Sharing the kitchen
Made dumplings with Susanna, Greg and Nikki over the weekend. It was one of their semi-regular cooking nights. They've had some pretty impressive cooking nights in the past: perogies, samosas and handmade pasta (without a pasta machine). This weekend, it was pork dumplings. Egg drop soup, and stir-fried baby bok choy with spicy tofu and mushrooms rounded out the meal. Afterwards, we had mango sherbet and green tea ice cream.
I love putting together a meal with friends. Especially when the meal is dumplings. Busy hands make conversations flow freely. And I really like how everyone helps to create something that we all later share.
Which makes something like SupperWorks difficult to understand. It’s a cooking concept that’s coming to Ottawa. I read about it in the newspaper on the same day as the dumpling making session. SupperWorks offers a kitchen away from your own kitchen for preparing meals. How it works is you’re given a list of possible entrees. You check off the ones that interest you. Then you go to the SupperWorks industrial kitchen where they provide all the ingredients for your meals -- pre-washed, chopped and measured. Your job is to follow the recipe and put the dishes together. And you don’t need to clean up. After you’ve finished making one meal, you move to a different station in the kitchen for the next entree. You then take the entrees home and put them in freezer – so you can pull them out at your convenience.
SupperWorks says the benefits of this idea are you get to make meals from scratch (sort of), you get to cook without being distracted by kids, spouse, phone calls or the dog, and you don’t need to put any thought into what to make. Plus you get to use a big, shiny, stainless steel kitchen. The last point is appealing, given how my kitchen is the same width as most people's hallways. But nothing else about SupperWorks attracts me.
First, choosing the meals to make is part of the fun of cooking. I don’t want someone deciding that for me. Second, there’s no question that family can be frustrating when you’re tired, stressed and trying to put dinner on the table, but choosing to leave your house to make meals seems a bit drastic. Besides, how are kids supposed to learn how to cook if mom or dad leaves the house every time they prepare a meal?
It also feels as if real-life cooking is trying to imitate television cooking. And that’s just plain disturbing. You’ve watched cooking shows before where all the chef does is throw a couple of previously prepared ingredients in a bowl, stick the mixture in the oven, and then reach to the oven rack below where they pull out the dish that’s supposed to emerge after 45 minutes at 350 degrees farrenheit. Have people become so used to seeing this concept that they think that’s what cooking should be? That someone else should do the prep work and their job should be what’s seen on-camera? I’m curious to see how SupperWorks does in Ottawa.
I love putting together a meal with friends. Especially when the meal is dumplings. Busy hands make conversations flow freely. And I really like how everyone helps to create something that we all later share.
Which makes something like SupperWorks difficult to understand. It’s a cooking concept that’s coming to Ottawa. I read about it in the newspaper on the same day as the dumpling making session. SupperWorks offers a kitchen away from your own kitchen for preparing meals. How it works is you’re given a list of possible entrees. You check off the ones that interest you. Then you go to the SupperWorks industrial kitchen where they provide all the ingredients for your meals -- pre-washed, chopped and measured. Your job is to follow the recipe and put the dishes together. And you don’t need to clean up. After you’ve finished making one meal, you move to a different station in the kitchen for the next entree. You then take the entrees home and put them in freezer – so you can pull them out at your convenience.
SupperWorks says the benefits of this idea are you get to make meals from scratch (sort of), you get to cook without being distracted by kids, spouse, phone calls or the dog, and you don’t need to put any thought into what to make. Plus you get to use a big, shiny, stainless steel kitchen. The last point is appealing, given how my kitchen is the same width as most people's hallways. But nothing else about SupperWorks attracts me.
First, choosing the meals to make is part of the fun of cooking. I don’t want someone deciding that for me. Second, there’s no question that family can be frustrating when you’re tired, stressed and trying to put dinner on the table, but choosing to leave your house to make meals seems a bit drastic. Besides, how are kids supposed to learn how to cook if mom or dad leaves the house every time they prepare a meal?
It also feels as if real-life cooking is trying to imitate television cooking. And that’s just plain disturbing. You’ve watched cooking shows before where all the chef does is throw a couple of previously prepared ingredients in a bowl, stick the mixture in the oven, and then reach to the oven rack below where they pull out the dish that’s supposed to emerge after 45 minutes at 350 degrees farrenheit. Have people become so used to seeing this concept that they think that’s what cooking should be? That someone else should do the prep work and their job should be what’s seen on-camera? I’m curious to see how SupperWorks does in Ottawa.
posted by the porcelain spoon at Monday, August 28, 2006
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