Welcome to English as a Second Language podcast number 975, Making Food from Scratch.
This is English as a Second Language podcast episode 975.
I'm your host, Dr Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.
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On this episode, we're going to listen to a dialogue about cooking food without using any canned food or other ingredients that you would buy that have been already prepared for you.
Let's get started.
I'm so excited to have the entire family coming for a visit.
For our first family dinner next Friday, I'm making everything from scratch.
I'm pulling out all the stops.
But have you ever made anything from scratch?
Sure I have.
Plenty of times.
If you say so, but our pantry is full of canned foods and jars and nearly everything we've cooked in the past year has been pre-mixed.
Are you sure you're up to cooking a dinner for 12 from scratch?
How hard could it be?
I just need to make sure that the ingredients I buy are fresh, follow the recipes closely, add plenty of fresh herbs and spices and multitask.
You mean do a juggling act.
It'll take a lot of work and organization to pull this off.
I'm up to the challenge, and I have a backup plan.
And that is?
Have you ever heard of the raw food movement?
Our dialogue begins with Anne saying to Walt I'm so excited to have the entire family coming for a visit.
For our first family dinner next Friday, I'm making everything from scratch.
Anne is excited because her entire family is coming to visit her and she wants to cook something for them for dinner.
She wants to make it from scratch.
That expression, from scratch, means you start with basic ingredients and make everything yourself.
You don't use anything in a can or anything that has been prepared that you bought in a store.
So if you're going to make vegetable soup, you make your own stock, which is the liquid for a soup.
You prepare the vegetables and so forth.
Anne says, I'm pulling out all the stops.
To pull out all the stops means to do something in the best way that you can, to do something fully, to do something that would require a lot of work but would be the most you could possibly do.
This term actually comes from organ playing.
When you play an organ very loudly, you pull out all of the stops.
The stops are parts of the organ that you can pull out in order to make the organ louder.
Well, Anne is pulling out all the stops to make a big family dinner.
Walt says, but have you ever made anything from scratch?
Walt doesn't think Anne has ever prepared a meal from scratch.
Anne, however, says, sure I have.
Plenty of times.
Lots of times.
Walt says, if you say so.
That expression, if you say so, is used when you really don't believe what the other person is telling you, but you don't want to argue with them.
Walt says, our pantry is full of canned foods and jars.
A pantry.
P-A-N-T-R-Y is a small room, usually next to the kitchen, that is used to store food that does not have to be kept cold, that does not have to be refrigerated.
A pantry usually has dry goods like sugar and flour and salt, things you don't have to put in a refrigerator.
A pantry would probably also have canned food.
Canned food is food that comes in a metal container, usually made of metal of tin.
Canned foods are very popular in the United States for all sorts of things, including soups and vegetables and other kinds of food.
Canned foods are very convenient because you can buy them anywhere and then put them in your pantry and use them many weeks or even months later.
A jar, J-A-R, is a glass bottle that has a top on it, which we call a lid, L-I-D.
Jars are also used for storing things, for putting things into, including food.
Walt says nearly everything we've cooked in the past year, in the last 12 months, has been pre-mixed.
To mix, M-I-X, is to combine different things together, to put things together.
Pre-mixed would be food, in this case, that has already been prepared and put together.
So you don't have to do it yourself.
Walt says, are you sure you're up to cooking a dinner for 12 from scratch?
To be up to something.
Here means to be ready for something, to be prepared to do something, to have the energy and the knowledge to do something.
Usually we use the word challenge after this expression.
Are you up to the challenge?
Challenge is a difficult thing to do.
Up to can also be used to mean simply doing something.
If someone says, what are you up to tonight?
He means, what are you doing tonight?
What are your plans?
What activities are you doing tonight?
Up to can also be used when someone is perhaps doing something wrong, even illegal.
I think my neighbor is up to something.
I think that there is something strange going on, maybe even criminal.
I think that's true.
I really do wonder what my neighbor is up to sometimes.
I don't know.
Strange smells, you know what I'm saying?
And... says that she is up to cooking a dinner from scratch.
She says, how hard could it be?
That question, how hard could it be, is used to indicate that you don't think it is very difficult.
You don't think it will be difficult to do this.
How hard could it be to find a beautiful woman in Los Angeles and ask her out on a date?
Well, it's actually quite easy to find the woman.
Getting her to go on the date, that's a little more difficult.
Anne says, I just need to make sure that the ingredients I buy are fresh.
Fresh F-R-E-S-H is an adjective used to describe food that has only recently been prepared or has only recently been taken from where it would normally be found.
For example, A fish that is fresh is one that has been brought from the lake or the river or the ocean very recently.
It's not a fish that was caught four months ago and now they're bringing it to the store.
That would not be a fresh fish.
If you want fresh fish, you often have to go to the river or the lake or the ocean to buy it.
If you want it really fresh, right out of the water.
We can use this adjective also to describe foods that are prepared.
For example, fresh bread.
Fresh bread would be bread that was baked or cooked very recently, maybe this morning or yesterday, an hour ago.
Ingredients are the things you use to make food.
So fresh ingredients would be things that you use to prepare your food that are fresh.
Anne says she also needs to follow the recipes closely.
A recipe, R-E-C-I-P-E, is a list of instructions for cooking or preparing something.
To follow something closely means to do it very carefully, to do everything that it says.
Following a recipe closely would mean doing everything the recipe says in the order it says to do it.
Anne also wants to make sure that she uses plenty or a lot of fresh herbs and spices.
Herbs and spices are small parts of plants, often dried, that have a lot of flavor in them.
We use herbs and spices to give more flavor to the food.
Anne also says she needs to multitask.
M-U-L-T-I-T-A-S-K.
To multitask is to do many things at the same time.
Walt says you mean do a juggling act.
To juggle J-U-G-G-L-E is to throw a lot of things up into the air and keep them all in in the air to prevent them from falling, from dropping to the floor.
However here, when Walt says a juggling act, he's referring to something that is very complex, something that will require doing a lot of things at the same time.
The idea here is that this would be very difficult to do because juggling can be difficult to do.
Walt says, it'll take a lot of work and organization to pull this off.
To pull something off is a two-word phrasal verb meaning to be able to do something that is very difficult or that is very challenging.
Anne says, however, that she is up to the challenge.
She is able to do this difficult thing.
And, she says, I have a backup plan.
A backup, B-A-C-K-U-P, plan is an alternative if what you're doing now doesn't work.
It's what we might also call plan B.
When people say I need a plan B, they mean they need a backup plan.
They need a plan to follow if what they are planning on doing goes wrong.
That would be their plan A, their original or first plan.
Walt asks what Ann's backup plan is.
Ann tells him, have you ever heard of the raw food movement?
Raw, R-A-W, is the opposite of cooked.
If you buy some tomatoes at the supermarket and you bring them home, they're raw.
They haven't been cooked yet.
In the last few years it has become popular for some restaurants and people in their homes to not cook food, to eat the food raw by preparing it in special ways.
There are, according to some people, health benefits from this.
I don't know if that's true.
I do know that Anne is just making a joke here.
She's saying that her backup plan is not to cook the food at all and to serve it or to give it to her guests raw.
Now let's listen to the dialogue, this time at a normal speed.
I'm so excited to have the entire family coming for a visit.
For our first family dinner next Friday, I'm making everything from scratch.
I'm pulling out all the stops.
But have you ever made anything from scratch?
Sure I have, plenty of times.
If you say so, but our pantry is full of canned foods and jars and nearly everything we've cooked in the past year has been pre-mixed.
Are you sure you're up to cooking a dinner for 12 from scratch?
How hard could it be?
I just need to make sure that the ingredients I buy are fresh, follow the recipes closely, add plenty of fresh herbs and spices and multitask.
You mean do a juggling act.
It'll take a lot of work and organization to pull this off.
I'm up to the challenge, and I have a backup plan.
And that is... Have you ever heard of the raw food movement?
Our scriptwriter pulls out all the stops on every script she writes.
We thank the wonderful Dr. Lucy Say for her work.
We also thank you for listening.
From Los Angeles, California, I'm Jeff McQuillan.
Come back and listen to us again right here on ESL Podcast.
English as a Second Language Podcast is written and produced by Dr Lucy Say, hosted by Dr Jeff McQuillan.
Copyright 2014 by the Center for Educational Development.
