Americans are lazy cooks

[Dogonthebed]

I’m an avid Pinterest collector of recipes. I see something I like the look of then pin to that’s week meal plan only to find out it is an American recipe Recipe stretching it as they seem to have shortcuts for everything we can’t get in the UK. Can they actually cook? It is the equivalent of us making a cottage pie from a Coleman mix. Anyone else find it bizarre how much help they get for basic recipes then having the cheek to set up a blog as recipes??? They could just read the back of the instructions fgs!

@SiennaMillar

A great chicken recipe from Morocco is called Bisteeya. Absolutely gorgeous dish with chicken, egg, almonds, and cinnamon. All wrapped in a pastry. I’ve never been able to successfully make it myself.

Pinterest, like other feeds, shows you more of what you have already liked and saved.

Just sayin...

It's actually because most servers make more money being tipped. That's why the restauranteur in the article I linked lost 30-40% of his staff when he raised wages and prices and eliminated tipping. When I tended bar several decades ago it was a bad night when I didn't go home with $200 in tips.

Edited to add that restaurants wouldn't necessarily lose profits by going tipless. Their wage costs would increase, but they would also lose sales as higher menu prices would cause customers to seek less expensive places to eat.

Aaahhh I see. Crazy system and crazy it will only get worse with more and more expected. Also I guess if minimum wage is so low its ike like companies are going to change it they don't need to. I Americans see it as normal. But the rest of world don't.

If a meal costs $100 in place without tips and in a place $75 but add $25 tip its same. I'm sure there wouldn't be a massive difference in prices.

I'm aware that the rest of the world doesn't see it as normal, but at most restaurants, only a small percentage of the customers are from outside the US. It's virtually zero outside of major cities or tourist destinations. The problem is when tourists think that by not tipping, they are somehow making a moral statement about the problem when in reality, they are just hurting their server and giving tourists in general a reputation for being tight.

Well you obviously do as you have literally described a disproportionate amount of children being obese in your area, if that is not a hotspot what is?

How can you plausibly argue that Britain has an obesity problem in comparison to the U S. That's ridiculous, surely like the US there are hotspots. I mean where I live I can get a huge variety of take aways including healthy ones so maybe it's down to your location. My DC are teenagers they are both categorically very thin (my Mum thinks too thin) I can honestly say all of their friends in 6th college and year 8 are the same. They walk everywhere and I suppose the habits of the families are pretty healthy. However, not always my DS eats loads not all of it good by any means and he looks like a young Mick Jagger so probably genes in his case as he definitely eats fast food with his own money. DD and her friends all have the stick legs if anything I worry loads about this so I think it is entirely location dependent. I visit my Mum in an area in the Midlands for example and there are many overweight children that look older than they are to the point of my DD when she was 8 been mistaken for a 5 year old as the difference is quite apparent.

I’m not sure about recipes but in North America I found the food in supermarkets much fresher and nicer. There was a much bigger range of everything so healthy options and loads of processed crap. I think you can eat how you want there, that’s why you get a lot of super healthy Americans. Obviously if there’s more cheap junk processed crap then if you’re short on time / money it’s going to add to the obesity problem for a lot of people! If I lived there I’d be even bigger than I am now!

I find the quality of our restaurant food here rubbish in comparison.

Unfortunately, that's not how customers see it. A $20 entree on which you would likely leave a $4 tip is considered a better deal than a $24 entree.

But it's just simple maths it's not.

And if we are going on anecdata then the biggest child, probably one of the only very overweight children in the whole of DS's primary school year was American. The Dad was massive (not obese) but tall as well and he was from New York. Equally, the primary school they attended is an urban, city one, so pretty much everyone walked or scooted or came to school on skateboards (including a Dad) and the American family pretty much always drove this gigantic truck style 4x4, we don't have the roads for those huge cars, he only lived 5 minutes around the corner.

On the other hand I knew another American Mum who's son was British but her son was very slim and a fast runner like mine. Obviously I don't know if she cooked for him but the probability is likely so yes it varies, anecdata doesn't really prove any point.

Oil produces a spongier, more moist crumb which my family prefers. I do sometimes mix butter and oil to give a bit of butter flavor, but most of the time I use oil.

Minimum server wage in restaurants is different from MW in other industries and also different from kitchen or back of house MW.

Basically, in a restaurant (or bar) the server is the golden goose who supplements the income of other staff, a sort of symbiotic relationship.

A good server or someone working in a place like a popular bar or steak restaurant can make a lot of money. It's not merely a nice part-time gig. If you identify your occupation as 'server' you are taxed based on estimated earnings - there's a special section of tax law dealing with server income from tips; it's quite complex - and even non-servers are required to state any income from tips when filling out your 1040.

Margins in the restaurant business can be very low. There are fixed costs that must be met and variable costs that can make a dent in an already small profit. This is why there has always been a reliance on tipping for server income. Many servers see the existence of tipping as an opportunity, not a curse.

Mexico is the most obese country now, I think.
I've encountered a lot of processed food in Mexico... and the Netherlands (world's thinnest high income country).

Thing about Americans is our meals are so marketed & commodified. Eating itself is sold to us as an experience and lifestyle expression, food especially excess food is everywhere and is some kind of public statement, not an incidental or 'fuel'. We Americans are bombarded by convenience food marketing & everywhere availability. I have a Canadian friend who lived in USA & used to lament how much colleagues went to restaurants. She loved cooking, hosting dinner parties, & got exasperated by how much more expensive it was to go out to eat as well as bewildered why people didn't prepare their own meals.

The thing is, if you’re looking at TikTok etc then the format lends itself to people chucking loads of stuff together and producing something quick and easy that goes in a video. That’s not necessarily how most Americans eat and I’m not sure anyone is claiming it’s fine dining.

I have American recipe books and have watched American cooking programmes that don’t have a single processed ingredient in sight. Equally, Jamie’s 15 minute meals and Delias cheats were almost all assembly and little “from scratch”

Volume vs weight- there are pros and cons. Cups are actually pretty clever because you don’t need specific equipment, if all the measurements in a recipe are proportions of a cup then the size of the cup doesn’t matter, the recipe will work with a mug, a coffee cup, a jug, a measuring cup or a jam jar- it doesn’t matter. But a weighing scale is more accurate when accuracy matters. Oil in cakes makes a lot of sense too- oil keeps in wider temperature ranges than butter, not melting everywhere when it’s hot and not rock hard when it’s cold. They make a different end product but it’s not rubbish, it’s just different because of the availability or practicality of ingredients.

I don’t like the idea of jelly as a side to savoury foods, in the same way I don’t like the idea of eating chicken feet. But then I’m not sure how many New Yorkers really like the idea of black pudding either. It’s just different, if they didn’t speak English you wouldn’t be batting an eyelid that a massive country thousands of miles away does things differently to us.

A lot of Americans come from ethnic groups that tend to be on the larger side - Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch, many people of African descent, for example. My DCs have some very tall and solidly built American relatives (Dutch heritage).

Sometimes children are not going straight home after school and will be picked up and driven to their destination.

There are very few American cities whose streets are suitable for the biggest 4x4s, but once you get out on the highway they're great.

But it's just simple maths

It's not simple maths because tipping is cultural in the US and deeply ingrained. It has a lot of short-comings, yes, but the vast majority of wait staff don't want it changed.

One thing I will say about food in the UK; I lived there many years ago and travel there quite a bit. The food, in private homes and in restaurants, has improved spectacularly over the last several decades.

One thing I think many posters overlook, or are just ignorant of, is the diversity of food cultures in the US.

And I'm still confused about the poster with issues about the store-bought fresh pasta in the soup.

Just wanted to add, I cook a LOT, I am a bit of a foodie, and it's really not hard to find a set of American measuring cups if you want to make American recipes. Mine are from Amazon and cost less than a tenner.

Every state sets its own minimum wage, and cities also set minimum wage. How it actually works on the ground within each state is that the minimum wage is whatever your closest competitor is paying.

The official MW for non tipped workers in Illinois is $13 per hour (less for workersbunder 18). In Chicago, it's $16-16.80 per hour. There are many, many hourly workers making 25-40% more than that per hour. In suburban areas employers depending on PT staff often pay a minimum of $20 an hour. You wouldn't get a teenager to babysit for less than $30 an hour twenty years ago.

Drumroll please: A little bit on the imperial system, a gorgeous read if you've the time. It all goes back to the medieval bricklayer and numbers that illiterate people can easily carry in their heads. The end part actually mentions the English cooking system and factors of four. Please do read, it's obviously from us (thus "imperial")

https://imgur.com/gallery/S9nYOfZ

Just to clarify this a bit further, no one makes the federal minimum wage. It's a legislative anachronism. Employers are required to pay whatever is higher, the state MW or the federal MW, and the state MW is always higher.

Congress stopped updating it decades ago because the states had taken over the job.

Yes I understand that as like I said upthread I have Scandinavian heritage myself, when I was in Copenhagen a couple of years ago me and my son frequently were spoken to in Danish but this Dad wasn't really big in that way and he had an Irish surname - then again obviously he could easily have that heritage via his Mother's line, my point was responding to another poster, highlighting that knowing an overweight British child in the U.S does not equate to facts.

The man was a SAHP, he didn't go anywhere, he just drove around the corner. It is a quite a 'Green' city so this is noted as it is quite a bombastic arrival in that type of car, on this kind of street, in that kind of school.

To add to that h my hav had. Health reason but his wife was the same but she did work and was thin.

^^ this
I was once given a slow cooker cookbook and it was an appalling American version. Adding cans of condensed soups or packets of cream cheese or mayonnaise. With quotes such as 'now you're really cooking', not you're not, you're just open packets.
Donated it to a charity shop.