Are Food Courts Still A Thing

Anyone who came of age in the Seventies and Eighties had to have hung out at a mall food court. It's where you could get a burger or taco, a scoop of ice cream or a slice of pizza. However with the dwindling amount of shopping centers in this country, are they still going strong?

Shopping malls were the center of everyone's universe, thanks to cars and credit cards.Friday and Saturday nights were the most visited.If you were lucky you lived in a county that allowed shopping on Sundays.One shared aspect of  all of them was the food court.this was either a circular or square area, either in the basement or roof top of the mall.They made eating convenient.There were no anchor store restaurants to deal with;they always had that stuffy, old lady vibe ,thanks to the - well - old ladies who dined there.The food court offered  exciting s menu options without being too costly.Food courts gave many their first taste of Japanese  or Mexican. Some may have had their first veggie burger or crepe after shopping for something.Then food court cuisine started to creep into our home menus. There were machines to make curly fries and recipes for smoothies.They even changed with the are  and the growing need for better and healthier fare.We all thought they were going to last forever.That was until big box stores like Target and Wal-Mart exploded on the American shopping .The computer age happened and it was hello to at home shopping goodbye to that trip to Macy's or Sears.

There are still malls out there,especially where I live in New Jersey.Many builders however opted for a fancier outdoor type of  center, reminiscent of the first shopping malls.There are the ubiquitous  Starbucks along some kind of heath conscious eatery.The food is always trendy, from fish tacos to acai bowls.There's a certain amount of what's call chi-chi.These eateries may offer respite after a few hours of shopping but there's not the small town feeling that food courts surprisingly had.The chains that were once part of mall life such as McDonald's and Sbarro's are now single standing buildings on highways.If a mall has a popular chain eatery, it's usually set off to the side as In And Out Burger at New Jersey's Bridgewater Commons and Tommy Bahama 's at the state's Woodbridge Mall.They don't have kids lingering about.It 's just going in for a $15 burger.There is some hope though for food courts. Crepes du Nord is now seen in several malls, sort from the food court.Burger King has updated it's menu to include the Beyond Burger while McDonalds has restyled itself to resemble a space age bistro with table service.

Malls may be losing in popularity  but they are reinventing themselves.Food courts are following too.They'll both be around, with a new updated look.

The Internet As Cookbook

Are home chefs using the Internet a bit too much? It seems that way, thanks to blog like this one along with Pinterest and Instagram. Will the cookbook go the way of Blockbuster and coal stoves.

Thanks to the invention of the information highway cooking with Internet recipes has gotten easier. There's literally every recipe on the World Wide Web even ones I thought were only unique to my family (they're not). It's so easy to type in any type of recipe and what seems like thousands pop up. The other day I wanted to make the M&M cookie  my Mom had made for me as a small child.. I remember the recipe  being in Life Magazine in one of the ads for the candy. Now type it in the search bar and every kind comes up. I was hoping for the original recipe, but wound up choosing one that produced monster cookies. They were delicious but not what I was really going for. For my holiday cooking I had to do a second check on Brussels sprouts because I had half forgotten my mother's recipe for them. It was one of those times I longed for a family recipe book. Someone else's recipe is not the same as one passed down from generation to generation. Don't get me wrong. I rely on the Internet for most of my info, but it would be nice to open a book and get what I need from it.

Which brings me back to the question - are we relying too much on the world for our cooking techniques instead of books written by real chef?. My tween years were spent in many a bookstore and the book section of department stores (yes, that was a section back then, along with wine and home repair sections in stores such as Macy's).There was nothing like poring through exotic themed cookbooks  with glossy pictures of dishes photographed on villas or fancy beaches or restaurants. The recipes were straightforward. Anyone could create them. What I liked were the explanations of the dishes along with their stories and histories. They were more than just cookbooks. They were kind of like encyclopedias. Some even had room to write notes in along side the list of ingredients. There are still cookbooks like that out there, one in particular is one by Sheila and Marilynn Brass, Their Heirloom Cooking (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishing ) has a wonderful collection of classic recipes plus a folder in the back for your own ones.  They, like many other cookbooks have information and vital advice about how to shop and what to have. You really can't get that from the internet.

Will the upcoming generations wonder what was an actual cookbook? I hope not. There should be cookbooks with crucial information and lots of beautiful glossy pictures.