coping and cooking

Living out in the suburbs poses challenges for someone who is used to city life. I am learning to deal with most of these challenges, but the one thing that might send me running back to Brooklyn in a tearful rage is the food. Or the lack of food.  The lack of GOOD food! It’s killing me.

When I was living in NYC, I spent way too much money on eating out, mostly because I didn’t have the patience to cook, but also because it was just so easy. Why eat my own crappy homemade food when I can pay for something that actually tastes good?  And a lot of it is cheap. You pay five dollars for a falafel sandwich and then you’re done for the evening. No chopping onions, or washing dishes, or covering a bowl with saran wrap. Besides, my cooking skills were sub par. It took me years just to figure out how to cook rice.

Sadly, out here in the boonies I am forced to eat my own mediocre home- cooked meals.  I am constantly slicing some vegetable, or waiting for something to boil, or cracking an egg, or burning something in the toaster oven.  And this is all because it is easier to find a pickup truck full of free manure, than it is to find a decent meal in this town.

There are about 20 places to get a burger, so that’s good, but I have to drive for about an hour to get a decent salad or a plate of eggs benedict, and an hour and a half to get Chinese, Thai, or Indian food.  Without making a day trip out of it, there is no place to sit and have a cappuccino (well we have a Borders here, but this particular one creeps me out). There are no whole foods, or French bakeries, or places to get soup that doesn’t have heavy cream in it, or bars to sip wine at without having to watch a football game. Oh and if you want to get anything after 10pm, forget it.  You’re eating Slim Jims from the gas station.

Ok, we have great diners and Applebee’s, and Wendy’s, and a Steakhouse, and Taco Bell. Also there is an abundance of bagels and “Chicken Parm.”  But why does everything have to be covered in cheese?  And why is there so much bacon in the salads that I order?  And why is all the fresh fish immediately doused in batter and deep-fried? I just want to be able to take visitors out for a pleasant meal at a restaurant that doesn’t make you so full, you’re sick for three days.  I mean come on, melted cheese AND sour cream AND ground beef AND french fries in my appetizer?  This wouldn’t bother me so much if I weren’t such a food snob.

That’s basically my problem.  It’s that I’m a food snob. I blame New York City and my mother for that (she once told me never to say the words “honey-mustard” again.)  My hubby never complains about food out here.  Infact, if it weren’t for me, his truck would be littered with Taco Bell wrappers and ketchup packets.  Gross.

I know that most towns in the US are set up like mine, and it’s the few cities that have snazzy restaurant scenes or foodie markets, but this particular blog is about the city to suburbs transition, and I’m sure others going through this must feel the same.  Believe me, I am aware that I could have bigger problems than this and that I should just shut up and go back to steaming my kale. My sister in law lived in Nigeria for a while and she was making things like bread and ice cream from scratch because she couldn’t get those things there.  I can get 20 varieties of each of those things at my local supermarket, so what’s my problem?

Ok, so now I have been forced to learn how to cook.

After two years, I can make a decent pasta sauce, sauté veggies, bake a chicken, and figure out how long it will take to make soup, that’s more than I could have said back when I lived in Brooklyn.  I also have to pack a lunch everyday for work, which I didn’t even do when I was in elementary school. 

It’s a long drive to NYC, so our solution is to travel in our minds and palates.  For New Year’s I made my own caviar blini with $6.99 supermarket caviar, and it turned out ok. And I recently bought my hubby the Momofuku cookbook which has recipes for their dishes like Kim Chi stew, which I plan to attempt to make soon. I also recently heard about websites like foodzie.com and importfoods.com, where you can order specialty foods online, which is helpful, especially after my de pui lentils meltdown at the Stop and Shop a little while ago. I just wanted to buy French Lentils and not one store in my town had them, so I went home and told hubby we had to move.

Please forgive me for being a food snob.  I don’t want to tell other people what to eat, but I do think eating healthy, fresh and local is good for you and it’s hard if you don’t have enough choices.

Would anyone like to comment with lunch and dinner recipes for me to try?