Nothing like a home-cooked meal

Fast Food? They Like It Faster All the Time

By Rick Horowitz

The tartar sauce was the key. Buying the tartar sauce meant we were serious about the fish sticks.

You've got a picture in your head somewhere: the all-American family sitting down to the all-American meal. The ingredients are fresh and colorful, the pots and pans bubble and hiss, and those tantalizing scents have been floating through the house for hours, promising great eating ahead.

Not our house. Not our meals. Not lately.

When it comes to the family dining experience, we've become just a bit more casual than that. It doesn't have to be fish sticks. Sometimes it's a nice "Hot Pocket" -- we've got plenty of varieties to choose from. Or a tasty "Budget Gourmet." It hardly matters what it is, as long as it's fast.

The Younger Teen has it all scoped out. She's checked out the latest arrivals from the supermarket -- bag after bag of ready-made something-or-others -- and she knows a trend when she sees one.

"If it's not frozen," she announces, "it's not happenin' in this house."

It's not that we won't lift a finger to put food on the table. We lift the finger, and then we hit the "Start" button on the microwave.

It wasn't always that way. Once upon a time, there was cooking done around here -- actual cooking, with actual food. Then life got complicated. There were work schedules, of course, not to mention after-school jobs and college classes and bus schedules and homework and movie schedules and TV shows and naps and friends and dates and --

No slicing, no dicing; that's our latest philosophy.

Nobody's got the time or energy to do that kind of thing, and anyway, why bother? Even if one of us could find the time or the energy to pull together an authentic edible cooked from scratch, there's virtually no chance that everyone (or even anyone) else would be around to enjoy it when it was ready. Call us crazy, but preparing a multi-course feast that goes directly from the stove to the leftover containers just isn't all that exciting.

We have the necessary equipment; we're just not equipped to deal with it right now. I mean, why use a food processor when there's so much processed food already out there?

Fish sticks, for instance...

The first time we bought them -- the first time we'd bought them in years -- it was almost a joke. A symbol. Had things gotten so out of control that fish sticks were the best we could do for our happy, harried household? We found some chopped-up pickles in the back of the refrigerator one evening, drowned the pickles in a lump of mayonnaise and spread the creation over our sudden seafood at 10 o'clock or so. Success! A little late for your basic weeknight dinner, but better than nothing, right?

That was a couple of weeks ago. The next time we went shopping, we bought the large package of fish sticks, and then two packages. We didn't seem to be joking anymore, though there was still the chance (the hope?) that sometime soon, we'd come to our senses and climb back up the food chain.

And then last night, we bought the tartar sauce.

It was just a small bottle, but it was the principle of the thing. Mixing pickle chunks and mayonnaise was now beyond us, too; that's what we were saying. From now on, even our tartar sauce would be a convenience food.

And the other thing we were saying? Climbing the food chain will have to wait.

There are fish sticks in our future.

Posted 3/9/99. Only the finest ingredients are used.

Search the Web Search Rick's!