Steve Calvin wrote:

> With lives seemingly getting busier and busier do you see the end of
> "scratch" cooking in the future? Just looking backward, my Mother and
> especially my Grandmothers cooked everything from scratch. Breads,
> cakes, pies including the crusts, stews, soups, sauces etc...
>
> Today is seems as though the number of people who routinely cook from
> scratch is dwindling. People are migrating to canned stews, spaghetti
> sauces, sauces in general, soups, etc. I know quite a few people who
> don't cook, period. They either do take out, go out, TV-"dinners",
> frozen stuff like pot-pies, and even premade and frozen PB&J sandwiches
> for gawd sakes! Now I admit that I don't routinely make bread but I
> pretty much make much everything else "the old fashioned way."
>
> Anyone else noticing a decline in folks like us who enjoy cooking and
> make the time necessary to indulge ourselves?

Judging by the quantity and variety of prepared foods I see on the shelves
and the things that people are loading up on in the grocery stores, that
seems to be the case. We don't eat a lot of soup in this household, so it
is not worth while to make a batch, so I buy a few cans of soup once in a
while. We don't eat much bread, and since we have a great Italian bakery in
town it is hardly worth it to bake my own bread. I do buy jars of pasta
sauce, an occasional bag of cookies. It is hard to turn down the goodies in
a good bakery. Other than that, just about everything we eat here is from
scratch. Cakes, cookies, pies, stews, puddings, meat pies. It's the same
with my family and my in laws.