Assorted Afflatuses

Delicious and So Simple
Pancakes are a chinch to prepare, yet Bisquick still graces the shelves of lesser supermarkets. (Image courtesy LynnInSingapore)

In general, I have a hard time understanding why people buy pre-prepared food. Granted, for the sake of your sanity, some items, like puff pastry, really should not be prepared by the home chef. Other items, however, are so bafflingly simple to prepare that I cannot understand why people bother to buy them.

Then again, according to The New York Times, our culture has spawned such laziness that six-year-olds now gain the most weight in the summer, when they are supposedly outside swimming and swinging. The article begins, "Summer. The perfect time for children to play outside, swim -- and get fatter?" But why should that laziness stop at the kitchen?

Americans, it seems, will stop at nothing to avoid work. Just look at the popularity of margarita mix. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have never had a margarita. I have, however, read enough cookbooks and cooking magazines to know that margaritas are dead-simple to make. One recipe I found at Epicurious.com, has a whopping six ingredients, including such hard-to-find items as salt and ice cubes. The third of America's population that can now officially call itself "obese" would stand to benefit from burning the extra two calories of energy needed to cut and squeeze a lime, rather than dumping the tequila and Tripple Sec into a bucket of powder.

Pancakes too epitomize this trend. As Mark Bittman would say, it is a matter of ones: one egg, one cup of milk, one cup of flour and so on. Is it really that much easier to pour water into a bowl of potentially tasteless processed powder? Just as comfort is no excuse for bad fashion, laziness is no excuse for insipidity.

I just love the irony: some Americans are so lazy they cannot even stop to make food to fatten themselves. We need to stop giving the rest of the world something else to make fun of. Our Fed chairman is bad enough.