the empty kitchen

Our Christmas hostess is a wonderful cook.  Not only that, she's gutsy and will take on cooking adventures that would make the rest of us nervous.  But she's not the norm.  And sometimes, I think that our kitchens are losing out to the food industry.
Look at coffee.  We can't compete with coffee in the kitchen any more.  Tim Horton's, Starbucks, in fact a lot of service stations will offer a perfect cup of coffee. Their coffee machines just don't make mistakes.
Baking - who bakes?  My food store has a dessert department that is a block long!  Their cheese cakes alone are astonishing.
This same store has a huge island just for fruit.  2 people do nothing but prepare fruit in all its guises and in all sizes and shapes. Their "made in store" orange juice is spectacular.
Sushi - there's a little counter next to this where hard-working folks are making fresh stuff that I'm increasingly buying and enjoying.
Bread.  Who would bake their own bread anymore.  Go to any good bakery department. The bread is incredible! We just had a bowl of soup for dinner, and I took an ordinary small loaf of frozen garlic bread out of my freezer.  8 minutes later, we enjoyed delicious hot bread, seasoned just right,  buttery and sizzling.
Speaking of soup.  For those of us who come from the Campbell's Soup generation - it's a big big world out there now.  I love to take a good soup and add to it - chicken, clam juice, niblet corn.
You want a great pot roast?  Go to the supermarket. Heat in the oven, succulent with delicious gravy.
You want Yorkshire Pudding to go with it?  Buy it frozen and ready for the oven, or buy it in a package, add an egg and some water, voila - golden, crusty, crunchy and waiting for that gravy.
Meat departments have larger and larger "butcher on call" counters. Here again, the choices of meats and fish that you take home and pop in the oven is growing - they are stuffed, and breaded, and sauced, and put on sticks, and so on. And if you want a salmon fillet for dinner, you get to choose exactly which one you want.
Been to a good deli department lately?  Watch the traffic.  It's endless.  Bean salads, ethnic dishes, three kinds of potato salad (when was the last time you had the nerve or the time to make a potato salad?) You want sliced roast beef? well done? medium? rare? Want a roast chicken?  Singles tell me they can do three nights of dinners with a roast chicken from the deli.
Pizza?  We have a favorite thin dough pizza from the supermarket that is much better than I could make. It's designed perfectly for 2 people, and takes 8 minutes to cook.
We're not talking about feeding a family of five, but in category after category, we are being out-done in the kitchen by store-bought prepared food.  Not that long ago, we rejected most of this stuff.  It didn't measure up, and there's still lots of rejections out there.  But their successes are growing, and will continue to grow.