Coyote's Den

Many Americans today get all their meals in little boxes that you throw into the oven or microwave, or that you buy from restaurants and fast-food joints. They don't know how to cook, or they don't feel they can cook well, or they don't think they have the time to cook, much less learn how to cook. That makes Coyote sad. People work all day to survive in this society, then they spend extra hours on top of working their day jobs running around paying bills, running errands, washing clothes, and shopping for food and other necessities.

When you think about it, the main work of our hunter-gatherer and other earlier ancestors was usually the work of directly providing their own food, shelter and needs. Nowadays, we work all day at a job, so we can earn money, so that we can afford to run around doing the work of providing for our needs. How crazy is that?

So naturally, the inclination is to use some of that money to let other people do some of our work. One way that happens is that many of us buy prepared foods so that we don't have to cook ourselves. Or we buy already prepared ingredients, even when we do cook at home, so that we'll spend less time and energy cooking, or learning how to cook.

We eat "just-add-water" meals, dump stuff out of cans directly into a microwave oven-safe dish, and even cut pieces of already-seasoned and marinated meat out of plastic heat sealed containers and drop it into baking pans and just set the timer.

I suspect that a lot of people in my country don't even know what food tastes like when prepared with fresh vegetables, spices, and other ingredients. And that makes Coyote sad also.

Don't get me wrong - food preservation has not only made civilization able to sustain much larger numbers of people safely, and has given us protection from famine and a way to make use of surplus, but it's also made it easier to prepare a lot of meals quickly. That can be especially important in a modern age where so much of our time is taken up with work and meta-work related activities that we just don't have time or energy to fiddle around in the kitchen for an extra hour.

Hmm... wow... now that I'm thinking about it, those arguments almost sound like arguments against food preservation! Ha ha!

But basically, what I want to get across here is that for many foods and flavorings, the difference in flavor and ultimate enjoyment of completed dishes can be phenomenal. Having said that, there are benefits to using preserved and packaged foods, that "cooking snobs" should not ignore. Indeed, in some cases, the method of preserving the food imparts a flavor or texture that makes that kind of prepared food the only way to go in order to get a certain result with cooking.

Also... I believe that the further you separate yourself from where food comes from &em; from where the forces that allow you to remain a living creature come from &em;, the more separated you become from the processes of life, and how to experience it, and how to even understand and enjoy your own body and senses.

I urge people to learn how to cook for themselves even if it's just in a rudimentary fashion, and even if they don't do it all the time. You'll learn to appreciate certain things more, and you'll probably enjoy how your meals taste a whole lot more. But even if you don't cook for yourself, find someone who not only can cook for you, but who will make good food.

It is my intention to include in this compilation, not just recipes for individual food items and dishes, but informational articles on the food and ingredients themselves.

And for those who worry that this whole cooking with good ingredients thing is difficult or complicated... please keep in mind... I'm Coyote. I'm lazy. I'd only put forth the effort if it's worth it, and I always aim to put forth as little effort as possible to get a job done right. If I can do it, so can you.