I’m not sure what point I’m going to want to make about this, but I’m counting on it coming to me as we go.

TWICE recently I have used a quick/convenience/expensive method that has turned out to be a gateway to making something in a longer and less convenient and less expensive but VERY PLEASING way. Counterintuitively, is what I am saying.

FIRST EXAMPLE: bagged salads. I love the whole concept of bagged salad mixes, and I love choosing which one I want to buy (Crunchy Thai! Spicy Chinese! Cheesy Caesar!)—but I feel foolish buying them because it’s like $3.00-$3.50 for a smallish salad I could theoretically make myself for much much less money, if I could use up all the extras of all the ingredients I would have to buy, before they went bad. And: if I ever actually DID do that, which for whatever reason I don’t. So recently I started buying the bagged salad mixes, figuring that Some Expensive Salad was better than No Salad At All, especially when what I want is for the children to be accustomed to eating salad.

(An aside: Do you remember the commercial, maybe two Olympics ago, and it was for almond milk but it managed to be extremely inspiring about the benefits of small health changes? I do not remember the almond-milk brand ((was it Silk? Silk is what comes to mind)), and I hope that will not be discouraging to those marketers, because I do still remember the commercial. One of the lines was like “There’s salad in the children!,” and then children, while eating salad, saying “We like it!” …Okay, it seems like I am now honor-bound to find the commercial that has stuck in my head for YEARS, and it IS Silk, which I hope will be very VERY pleasing to marketers, and here it is:)

(Continuing on:)

And after, say, half a dozen bagged salads, and all the joy and angst they contain, tonight it happened that I was making lasagna (Stouffer’s, and this is a cost/benefit analysis I am not going to beat by making it homemade), and I wished I had a bagged salad but I didn’t, because yesterday on my usual grocery-shopping day I was instead spending an extra ten hours in bed after getting my flu/Covid shots the day before (I did not feel BAD-bad, but I felt tired/sore at just the right level to make it feel nice to stay horizontal and blanketed); and because today Paul has my car because his is in the shop, and my commute is a 5-minute walk whereas his is a 45-minute drive; and anyway my point is that I had neither bagged salad nor car, so I was theoretically stuck, salad-wise.

But I did have a partial bag of spinach. And I’ve become familiar with the way these bagged salads work: some mixed vegetation; some sauce; some add-ins; some stirring things together in a big bowl and then decanting into smaller bowls. So just impulsively I tore up some spinach into a big bowl; and I peered around in the fridge and I had some banana peppers and some black olives so I chopped those up and added them; and then I put in some Caesar dressing; and then I remembered that the salad mixes usually have something crunchy/crispy so I added some roasted salted pumpkin seeds. And I dispensed this concoction into bowls, and PEOPLE IN MY HOUSEHOLD ATE IT AND SAID IT WAS GOOD. And I probably wouldn’t have thought to bother with such a thing, except for the practice of the bagged convenience salad mixes. Doing something the easy/expensive way was like training wheels. Yes!!: THAT is the point I will try to make, I THOUGHT I’d find it midway!

SECOND EXAMPLE. Though this one is only halfway done, but I feel it processing! With lasagna, I like to have dinner rolls, and when I say “like to” I mean more like there’s no point having lasagna without them. Normally I have a bag of them in the freezer just in case I make lasagna or soup or whatever, but to my unhappy surprise there were only two rolls in a sad frosty bag. And just to review: no car.

I looked online for “fast dinner rolls” and found a recipe that took 30 minutes total for prep plus baking. Well, I have worked in a bakery, and that did not seem reasonable for yeast rolls. Glancing through the recipe, I doubled the time I thought it would take—which was fine, because the lasagna would take 45 minutes and it was still 15 minutes before I’d need to start that.

The doubled time turned out to be a bare minimum, and the rolls turned out to be flour-forward and stodgy. But!! In making them, I remembered how relatively easy bread-making is, once you’ve learned the basics and gotten some practice, BOTH OF WHICH I HAVE ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED WHILE BEING PAID TO DO SO. I was cutting the dough into lil dough rounds and tossing them hand-to-hand to shape them like a PRO, even though it’s been over 25 years.

The main thing about making rolls from scratch is you need TIME: you have to start lonnnnng before you want bread. But now I have remembered that hot tip! The flour-stodgy rolls were a shortcut, but now I remember it’s not more difficult to make them the good way, you just have to plan ahead, which I am perfectly able to do! (And on the nights I am not able to plan ahead, I will make cornbread or I will microwave some sandwich rolls, I will not try any ridiculous “30 minute” yeast recipe.)

Well, but that doesn’t really work with the training-wheels analogy I was going for. To make this one work for you, you would need to go back in time and work in a bakery for awhile in your 20s, and then discover you still had that muscle memory in your 50s. FOR ME this silly quick recipe worked to REMIND me of something I can do more easily the long-form and less-convenient way. There: let’s say that fits the theme.