{"id":4207,"date":"2014-06-07T19:23:31","date_gmt":"2014-06-08T00:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4207"},"modified":"2014-06-08T19:15:17","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T00:15:17","slug":"yelp-cookbooks-and-old-boomers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4207","title":{"rendered":"Yelp, Cookbooks and Old Boomers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I joined the ratings web site Yelp about about a year ago, and I put up a couple of reviews for some local establishments that I frequent. Given that I frequent them because I actually like these places, I gave them all good reviews on Yelp. Well, wouldn’t you know it . . . a few months later, Yelp took down all my reviews. I never got an explanation, but I have heard that Yelp puts every rater thru a credibility analysis, and if you give good ratings all the time, they decide that you must be getting paid or otherwise have a vested interest in promoting the places that you write about. So you get booted. <\/p>\n

Well hey, Yelp . . . maybe I just wanted to tell the world about the good places, and not bother to bitch about the not-so-good (I mean, isn’t there enough bitching about life already?). Perhaps I like to commend, and I don’t enjoy criticizing. But I WILL now criticize Yelp; sure, they need to maintain credibility with their viewership, but in the process they make the assumption that every honest person is going to gripe on-line about their bad experiences. Honesty = bitchiness. People who just don’t like to complain, who like to share the good but perhaps keep the bad to themselves, just don’t fit into Yelp-world. I just don’t see this as a positive social trend; it is NOT an example of how modern technology is \u201cbringing us all together\u201d \u2013 just the opposite, I’d say. But that’s just me, I guess, living in the past.<\/p>\n

Hey though, I could try to \u201cmodernize myself\u201d, and perhaps I will start by doing a bad review here. I’m going to pan most recent versions of a famous cookbook, the \u201cBetter Homes and Gardens New Cookbook<\/a>\u201d. I have had the 1981 version since the mid-80’s, and it served me well as a basic cooking guide over the years. By 1990 I was pretty much a committed vegetarian, so a lot of the recipes (such as Porcupine Meatballs, Tongue and Lima Skillet, Creamed Sweetbreads or Salami-Bean Casserole) were no longer relevant. I bought and made good use of 3 or 4 basic vegetarian cookbooks (including Laurel’s Kitchen and the Enchanted Brocolli Forest). But the BH&GN Cookbook has so many recipes for so many different kinds of foods that a lot of it still worked for me. I still found myself pulling it off the shelf and opening it on the table as I tried to figure out how to put something palatable, perhaps even enjoyable together for dinner (or dessert \u2013 lots of basic cookie and cake recipes). <\/p>\n

A few years ago I decided to go modern and pick up the 2010 version of BH&GN Cookbook; I liked the notebook format, it’s very nice to leaf thru on your kitchen table. But something is missing, something has been lost. This new \u201cNew Cookbook\u201d seems to be trying too hard to be \u201cwith it\u201d, to adapt to \u201cmodern family life\u201d. It has lots of pics and gives you prep times and hints on how to use pre-packaged foods from the supermarket (such as spinach ravioli) . . . it also drops some eclectic but interesting items from earlier editions such as mulligatawny, a spicy Indian soup (albeit, I use a recipe for mulligatawny from Nikki Goldbeck’s American Wholefoods Cookbook, using lentils instead of chicken pieces).<\/p>\n

But then again, you can still find a lot of from-scratch recipes here, if that’s the way that you want to go (although the recipe for home-made tomato catsup is gone; can’t expect anyone to make their own catsup anymore). There are more pix and more info inside than the classic version, even if mulligatawny is gone. So now that I’m looking thru the thing again, it doesn’t seem so bad after all. There are some ideas in it that I may want to try out, such as veggie-stuffed pasta shells (but I will substitute tofu and flax meal for cheese and egg), or roast red pepper soup (using veggie broth instead of chicken, of course).<\/p>\n

Maybe I didn’t like the new copy at first mostly because I’m nostalgic for a simpler time, when recipes could just be recipes, and a cookbook didn’t have to get involved with family life-style management. I suppose that the modern BH&GN Cookbook is quite useful to \u201ctoday’s busy families\u201d, that it does its best to allow them to get involved at whatever level they wish to with their meal preparations. I guess that I just long for the days when most households had someone with the time and interest to prepare good fresh meals (but yes, I realize that this duty was repressively assigned primarily to the women of the family, back in those \u201cgood old days\u201d).<\/p>\n

So maybe my review here is more of a thumbs-down on modern life than on the 15th Edition of the BH&GN Cookbook; maybe it’s more a function of what’s going on in my own head these days. But hey, I guess it’s just another part of growing old. <\/p>\n

Yea, it looks like I can’t post a bad review after all (other than for Yelp). My heart is just not in it. I guess that I AM old now, I am part of a different generation \u2013 one that didn’t bitch so much (how else would our nation have gotten through a horror show like World War 2?). One that didn’t go around saying \u201cdon’t trust anyone over 30\u201d or sing \u201chope I die before I grow old\u201d (the Who). It’s too bad that \u201cmy generation\u201d (the Who again) was responsible for these innovations, and the generations that followed are now taking it to the next level. We certainly did \u201cteach [our] children well\u201d (CSN&Y). And they returned the favor with things like Yelp. Oh well, at least we handed down to them a pretty good cookbook, if they are interested.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I joined the ratings web site Yelp about about a year ago, and I put up a couple of reviews for some local establishments that I frequent. Given that I frequent them because I actually like these places, I gave them all good reviews on Yelp. Well, wouldn’t you know it . . . a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4207"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4207"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4209,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4207\/revisions\/4209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}