This Is Why It's Called Slow Food

In this modern day and age, it's amazing how much time goes into preparing our food before we ever see it. I'm not talking about ready-made food like frozen pizza or restaurant food, either. I'm talking about the plain, raw ingredients you might pick up in the produce section or the meat counter and then spend some time of your own turning into a meal.

Let's take yesterday's Sunday lunch, for example. We had roast chicken with a tarragon sauce, boiled potatoes, corn on the cob, and a cucumber and tomato salad. Simple enough, right? Right. Except . . .

The chicken was one we had raised, slaughtered, plucked, and eviscerated ourselves. To say nothing of the breaking of the legs. Hours of work already there. Inside the cavity I stuck some random little onions I had thinned from the garden. Hours more work for planting, watering, weeding, and cleaning those onions.

The sauce included tarragon from the garden, which of course had been planted, watered, weeded, and then harvested, plus washed and chopped. The chicken stock for the sauce had been prepared by the MiL from the hearts, necks, and gizzards of the slaughtered roosters. She spent quite awhile carefully skinning and trimming those pieces before putting them in the pot to simmer.

The potatoes, in addition to the back-breaking work in the garden before they even grew big enough to harvest, had to be dug up, scrubbed clean, peeled, quartered, and then boiled.

You all know the work that goes into tomatoes, shallots, and cucumbers (although these weren't our cucumbers--the MiL bought some at a farm stand because we HAVE no cucumbers dammit) in the garden before they can become a salad. Same with the corn, which then has to be harvested, shucked, and de-silked before being simply boiled.

So for a relatively simple meal that was consumed in less than half an hour, I probably spent at least an hour in the kitchen doing the actual cooking, and there were untold hours to plant, grow, harvest, and prep all that food before it became, well, food.

It's kind of tiring to contemplate, but I'm sure I don't need to tell you that everything on our plates yesterday was the best possible example of that particular food. It was beyond delicious, and doing all the work yourself will make you appreciate your food a whole hell of a lot more.

That said, you should know we had leftover Chinese takeout for dinner. Because even I have my limits.