It's not like I depend on it for recipes (remember when Cardamom Addict posted her recipe reviews?), but it does tend to reflect what is going on in the "typical" Canadian kitchen of the time. (Fun bonus: if you go to the website and hover over "Recipes," you can read all the calendars going back to 1974.)
Note I said "typical."
Well, somebody's idea of typical. The media's idea of typical.
Here's the 2012 idea of typical:
The 2012 version of the venerable Milk Calendar looks a lot different than the first instalment launched by Dairy Farmers of Canada.
In the mid-’70s, Canadian families cooked at home almost every day. The calendar — featuring recipes for entrees, side dishes, desserts and baked goods — has kept pace with the times as more and more families juggle busy lifestyles and embrace new trends, says its recipe developer, Jennifer MacKenzie.
“So we streamlined many of the methods to modernize some of the traditional recipes that once took longer to prepare because we definitely know people aren’t doing that any longer,” she says.
MacKenzie adds that through the years, as new ingredients came on to the market such as chipotle and sweet potatoes to name a few, the Milk Calendar changed to include these newcomers. (Hamilton Spectator, other newspapers)
Sweet potatoes are new ingredients??
But that aside...
Yes, I do cook every day, unless I'm sick or we're at the beach or something. Cook, not as in very time-consuming or expensive meals, but as in putting a few ingredients in the slow cooker, or mixing something up in a skillet and putting out a salad or vegetable, and a homemade dessert some days.
Is that now so strange? I KNOW I'm not alone; otherwise there wouldn't be so many homemaking blogs and frugal food websites. If you want to eat potatoes, meat, beans, stir fry, whatever, you do have to cook them. Or somebody does.
I'm not saying we should all revert to the 1979 Milk Calendar--after all, tastes HAVE changed.
But I just wonder when it was that yesterday's normal cook became today's freak of nature.
1 comment:
Both my daughter and I cook at home everyday. I don't use a lot of convenience foods (sometimes reverting to a "cream of" soup, etc.) but due to staying on a Feingold diet, she can't use hardly anything premade.
Actually, here in the American Midwest, I see more people cooking from scratch these days. I think it may be a result of the Food Channel and such media. Most of those shows are "from scratch".
I had a few cookbooks from the 1960s which were terrible for their "can of this" and "can of that" way of cooking. Definitely a far out reaction of women entering the paid-for-work force.
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