Recipe for......

As regular followers know, I spend a fair amount of time nosing around cooking/food magazines. Some I like, some I don’t, but I find their recipes interesting as a reflection of our society and culture. Time compression (for want of a better term) resulting from our blackberry internet/facebook/tweeter speed society obsession has somehow resulted in having less time for real cooking and hence the rise of the “Five Star Food in Five Minute” recipe genre. No time to learn about wines for yourself? No worries, just read the “Ten Top wines” list in any particular publication. Overweight, lethargic, arteries closing? Check those recipes including lite mayonnaise, low fat this, yogurt that. Meats should be “trimmed of any excess fat”, on and on. The latest Bon Appétit’s recipe index contains about 72 recipes (a wonderment in itself!). And, helpful publication they are, they have six little tags appended that help you select your choices. They are: low calorie, low cholesterol, low fat, high fiber, low saturated fat, and vegetarian. Many uses of the word “low”. Guess they left out “low flavor”, but maybe it’s understood. And, besides the recipes included from the magazine content, the helpful advertisers add their own. Barilla adds pasta recipes, PAM baking spray gives us Blueberry Lemon Yogurt Muffins (for which you need a cooking spray), and then there was this helpful recipe for Mediterranean Pasta with Fire Roasted Tomatoes:

2 Lbs medium plum tomatoes, halved lengthwise
½ cup olive oil, divided
2 cloves garlic, minced.
[okay, so good so far, right?]
1 Tbsp. McCormick Gourmet Collection Italian Seasoning
½ tsp. McCormick Gourmet Collection Crushed Red Pepper
½ tsp. McCormick Gourmet Collection Sicilian Sea Salt
¼ tsp. McCormick Gourmet Collection Course Grind Black Pepper
8 Oz. Pasta such as spaghetti

Would anybody care to guess who sponsored this recipe? Selfless promotion of good cooking, those guys..I’m sure the dish would be a disaster without this list of ingredients.

And since I’ve descended to a rant, here’s another: I have several times started a “letter to the editor” suggesting they change the name of the publication from whatever to: “Special Advertising Section”. This would result in a huge cost savings since they could would only have to put “real content” at the top of only a few pages, thereby reducing the need to put the “SAS” note at the top of most of the pages in the magazine. Events, chamber of commerce stuff (Vegas for pages and pages), sometimes kitchen equipment.

Lastly – with my keen analytical mind always churning, I can’t help but note that if there are 72 “new” recipes in one monthly magazine, multiply that by, say, (at least) ten more magazines, multiply that by 12 and you have a stunning number of recipes over a years time, and some have been in publication many years.. Can there be that many different ways to prepare something? Wow.

Occasional picture: waffle dessert taken by a traveler in a far away, Nordic country..looks good right about now!!

DFD always