Quick-Fixes

"Time is short," shouts the Eating Well Rush Hour Cookbook, recognizing that rush hour has moved from the streets into your kitchen. In the book's attempt to appeal to gourmets, you'll find recipes for slightly unusual things like eggplant-couscous rolls (not something we'd fix in our kitchen during rush hour). After sadly looking at a recipe requiring mangoes as an ingredient, I was heartened to discover a lengthy chapter on the culinary art of hot dogs. Ready to try microwave fajita dogs?

Not all the books sacrifice quality in the preparation. Melissa Clark's The Instant Gourmet: Delicious Meals in 20 Minutes or Less has dishes that make my mouth water. How about fresh goat cheese quesadillas tonight? Chicken breast in balsamic vinegar or even linguini with Gorgonzola cheese, pine nuts and watercress? The last recipe requires heavy cream, so you can see that we're going for maximum flavor here along with speed. But it's healthful cooking be damned.

Must we choose between health and speed? Sacrifice economies of purchase for the stressful rush to bang pots and pans? Something else is getting lost here besides flavor. What about an appreciation for the process? The reason I cook is that I enjoy it. Standing at the stove somehow relaxes me and helps me unwind from my day. I like cutting up herbs and using fresh garlic. I prefer fresh fish over frozen. Don't show me recipes that you can prepare in five minutes. I want to spend more time in the kitchen, not less. I take heart from books like Pierre Franey's Cuisine Rapide, whose concept of really fast cooking requires 60 minutes.

If we are hurrying to boil water, something is not right in our lives and it's time to stop and smell the rosemary. That's when we need to reexamine priorities. Do we really want to open a can of Spaghetti-O's, slam a few plates down on the table, pull out a stopwatch and tell the family, "Ready, set, go"? Good things take time. Faster is not necessarily better. Like sex, cooking is a pleasure that should be savored, not rushed.