I was excited to take home ec, but little did I realize it was basically for people who had never been in a kitchen before. If you were a kid who had parents/grandparents who cooked and let you help out, you were miles ahead of the game.
We made brownies. From a box. Taco salad. Forget what else but it was all box food type stuff. If you’re a kid in the US who doesn’t have a home cooking tradition Home Ec isn’t going to teach you shit.
to be fair, learning how to make even boxed meals is still better than nothing if you’re from a home life situation where you’ve received zero food prep knowledge
And once you get $30 and already have a couple pots and pans, a rice cooker ought to be high on the priority list. They don’t have to be expensive, although some are, but they are so worth it for the convenience.
I used to rarely have rice: it’s not hard to cook but you have to pay attention, and get the timing right, and it’s easy to screw it up. But getting a rice cooker was a game changer, and now I eat rice several times a week. While single use gadgets are generally not worth it, this one is.
I helped out in the kitchen a lot, but the home ec classes I took were things that I wasn’t (yet) doing at home.
My mom made scrambled eggs, but the way they taught me to do it in home ec resulted in much better eggs. They taught me how to make tacos, my mom didn’t know about tacos at all.
I think the issue is that my mom really learned very little from her own mother because her own mother wasn’t much of a cook. My mom cooked every day. She had cook books. She had a few recipes handed down from relatives. But, she didn’t know what she didn’t know, which was a lot. Almost everything was overcooked and dry. She didn’t know how to taste what she was cooking and adjust things. She didn’t understand the purpose of the ingredients in the recipes she made, so she’d substitute things that completely ruined it.
I think my home ec classes were much better than the ones you had. But, also, my mom wasn’t very good at cooking. So, home ec was really useful for me.
Now we have the internet: an entire world of inspiration, variation, coming with strips and perhaps a video! No more excuses
They taught me how to make tacos
One of the things still on my list. I grew up learning to make tacos from my mom: buy a kit with crunchy shells, a spice pack to brown ground meat with, preshredded lettuce and cheese.
But I’ve had some amazing tacos that look nothing like those and are so much better. I’ve started exploring making real tacos with actual ingredients and with tortillas l, but there’s so much more to try and to learn even for such a simple food.
Currently I really like the Costco family taco kit. Real ingredients, So good, so convenient, inexpensive for prepared food, and better than anything I make.
I recommend a trip to Mexico. The street tacos there are nothing like the hard shell tacos that are common in grocery stores.
Just the variety of meat fillings is huge: Suadero, Barbacoa, Chorizo, Carnitas, Carne Asada…
The tacos are also small and cheap. That means you can try a variety of different ones without filling up, and obviously without worrying about the cost. Even places in the US and Canada that sell pretty authentic tacos typically make them fairly big and fairly expensive, so you have to choose one flavour per sitting. You may get 3 tacos in an order. That same amount of filling would be spread among 10 tacos in Mexico so you can either have a small snack, or have a variety of different tacos for a full meal.
One of my teachers took us out hunting once. Shot a hare. We were there for every part of that journey from the hunt to it being on the plate and eaten. I definitely learned a lot from that.
We learned about food safety (“don’t leave stuff on the counter forever”, “raw chicken is bad for you”), how to properly hand wash dishes, how to budget for a household, and a bit about the various non-nuclear family shapes. (Yes, I learned about divorce in 6th grade. It just hadn’t come up in my life before. No mention of non-hetero couples or non-married couples because, you know, Kentucky in the 90s.) It was a broad life skills class with an emphasis on cooking. Not a clue what we cooked, but we got to use a flour sifter and that was fun.
Makes me really sad when people can’t make a cake without a box or can’t make a basic roux or something. Really take for granted my privellege to have been exposed to basic stuff like that.
My first boyfriend in college taught me how to make a roux. It’s such a useful building block for all sorts of foods. We’d make leek and potato stew, generally using the fat from bacon for the roux. Highly recommend as a filling meal for college students.
Huh, it just occurred to me that when people say “Glad school taught me the Pythagorean theorem but not real life skills like how to do my taxes”, they’re just forgetting about home ec.
I never had the option of taking something like that I school, but thankfully my family cooked enough that I got rather good at cooking and spicing food. I’ve actually taught my wife how to do it, and we’re in the process of trying to teach our partner how to cook now.
Home Ec was an elective class for me (that I didn’t take) as an alternative to Personal Health, a low-impact PE course with an emphasis on nutrition (that I also didn’t take). We did not have any other practical skills classes, like wood shop or automotive whatever. Poverty district.
My middle school had a cooking class and a sewing class, each of which we all took at different times. I saved my favorite recipe from the cooking class (a poppy seed cake) and made it a few times even after the class was over (but have since lost the recipe for.) I remember we used a pudding mix in it, which I wouldn’t have thought to do before. Meanwhile in sewing, we made letter-shaped pillows of our initials, which I really enjoyed. I ended up hand-sewing the rest of the letters of my name after the class was over to go along with it.
The only complaint I have is that the electives for my middle school (which were mandatory, so hardly “elective”) were cooler than the electives for my high school. I remember other schools having things like metal shop and swimming. A friend from Canada had an entire booklet of electives to choose from. My school had a single sheet of options, many with stupid names that didn’t reflect what they really were. I ended up taking an interior design class because the name made it sound like it would teach practical home skills. Granted, I still enjoyed the class and learned a lot from it (and have been able to apply the knowledge, even if just when building in the Sims.) Though if the classes had descriptions that actually fit what they were teaching, I probably would’ve taken something else. There were even a few boys who had signed up for that class, just to transfer out after the first day. Like me, they thought they’d be learning how to handle home finances or something, not learning how to identify a Queen Anne era chair by the style of its legs.
Ours was just, “Here’s a video unrelated to home economics,” because it and choir were the classes you got stuck in if there wasn’t something else you could take that period (only 150 kids k-12)
I was excited to take home ec, but little did I realize it was basically for people who had never been in a kitchen before. If you were a kid who had parents/grandparents who cooked and let you help out, you were miles ahead of the game.
We made brownies. From a box. Taco salad. Forget what else but it was all box food type stuff. If you’re a kid in the US who doesn’t have a home cooking tradition Home Ec isn’t going to teach you shit.
to be fair, learning how to make even boxed meals is still better than nothing if you’re from a home life situation where you’ve received zero food prep knowledge
Not to be too picky, but boxed food usually aint the best for you. Now a class called “Shit you can do with rice” would be a killer way to go.
… and beans.
That’s lesson 1
Lesson 1 would be “Don’t use actual shit”.
And potatoes
And once you get $30 and already have a couple pots and pans, a rice cooker ought to be high on the priority list. They don’t have to be expensive, although some are, but they are so worth it for the convenience.
I used to rarely have rice: it’s not hard to cook but you have to pay attention, and get the timing right, and it’s easy to screw it up. But getting a rice cooker was a game changer, and now I eat rice several times a week. While single use gadgets are generally not worth it, this one is.
I helped out in the kitchen a lot, but the home ec classes I took were things that I wasn’t (yet) doing at home.
My mom made scrambled eggs, but the way they taught me to do it in home ec resulted in much better eggs. They taught me how to make tacos, my mom didn’t know about tacos at all.
I think the issue is that my mom really learned very little from her own mother because her own mother wasn’t much of a cook. My mom cooked every day. She had cook books. She had a few recipes handed down from relatives. But, she didn’t know what she didn’t know, which was a lot. Almost everything was overcooked and dry. She didn’t know how to taste what she was cooking and adjust things. She didn’t understand the purpose of the ingredients in the recipes she made, so she’d substitute things that completely ruined it.
I think my home ec classes were much better than the ones you had. But, also, my mom wasn’t very good at cooking. So, home ec was really useful for me.
Now we have the internet: an entire world of inspiration, variation, coming with strips and perhaps a video! No more excuses
One of the things still on my list. I grew up learning to make tacos from my mom: buy a kit with crunchy shells, a spice pack to brown ground meat with, preshredded lettuce and cheese.
But I’ve had some amazing tacos that look nothing like those and are so much better. I’ve started exploring making real tacos with actual ingredients and with tortillas l, but there’s so much more to try and to learn even for such a simple food.
Currently I really like the Costco family taco kit. Real ingredients, So good, so convenient, inexpensive for prepared food, and better than anything I make.
I recommend a trip to Mexico. The street tacos there are nothing like the hard shell tacos that are common in grocery stores.
Just the variety of meat fillings is huge: Suadero, Barbacoa, Chorizo, Carnitas, Carne Asada…
The tacos are also small and cheap. That means you can try a variety of different ones without filling up, and obviously without worrying about the cost. Even places in the US and Canada that sell pretty authentic tacos typically make them fairly big and fairly expensive, so you have to choose one flavour per sitting. You may get 3 tacos in an order. That same amount of filling would be spread among 10 tacos in Mexico so you can either have a small snack, or have a variety of different tacos for a full meal.
That would be excellent! It’s on my list
One of my teachers took us out hunting once. Shot a hare. We were there for every part of that journey from the hunt to it being on the plate and eaten. I definitely learned a lot from that.
Did you learn metallurgy to make the gun tho?
I knew I missed one class!
Also chemistry to make the gunpowder
That’s what shop class was for
When I had it, we learned much more than just cooking…
I remember they taught us how to do laundry, how to iron clothes, how to sew, how to balance a checkbook (yeah I’m old shut up), among other things.
Very useful actually, and despite it being over 2 decades ago, I still know how to do all of it.
Like with any class it really depends on your teacher.
Also depends on whether you live in a regressive borderline fascist state that views education as either propaganda for them or propaganda for us.
We learned about food safety (“don’t leave stuff on the counter forever”, “raw chicken is bad for you”), how to properly hand wash dishes, how to budget for a household, and a bit about the various non-nuclear family shapes. (Yes, I learned about divorce in 6th grade. It just hadn’t come up in my life before. No mention of non-hetero couples or non-married couples because, you know, Kentucky in the 90s.) It was a broad life skills class with an emphasis on cooking. Not a clue what we cooked, but we got to use a flour sifter and that was fun.
Makes me really sad when people can’t make a cake without a box or can’t make a basic roux or something. Really take for granted my privellege to have been exposed to basic stuff like that.
My first boyfriend in college taught me how to make a roux. It’s such a useful building block for all sorts of foods. We’d make leek and potato stew, generally using the fat from bacon for the roux. Highly recommend as a filling meal for college students.
Huh, it just occurred to me that when people say “Glad school taught me the Pythagorean theorem but not real life skills like how to do my taxes”, they’re just forgetting about home ec.
Bold of you to assume schools even have home ec classes anymore.
I’m pretty sure they phased those out in the late 00s to early 10s, at least in the school districts around me.
I use the pythagorean theorem a lot more than I expected tbh
It’s actually extremely useful for a lot of things, I was just relaying the meme.
Or they never even had it offered.
I never had the option of taking something like that I school, but thankfully my family cooked enough that I got rather good at cooking and spicing food. I’ve actually taught my wife how to do it, and we’re in the process of trying to teach our partner how to cook now.
Home Ec was an elective class for me (that I didn’t take) as an alternative to Personal Health, a low-impact PE course with an emphasis on nutrition (that I also didn’t take). We did not have any other practical skills classes, like wood shop or automotive whatever. Poverty district.
Pretty sure it existed in my school but that was for kids not on a college track.
My brother took “small engines”, if you include that as home ec. Basically how to take apart and rebuild a lawn mower
Yeah Home Ec was an elective for me too, but it did exist.
The most homemade thing I made in home ec in the 90s was pancakes.
I already made pancakes at home lol
I think my school only offered sewing. I have clue where they would have cooked, except for the cafeteria kitchen. I made a dope walrus, though.
My middle school had a cooking class and a sewing class, each of which we all took at different times. I saved my favorite recipe from the cooking class (a poppy seed cake) and made it a few times even after the class was over (but have since lost the recipe for.) I remember we used a pudding mix in it, which I wouldn’t have thought to do before. Meanwhile in sewing, we made letter-shaped pillows of our initials, which I really enjoyed. I ended up hand-sewing the rest of the letters of my name after the class was over to go along with it.
The only complaint I have is that the electives for my middle school (which were mandatory, so hardly “elective”) were cooler than the electives for my high school. I remember other schools having things like metal shop and swimming. A friend from Canada had an entire booklet of electives to choose from. My school had a single sheet of options, many with stupid names that didn’t reflect what they really were. I ended up taking an interior design class because the name made it sound like it would teach practical home skills. Granted, I still enjoyed the class and learned a lot from it (and have been able to apply the knowledge, even if just when building in the Sims.) Though if the classes had descriptions that actually fit what they were teaching, I probably would’ve taken something else. There were even a few boys who had signed up for that class, just to transfer out after the first day. Like me, they thought they’d be learning how to handle home finances or something, not learning how to identify a Queen Anne era chair by the style of its legs.
Damn, sewing would have been so much more useful than the religion classes I had
Ours was just, “Here’s a video unrelated to home economics,” because it and choir were the classes you got stuck in if there wasn’t something else you could take that period (only 150 kids k-12)
They should have just combined the two and had a singing kitchen.