Here there be cooking

I have an acquaintance who supplements her family's income by selling kitchenware, and yet she says without the slightest sense of irony that she doesn't cook.

I think this is one of the strangest statements to come out of the mouth of anyone (not just my acquaintance) with access to a kitchen. What do you mean, you don't cook? Is it that you don't know how to boil water? You doubt your ability to follow a simple recipe? You're so rich that the financial toll of having someone else prepare your food is something to be waved off? Proclaiming that one doesn't cook makes about as much sense as announcing that one doesn't read, or pay bills, or do laundry. Cooking is not rocket science. It's not magic. How hard it it to boil a pot of pasta and dump a jar of sauce on it? And you'd pay someone $5.75 at the very cheapest joints to do it for you!

Almost any form of prepared food is an attempt to approximate home cooking. It is not difficult (and I do mean that! It's not difficult) to make a home-cooked meal that rivals restaurant food, and blows the store-bought frozen version out of the water. That new-fangled technology, the crockpot, makes it easy for anyone to come home to steaming stew or pea soup or chicken 'n dumplings. Any old pot will boil water for rice or pasta. Baking potatoes: what could be simpler? Put 'em in the oven for an hour! For this, for this we are charged a fee at a restaurant!

I happen to like to cook, but I don't think that's the point. Cooking at home is so easy and so much more cost-effective than eating out that it's just foolish to refuse to do it even if it's not your bag. Cooking is not rocket science. It's not magic.

If you can read and follow directions, you can cook. If not -- well, we don't let kindergarteners touch the stove either.