Pre-made Recipes (Chow)

In the distant past, there was a restaurant in UIUC's campustown called Hunan King, located above the quite good but only sporadically open Seoul on East Green. Hunan King was a sleazy Chinese joint catering to sleazy college vermin like myself. You had to be prepared to ignore the occasional wandering cockroach to eat there. But...

They made dishes with a spicy Hunan brown sauce that was the foundation of three or four of my favorite Chinese dishes ever. I love Szechuan food too (and since 2005 it is now possible to get actual Szechuan pepper again after a 37 year embargo), but the complex richness of a deep Hunan sauce... Mmm!

I'm tired of pining away for my lost Hunan sauce, so I'm going to start fiddling around with making my own. As a starting point I've been browsing the web, and slowly becoming more and more filled with outrage. Even when you are trying to explore a niche recipe area like Hunan cuisine, the vast majority of recipe information you can dig up on line calls for opening jars of prepared spicy bean paste, or "brown Chinese sauce". Here's a great recipe for a black bean stir fry -- take some meat and vegetables and cook it in "7 oz. black bean sauce". What is wrong with people?

I understand the convenience of opening up some jar of crap and pouring it into a pot to make dinner. But sifting through recipe site after recipe site, there is a huge preponderance of these type of pre-made recipes. So not everyone wants to make their own berbere, that's fine -- but the pendulum seems to have swung awfully far towards the Ragú (brought to you by Unilever, dehumanizer of women) end of the spectrum.

Making your own food from scratch doesn't have to be very time-consuming or inconvenient. Despite how NDM cooks, you don't have to use 8 or more cubic feet of dishware and utensils and an entire afternoon to prepare appetizing meals out of raw ingredients. Why do so many Americans regard cooking with such horror?