Don't forget! The easiest way to support Casual Kitchen is to buy your items at Amazon using the various links here.
Just click over to Amazon, and EVERY purchase you make during that visit pays a modest affiliate commission to support my work here. Best of all, this comes at zero extra cost to you. As always, I welcome your thoughts.
PS: Follow me on Twitter!
*************************
The economics of grandma's tuna casserole, and why today's lower middle class eats like yesterday's tycoons. (Bloomberg)
I don't want a life of perpetually weighing tempting options. Thus I limit the choices I make in a day. (Mark's Daily Apple)
Certain consumer behaviors seem irrational, wasteful, even evil. What drives people to possess so much more than they need? (Boston Review)
Why are we so conflicted about leisure? (Brain Pickings)
Don't wage an online war with vegans... if you can help it. (Kitchenette)
Can your investments pass the "Cocktail Party Test"? It's not quite the test you think. (The Motley Fool)
Bonus: Bubbles? No one has any idea what's going on. (The Motley Fool)
One takeaway from the Bubbles article: there's been an astonishing amount of fear-inducing "bubble" talk in the investment media over the past several years (since the real estate bubble ironically), and it's done nothing but scare people away from many years' worth of truly attractive stock market investment opportunities. Never take counsel of your fears!
Uh oh. America's coming cognitive decline. (Bloomberg)
"I've been wondering whether the biggest mistake might be seeing happiness as something we should be aiming for at all." (Quartz)
Got an interesting article or recipe to share? Want some extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
I enjoyed The Economics Behind Grandma's Tuna Casseroles. In the introduction to How to Cook Without A Book Pam Anderson writes about cooking in her mother's kitchen and cooking in her own kitchen with an increased number of ingredients and ways to prepare those ingredients. In ATK's new cookbook 100 Recipes Christopher Kimball writes about learning to cook from a woman in Vermont who turned out one great meal after another. When she died he was presented with her recipe collection -- no more than 75 index cards.
ReplyDeleteThe increased number of food choices and ways to prepare them hasn't made cooking and getting meals on the table easier. More choices have made it more confusing.
After watching Barry Schwartz's Paradox of Choice video on TED a few years ago (did I find that link here?) I started consciously limiting my choices in the kitchen. It didn't seem to limit choice at the table much. I've since added to the variety and find myself asking if I really need three kinds of sea salt and seven varieties of vinegar -- plus lemons and limes? Do I need a shelf full of dry beans and grains, or should I limit it to those I use most often?
You know, the 20% of ingredients I use 80% of the time.
Thanks Sally for a great, great comment. I share a lot of the same views: it's like we've added 80% more things in our kitchens (or even more broadly, in our lives) and it hasn't really added to our competence or our satisfaction one whit. You're exactly right.
ReplyDeleteDK
PS: And yep, I wrote about Barry Schwartz's book here at CK: http://casualkitchen.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-be-satisficer.html It's useful reading.