Cookbook Review: "I Dream of Dinner (so you don't have to)", by Ali Slagle

 

This was a random snag at the local library in the New Releases section. Beneath the title says 'low-effort, high-reward recipes', and I'm always curious about that, since food media treats that concept quite variably over time, and quite rarely with any sort of honesty about the preparations. Given that this book was apparently start-to-finish mid pandemic, it offers a very interesting sociological microclimate to analyze. 

Much of what this book seems to focus on is, paradoxically, not focusing on specifics. It emphasizes the notion of being flexible with ingredients while developing an understanding of versatile recipe concepts rather than fixed recipes. That's a laudable notion, and one I regularly espouse on my Twitch channel while educating my viewers towards it, so I had my hopes up to some degree.

This book is packed to the gills with both recipes and recipe concepts that are fairly quick and easy, which is great. But the vast number of ingredients that show up throughout it make me think that in its execution, the book forgets its goal. There are massive numbers of secondary and tertiary ingredients that are either aggressively seasonal, uncommon, expensive, or just unlikely to be used up before they spoil. This cookbook talks about quick and easy but it builds ideas that cry out for a massive pantry, fridge and perhaps a nearby bakery. 

Being geared for a busy life would be just fine if it had any sort of consistency in that regard. The amount of potential ingredients mentioned (and then frequently glossed over) in this book does the concept no favors. If you want to focus on the methodology, don't bury it in excess superflous possibilities. 

I understand the notion- offering large numbers of potential ingredients sounds like a great idea for inspiring people to try new things or get creative with what's on hand. Unfortunately, when your concept is largely geared toward people in a distracted or overworked hurry, the reader is more likely to be mildly overwhelmed by decision paralysis, preventing them from doing the sort of riffing the book wants them to. 

Including a 'tech tree' or flowchart page for each concept or major section with a few nonspecific examples would have been far simpler and more effective at getting the point across for most of the book, and cut a hundred pages out to boot.

Now some other good parts of this book, to my mind, are the visuals. There are tons of pictures, and they do a fine job of making the food look delicious. 

Thing is, most of them are fancy plate-ups that thumb their nose at 'low-effort'. I know full well the time and attention it takes to make simple food look that good, and the average home cook doesn't have it. It's understandable, but disingenuous and not really fair. For a cookbook that's meant to build confidence in a person's capabilities and creativity, it does a great job of setting them up for the "ehh, close enough" sadness when their dinner looks little indeed like the pictures implied. Instagram Inadequacy is a large and still growing problem in food media, and books like this don't help.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I do. It has a handful of recipe ideas I'll probably use, and it has endorsements from people I would trust. But everyone whiffs sometimes, and this is one of them. I Dream of Dinner takes the best notions from scores of other cooks and mashes them together into a book that won't intrigue or inspire unless you already know how to read it- and the intended audience is supposed to be people who don't. This is a concept that doesn't feel like it's been field-tested properly. Given the circumstances of its creation, that's not a surprise, but it's really concerning that there's so much tunnel vision here. This one goes back to the library as a disappointment.

Unsafe and Unnecessary Information

 

With the massive expansion in internet availability around the world, the potential for easy access to information has never been higher. 

Unfortunately, the world is full of people who don't care about accuracy, only marketability, and the modern internet centers around that fundamental design flaw (and the accompanying character flaws responsible).

Accurate information tends to be static. It's sometimes utilitarian, even boring. It comes from verifiable professionals, often with accompanying references. 

That's not how the internet works right now, which is a terrible problem. Such a measured, deliberate approach not only fights with the current rapid-fire "content creation" meta, but also with the visibility and accessibility algorithms behind the websites themselves.

Under the hood, the modern internet is sabotaging itself for the sake of short term offscreen profits, maximizing its ability to farm search information, then harvest and sell potentially useful data to other corporations and governments that are willing and able to pay. It's like a futures market- so all parties know it's nonsense but they play along anyway!

When it comes to most things food-related online, aids like the Jump To Recipe browser plugin are almost mandatory, since brief documents with lower word count (as opposed to, say, short videos) get reduced priority in search engines, rendering them less effectively found. What would otherwise be a quick and easy lookup feels like it's been hamstrung from both sides, padded out to the point of aggravation with longform anecdotes and ersatz prose just to reach a level of search priority it was obliged to from the start. 

To a person in a hurry looking for a weeknight dinner notion, it feels like a profound betrayal to find a 'recipe' webpage that then requires navigating past a handful of ads, sponsorships, and an often unreadably obtuse wall of vaguely related text to find a 'recipe' that might turn out to be a poorly formatted mess ill-suited for the purpose. There is little worse than wasted time.

The internet was developed to speed up information sharing, after all. 

Anyone else still remember the old term "The Information Superhighway"?

Doesn't exist any more. Now useful things are buried in piles of catchy but forgettable junk. We've got lasting horrors like NyQuil Chicken, or the uniquely Chicagoan Malört Sausage. Does anyone remember the memetic horror Tide Pod Pizza? Things like that are/were popular. Imagine the horrors you might have missed!

I keep my personal online presence to a relative minimum. I've talked about it before, even. The more of something there is, the less likely any of it is going to be adequately organized, curated, and useful to those who might seek it out.

Just because it can exist doesn't mean it should, and just because it exists doesn't mean it deserves to be seen. Reckless promotion of unverified information kills people. Hasn't that been obvious enough these past few years?

Unfortunate that this morning showed clearly how sufficiently large companies are willing to cover for one another at the macro level when it comes to misinformation. The sorts of problems these situations create can't be solved with just money. When it looks okay for the big guy, the little one imitates, and the whole environment suffers.

But I suppose if given enough money, one can buy sufficient peace and quiet for the rest of one's days... minus occasional grumblings from a vestigial conscience.