiche from a deli for $5 or $6, but......why?

Obviously, you have to do what's right for you, and you can take "cook it yourself" too far. If buying something saves you one or two minutes and only costs a few cents extra, you can count that as a good deal and do it with my blessing. But the “convenience food” industry has convinced us that we should hardly ever cook anything ourselves, because we just don't have time. (Or expertise. Or the newest super-duper, whizbang cooking device.)

Now, Steve...
...you've made me hungry. I'm going to go throw some water in my larger pot, add noodles, bring it to a boil, turn it off, wait a moment to make sure it won't bubble over ( you don’t need to keep it simmering, and unless you can’t keep it out of the reach of small children, you don’t need to watch a turned-off pot, period!) come back in ten minutes, drain it, add sour cream, some frozen spinach and shake on some Parmesan cheese. Hands on prep and cooking time, two minutes, for Noodles Alfredo ala Sykes. Cost? About 45¢.

It ain't that complicated!

It really isn’t. But anyone watching the steady diet of Lean Cuisine and Stouffer's commercials on TV has been told so often and so persuasively that cooking is complicated and time-consuming, it’s almost sacrilege to suggest otherwise.

Still, I’ll suggest otherwise. You do not need a thousand square-foot kitchen to cook good meals. You do not need a $500 set of pots endorsed by a celebrity chef. You do not need a five burner stove, a double set of convection ovens, ten specialized knives or a thousand dollars worth of mixers, grinders and processors.

And you definitely do not need to use the lack of these things as an excuse to buy $7 a pound “preprepped” food. (A 9 oz frozen dinner priced at $ 3.95 costs $7 a pound.)

You can cook perfectly good meals without all this stuff. Besides, what’s so great about frozen food? I do occassionally (mostly out of curiosity) try one of those much -hyped “gourmet” frozen entress, and I’m almost always disappointed by both the portion size and the taste. Just because the manufacturer’s commercial tells you something is delicious doesn’t mean it actually is. Call me crazy, but five miniscule bits of chicken drowned in a sauce that’s mostly tasteless white goo garnished with a few specks of parsely is not my idea of “gourmet.”

Especially when I’m paying that much per pound!

And here’s my final point, the real kicker.....

Why are we so desperate to save time? Because we spend so much time working long, hard hours to earn the money we end up spending to save time! And it never occurs to us that working for, say, $20 per hour, then spending the equivalent of $30, $40 or, heaven help us, $180 per hour to save time just doesn’t make any sense!

Does it?