![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading and Such...
Oct. 11th, 2017 10:04 amI'm baking a LOT of cookies this morning. Mason's Robotics League is having a recruitment potluck and Mason signed us up for cookies, so I'm on batch two of chocolate chip cookies. I keep having weird mishaps. When I first started, I accidentally put in a teaspoon of ANISE instead of vanilla. I had to toss that batch before I even finished making it. The second batch I made, I completely forgot salt and baking soda. Weirdly, they seem fine? I'm going to keep that batch and see if anyone can really tell the difference. I would have thought they'd be flatter? But they seem fine.
Also, in the mail, yesterday, I got my AARP card! Whoot!
But, today is reading Wednesday, so let me see what I've been reading. It's been a food-focused week. I've been thinking a lot about how Americans celebrate food versus how other countries, but specifically Japan (at least in its manga culture), do. It started with me reading Sweetness & Ligtning / Amaama to Inazuma (Volumes 1-7) by Gido Amagakure. The story follows a newly single dad (he's a widower) who learns to cook for his pre-school daughter. By chance, he runs into one of his students (he's a high school math teacher) who is the daughter of a famous cook, who is secretly not good at cooking, either. Together they teach each other to make yummy food. There's a lot of family bonding, great-looking food, and ACTUAL RECIPES at the end of each chapter.
There are actually a lot of manga like this. What Did You Eat Yesterday? / KinÅ Nani Tabeta? by Fumi Yoshinaga, which is probably easiest described as a story of a gay couple whose love language is cooking. It, too, has actual recipes in it.
But, in both of these, there's a whole lot of exclamations of "Wow! SO GOOD!" and "Ahhhh!" Plus, scenes of shopping, preparing, and cleaning up. The WHOLE experience of cooking and eating. And, I thought about that a lot when I read these two articles. The first one I came across on Mary Anne Mohanraj's Facebook Page: "Grocery Industry Confronts a New Problem: Only 10% of Americans Love Cooking." This started a whole conversation of why cooking is actually a whole lot of work, much of which goes unappreciated, which was then echoed in an article that Shawn found for me from the Atlantic: "'Easy' Cooking Isn' Easy: A Thanksgiving Lament."
And that made me think about a bunch of things, including American cooking shows--most of which involve professional chefs or "home cooks" who "elevate" their cooking to standards that most people find impossible and WAY MORE WORK than anyone wants to do. Which also led Shawn to forward this "how is this not a parody" video of a woman making peanut butter 'slices,' making easy work FAR MORE DIFFICULT THAN IT EVER NEEDED TO BE. "Video Makes Peanut Butter Sandwiches Complicated, And Moms Have a Hilarious Field Day."
I also read a few non-food related things. I read the first fifteen chapters of Wolf in the House (a Korean manhwa yaoi) by Park Ji-Yeon, Not Simple by Ono Natsume, and Kasumi by Surt Lim / Hirofumi Sugimoto (Vol. 1).
How about you?
Also, in the mail, yesterday, I got my AARP card! Whoot!
But, today is reading Wednesday, so let me see what I've been reading. It's been a food-focused week. I've been thinking a lot about how Americans celebrate food versus how other countries, but specifically Japan (at least in its manga culture), do. It started with me reading Sweetness & Ligtning / Amaama to Inazuma (Volumes 1-7) by Gido Amagakure. The story follows a newly single dad (he's a widower) who learns to cook for his pre-school daughter. By chance, he runs into one of his students (he's a high school math teacher) who is the daughter of a famous cook, who is secretly not good at cooking, either. Together they teach each other to make yummy food. There's a lot of family bonding, great-looking food, and ACTUAL RECIPES at the end of each chapter.
There are actually a lot of manga like this. What Did You Eat Yesterday? / KinÅ Nani Tabeta? by Fumi Yoshinaga, which is probably easiest described as a story of a gay couple whose love language is cooking. It, too, has actual recipes in it.
But, in both of these, there's a whole lot of exclamations of "Wow! SO GOOD!" and "Ahhhh!" Plus, scenes of shopping, preparing, and cleaning up. The WHOLE experience of cooking and eating. And, I thought about that a lot when I read these two articles. The first one I came across on Mary Anne Mohanraj's Facebook Page: "Grocery Industry Confronts a New Problem: Only 10% of Americans Love Cooking." This started a whole conversation of why cooking is actually a whole lot of work, much of which goes unappreciated, which was then echoed in an article that Shawn found for me from the Atlantic: "'Easy' Cooking Isn' Easy: A Thanksgiving Lament."
And that made me think about a bunch of things, including American cooking shows--most of which involve professional chefs or "home cooks" who "elevate" their cooking to standards that most people find impossible and WAY MORE WORK than anyone wants to do. Which also led Shawn to forward this "how is this not a parody" video of a woman making peanut butter 'slices,' making easy work FAR MORE DIFFICULT THAN IT EVER NEEDED TO BE. "Video Makes Peanut Butter Sandwiches Complicated, And Moms Have a Hilarious Field Day."
I also read a few non-food related things. I read the first fifteen chapters of Wolf in the House (a Korean manhwa yaoi) by Park Ji-Yeon, Not Simple by Ono Natsume, and Kasumi by Surt Lim / Hirofumi Sugimoto (Vol. 1).
How about you?