Ditching Chopping

The other Monday I tried to make a lower-effort meal from scratch. Typically I cook on Mondays, since the trash goes out the next day. Living in an apartment with no outside dumpster means the peelings and other food waste are mine until the Streets Department takes them away, and they can get kind of pungent if they sit there too long. My usual MO is to cook a big pot of some kind of stew along with cooked veggies of some kind (baking a winter squash, roasting a variety of vegetables, making a gazpacho in the veggie-flush late summer, etc.) that I pack the fridge and freezer with. This can take all of Monday.

Recently I hit Trader Joe's, determined to embrace the frozen, thawable meal. I also saw that they have pre-chopped mirepoix (which I have since seen at Shoprite too). So, I made it one last Monday (I reluctantly admit there could be many 'one last Mondays') and made a tempeh chili I found on Post Punk Kitchen. It was pretty damn good, a little spicy for M, but G has been pounding it. Indeed without chopping, it became a task of simply cooking the chopped veggies, dumping everything else in, and leaving it on the stove awhile.

You'd think the pre-chopped veggie would be the perfect way to get more people cooking from scratch, but I'm not sure the axis of Bittman/Pollan would fully approve. Well, maybe Bittman, but Pollan seems attached to his romanticized kitchen labor. In his recent book Cooked, he admits that chopping is drudgery. "So why would you - why would anyone? - do it if you didn't have to?" He follows that question with a discussion of how Americans have slipped from cooking their own meals at home to buying takeout meals or frozen stuff they can pop into the microwave. I guess the idea is that chopping vegetables is a necessary evil, like the strain and sweating of exercise, something that in our modern world we could certainly avoid, but at great cost. I'm not so sure.