With the holiday season in full-swing, everyone is focused on gifts, snow, decorations and food. Holiday recipes are sprouting up in the newspapers, while magazines feature spreads of spectacular looking entrées. Advice columns are printed everywhere, describing how to cook impeccable meals. It is no wonder that society has become so enthralled with food and cooking, turning the holidays into a hectic, stressful toil for culinary perfection.
Personally, I cannot understand it.
Perhaps this is because I come from a family where a home-cooked meal is no more than a distant reality. We have hosted exactly one Thanksgiving dinner at our house - naturally, the turkey somehow failed to cook. While cleaning out our refrigerator this past summer, we discovered food that expired in 1996.
Holiday parties send us searching Big Y's bakery department for whatever sale items look most "homemade." And to us, "cleaning out the oven" does not refer to wiping away spills and baked-on food. Rather, it means emptying the oven of cereal boxes, granola bars, loaves of bread, Pop Tarts, cookie packages, and as I noticed recently, a white chocolate rabbit from a frightening number of Easters ago.
Clearly, our anti-cooking philosophy, and consequent dependency on pizza shops, strips us of any resemblance to the idealized American family. Yet I hardly view us as deprived. The pressure to receive awe and approval from friends and relatives only leads to countless hours of cooking or trying a recipe a dozen times. People should realize something when the media, alongside its many recipes and cooking shows, has to offer tips on how to relax and regroup after the tension of preparing holiday dinners.
More than two weeks before Thanksgiving, a Martha Stewart newspaper column entitled, "Holiday Planning, Week by Week," caught my eye. As the title suggests, the article neatly divided the stretch from Thanksgiving to Christmas into intervals of when to make certain holiday preparations.
For example, in "Week Two," Stewart advises, "Take an inventory of baking staples, and replace those that are running low." Now, I do not even know precisely what qualifies as a baking staple. For me, the translation equals: "Make certain that the can opener, microwave, and Big Y's rotisserie are in good working order."
And, by "Week Four," you should "Prepare make-ahead side dishes. Cranberry sauce, for example, can be made early and refrigerated." Well, my idea of "preparing" cranberry sauce is dumping the cylinder-shaped jelly mold into a bowl.
The intention behind this column is to make cooking more manageable, but it simultaneously encourages the impractical strive for perfection. As a result, cooking further evolves into something more stressful than enjoyable.
Picture the many frazzled, bleary-eyed people who on Christmas day, say, "I was so disorganized this year that I was up until 3:00 in the morning making my sugar cookies." How can baking cookies at that hour be enjoyable? I may have a hard time finding baking alluring at all, but cooking at 3:00 A.M. seems outrageous and unnecessary.
Despite Stewart's "Week Three" suggestion to "Make and freeze cookie dough to bake as needed," there is a significantly easier alternative. Simply omit her words, "Make and," and prospects are already looking brighter.
Perhaps you think that only the June Cleaver-type women, with their flour-dusted aprons and wooden spoons in hand, are the culprits. But, everyone - even children - can be drawn into the madness. I pity the poor children who, under their parents' watchful eyes, have to make gourmet-style cookies for Santa.
The attitude at my house was always: "Who cares if the cookies are burnt as long as they are hidden beneath a heavy coating of frosting, sprinkles, icing, marshmallows, M&Ms and chocolate chips?" Our culinary creations could have easily been mistaken for a spill in the candy aisle. But in circumstances like these, when there is no intention to produce the perfect food, cooking is most fun.
Even beyond the holiday season, do you realize how much time and energy that we (well, of course, not me, personally, as I have well-established) spend seeking out the best-tasting food?
And if we cannot cook it ourselves, we dine at expensive restaurants. Just as homemade gingerbread men and Stop and Shop's gingerbread men taste the same to me, I would likewise have a hard time distinguishing between an entrée from a five-star restaurant and the UMass Dining Commons.
Honestly, to be in the realm of the UMass Dining Commons is like having a Thanksgiving feast everyday (excluding, of course, that aforementioned Thanksgiving dinner when the turkey failed to cook). Furthermore, my biggest food preparation steps here are sprinkling salt and pepper on scrambled eggs, squirting mayonnaise into a sandwich, or maybe making a Belgian waffle (if I am feeling really ambitious).
To some people, this "do not cook" philosophy seems atrocious, but being a devout Lean Cuisine addict suits me just fine. It makes the holiday season, and life in general, significantly less stressful, and more relaxing and enjoyable. That has been my motto since the third grade, when years of culinary incapability culminated in an oven fire that was definitely not worth a homemade batch of praline cookies.
Katherine Marr is a Collegian columnist. She can be reached at kmarr@student.umass.edu.
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