State of the Culinary Arts

In my last post I mentioned that I've been cooking more often in the past couple of weeks since my arrival than I had been earlier in the year.  Part of the reason for this is that I want to make a lifestyle change to stick to foods that are safe for me and won't make me sick (because of IBS) and another part is the freedom of the comparatively large kitchen that I have at my disposal.  For a while now I've been wanting to make a post about shopping, cooking and eating in the US because I've noticed a fair amount of differences between those habits here and in NZ.  Some of these points may have to do with income levels, State differences and family habits/culture but this is my experience.

Firstly, shopping in the US is interesting.  Even in the normal everyday supermarket I can get Soy Cream Cheese - which is incredibly delicious and safe for me!  There are more flavours of soy ice cream than I'm used to (cookies and cream included) and in our local grocery store there is a Dunkin' Donuts.  I've actually found, to my surprise, that I can eat the type of donuts that Honey Dew Donuts and Dunkin' Donuts sell.  I've also found that strawberry frosted donuts with sprinkles are so good that I want to eat too many of them.  These stores are everywhere and they have drive through windows.  Oh, that's another thing; there are drive through windows for pretty much everything.  In Wellington, the capital of NZ, there were 2 stores with drive through windows in the central Wellington and close suburbs.  They were both US franchise fast food restaurants.  Here you have all the fast food places with drive through windows, a café has one, the pharmacies have them, there are drive-through ATMs and you can get little electronic boxes that attach to your windscreen to automatically pay at toll booths.  It seems, in the USA, all you have to do is drive through.

Back to the supermarkets now.  I have never seen so many frozen dinners in one place at one time!  There are at least 4 aisles of vertical freezers with vegetables, pre-cooked meats, ready made dinners, ice cream, waffles, donuts, gluten free foods and etcetera in our local grocery store.  About a half of one of those freezers is filled with microwave meals.  There is another freezer for seafood, though it's a bit smaller, and most of the back wall of the store is refrigeration for meat, dairy, perishable soy and, yet again, more mircowave dinners that don't need to be stored frozen.  Compare this to my local supermarkets; the larger of which usually had 2 freezers for vegetables, pre-cooked meat and instant foods.  The instant foods took up about a quarter to a third of 1 freezer.  These freezers were also much smaller; they were the type you look into from above.  And it's not that this area is more populated; Franklin has a population of 31,635 as of the 2010 US Census and Wellington City has a population of 192,800 (and those are just those that live in the city, not those that live in the greater Wellington region, many people commute into the city for work for other activities).  The reason for the difference is, in my humble opinion, that there are more supermarkets in Wellington city than there are in Franklin.  A lot of Franklin is spread out and you can't walk or bus anywhere without first getting a ride to a footpath that goes somewhere other than around the block or to a bus station.  Downtown Franklin doesn't contain a supermarket (they're too big here for one to fit) and they tend to be in big malls with a dozen other stores.


Secondly, I wanted to tackle the topic of fast food and restaurant meals.  The US has something of a reputation, at least in NZ, of creating a habit of large portion sizes.  While it's true that you can get a giant drink from a fast food restaurant; it actually seems that most franchises give portions around the same size as those of US food chains in NZ.  Now, non-fast food restaurants are another story.  When I went to a steak and seafood place nearby they gave giant portions.  Future-in-law said that the reason for this is that if a restaurant serves normal, moderate sized portions that people would give themselves at home they are suddenly assumed to be stingy and they would get a bad reputation.  He said that many people, himself included, take half the meal home to have the next day or at another time.  There are people who eat the whole meal then and there but I think every country has people who over-indulge at least some of the time.


And lastly, the adventure of this family's kitchen.  I have to tangent back to the super market for a moment here to explain a detail I missed earlier.  There seems to be, on almost all items that I went to buy, a constant discount deal on buying in bulk.  For example, if you buy 10 bottles of iced tea you can get them all for $10.  I'm used to seeing 2 for $5, and there are a few of those deals too, but I've never seen a bulk deal for 10 of an item in an NZ supermarket.  In fact, from what I recall, most NZ supermarkets actually restricted the number of an item shoppers could purchase and it was usually maximum of 12.  Perhaps the enticement of a discount for buying in bulk can be partly to blame for the state of the kitchen in this house.  There is, as I put it to fiancé the other day: "More of everything you could ever need or use before it expires" in this kitchen.  There are two large closets which are used as pantries and they're completely full of cans, packets, boxes and cartons of food.  There's half a shelf of plastic re-sealable storage bags, tin foil, wax paper and parchment baking paper.  There is an entire, albeit small, shelf dedicated to pre-made frosting, muffin and cake mixes.  There is an entire very large shelf covered in herbs and spices in jars and zip-lock bags.  It's great to have so much to work with but the problem is that I don't know I have all these things unless I manage to hunt them out through the 3 rows of cans on one shelf or the stacked trays of spice jars.


When I asked fiancé if he had ever heard of the fad of eating your way to a bare cupboard; he said that he had not.  I'm not in the least part surprised by this.  I would love to do this with this household's kitchen but I foresee some issues.  One is that fiancé, due to a physical condition causing heightened senses, is a very fussy eater.  There are foods in the cupboard that he used to eat but now won't.  Another is that I can't eat a lot of what is in the cupboards because of my own health issues.  Perhaps, if we can find no one at home who will consume them, some of the cans will have to be donated.  We'll see what happens, and if I can get anyone to co-operate with me, as time goes on.