I’m still in Mexico, and will be posting about that in a bit (once Peter leaves and I’m left to my own devices in the evenings).

In the meantime, don’t miss yet another fantastic article by Michael Pollan: Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch.

As usual, he manages to say everything I’ve been saying, but without ranting or getting depressed. The real tragedy of the current state of home cooking, in my mind, is that people who now want to learn to cook have virtually no home cooks to learn from–only fancy chefs. Home cooking is a very different skill set from restaurant cooking, and not nearly as intimidating as TV cheffery makes it seem.

I also love his point early on about the transubstantiation that’s central to cooking. It is a small art, and a small miracle, to transform ingredients. I talk about this a bit in the early parts of mine and Tamara’s cookbook, Forking Fantastic! (out Oct. 6, as if I’d let you forget).

More practically, cooking is perhaps the best arts-and-crafts project you can undertake–it’s done in an hour, and you don’t have the results cluttering up your house. But you still have the satisfaction of having completed something substantial, of having made something–which unfortunately is a feeling that’s very rare in a lot of our workdays.