Maybe It's Another Dying Art

So lately I've been taking a couple of cooking or baking classes. I want to be a good cook. I want family and friends to say, "Oh, Seredne's making her famous [insert totally kickass and amazing food here]?! I wouldn't miss it for the world!"

I had to make cookies for my boyfriend to take to work on Friday (which, by the way, he gave the extras to people at work to take home, he did not bring them home for me!). I was all prepped to make chocolate chip cookies from scratch, but of course I realized there was one ingredient that I didn't have (stupid butter, I only had margarine and it specifically said NO MARGARINE).

I wound up going to the corner market, buying the package of ready made cookie dough, slicing it and assembling it on a tray, and baking for 12 minutes. Sure, it's no muss/no fuss, but I wonder if it actually turned out better than my attempt at homemade would have been.

Where's the shame in buying ready made cookie dough or break-and-bake? It's still made with love. It's still ridiculously tasty (although I much prefer Pillsbury to Tollhouse). If real cooking, buying all the individual ingredients, mixing, and baking, is a dying art, is it necessarily such a bad thing?

Take my bread baking class for example. We made the dough from scratch, but we used giant standing electric mixers because the dough is just so tough. At the end of the class when we were testing what we just made, it actually wasn't that good.

Now I don't know if that's because maybe things didn't have enough time to bake, but I got to bring home some french bread dough which I baked later. THAT dough was extremely tasty. But really, no better than anything you'd get in a bakery.

I could see maybe at Thanksgiving preparing your bread from scratch. But in most instances, I'm not sure I see that it's worth it.

Maybe I won't make such a great cook after all!

Also this summer I bought a sewing machine at a yard sale. I'm pretty excited about the possibility of learning how to make my own purses (the one I have that I made is quite nice... and it's reversible?), skirts, or I was even thinking of making a quilt.

A few weeks ago my boyfriend and I drove by a material store. He was not about to stop the car to go in, and he said that it was another dying art. My argument back was mostly awful (good thing I didn't stay in law school). I tried to say something about what would he do if clothes factories shut down and he had to make his own. Then he said something about that being ridiculous, and he talked for awhile about the Spinning Jenny. Who talks about the Spinning Jenny!?

Maybe cooking is another dying art.