(Updated in August 2009 to be more precise about prices.)

Yes, I watch cooking shows, because I pretty much have to cook all my own food to meet my low-sodium dietary requirements, and that requires assimilating a gigantic truckload full of ideas and recipes to find the ones I can adapt for my needs on my budget with the foods available here.

Plenty of cooking shows think that every place is like New York, but Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa leads the pack, thinking that every place is just like The Hamptons. In the new episode Food Network aired today, here she is, one minute into the show, talking while shopping in a small Long Island grocery store:

When I’m making a fast dinner, I’ve got two rules. One is “really easy recipes,” and the other one is “ingredients that I can find in any grocery store in America.” I’ve got everything I need for dessert and for vegetables. Now I need the main course—red snapper.

OK, first: there may be one grocery store within 30 miles of here that has fresh red snapper, but people on the coasts often (OK, constantly) forget that the middle of the continent does not have a plentiful supply of fresh fish at every 200-square-foot grocery store. I can ignore that. But here she is, not quite one minute later in the same episode:

[For dessert] I love to make Honey Vanilla Fromage Blanc. Fromage Blanc is this French soft cream cheese that has a little bit of a sour cream taste to it. …

She then makes a raspberry sauce for the dessert, so about three minutes later:

I actually discovered Fromage Blanc in Paris, and it used to be that you couldn’t find it anywhere in the United States, but now it’s really available in specialty food stores.

What happened to “ingredients that I can find in any grocery store in America??” If I’ve ever seen Fromage Blanc in a grocery store within 100 miles of here, I don’t remember it at all. And she admits up-front that it’s “really available in specialty food stores.” In Ina’s world, is every grocery store in America also a “specialty food store?”

It’s the kind of bubble that makes “flyover state” residents think that coastal residents have absolutely no clue about the world more than 10 miles from their home. Martha Stewart’s magazine Everyday Food does a much, much better job of describing things that actually are available throughout the country, at least in some stores. But every store in America having red snapper, much less Fromage Blanc? Good grief.

(I like Ina Garten’s ideas and simplicity, but the woman is often completely unaware of the kind of money she’s asking people to spend. I’ve noted to friends in amazement that her recipe for chicken stock, something she calls an everyday basic that you should really make at home because it’s very simple, calls for simmering three whole five-pound chickens, along with vegetables and herbs. Around here, mass-produced factory chicken costs at least $1 per pound, and she calls for using the equivalent of one grocery store package of thyme and of dill, at $3 to $3.50 per package.

On TV, Ina also said that you want to use the best chickens you can find. Cook’s Illustrated says that their preferred brand, Bell & Evans, costs about $2.29 per pound in Boston where they’re headquartered. I’ve never seen Bell & Evans chickens in any grocery store here. Whole chickens are either factory birds, or you get them from something like the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. There you can get a locally grown, all-natural, pastured chicken without steroids, anti-biotics, or growth hormones. And a four-pound chicken costs $18.25—about $4.50 per pound.

Is it worth the money? Not for stock. After the stock has simmered, Ina tells you to “discard the solids.” So, after boiling $12-$15 worth of factory chicken (or $56 to $63 worth of high-quality chicken) in seven quarts of water for four hours, along with $7 worth of herbs and another $2-$3 worth of vegetables, you throw all the ingredients away and end up with six quarts of stock.

Using factory birds, this stock costs around $3.65 per quart. Using high-quality “boutique” chickens, it costs at least $11 per quart. I don’t argue that this stock would be worlds better than store-bought chicken stock. I can’t use that stock anyway, because even the “lower sodium” versions recommended by Cook’s Illustrated are too high in sodium. Their winner, Swanson Certified Organic Chicken Broth, has 570mg of sodium per cup, or 2280mg of sodium per quart. But when purchased from Amazon, it costs $3.15 per quart, takes zero hours of cooking, and dirties zero dishes.

Compare this to Alton Brown’s recipe for chicken stock, in which he simmers four pounds of “chicken carcasses” (wings, necks, and the stuff you have left after carving a roast chicken, plus legs or thighs if you want to use chicken pieces) with about half a package of thyme and other pantry vegetables and herbs to get five quarts of stock. AB’s stock costs about $8 to make five quarts from factory birds; Ina Garten’s costs at least twice as much and, if using highest-quality birds like the recipe writers always want, up to seven times as much.

Hell, even the 2009 Cook’s Illustrated recipe for stock to use in Hearty Chicken Noodle Soup calls for one pound of ground chicken (if you’re trying to extract flavor from solids, grinding them up is the way to get the most surface area for the best effect in the fastest way), two quarts of store-bought chicken stock, pantry vegetables and seasonings, and 1½ pounds of chicken breasts that you also use for the meat in the soup.

This is likely the most intensely-flavored chicken stock of the lot, and counting the cost of the chicken breasts (which, unlike the other ingredients in this and the other stocks, you actually get to use rather than throw away afterward), costs $12 for about three quarts. Ina Garten’s “everyday” chicken stock costs almost as much, not counting the four-plus hours you need to prep it. (AB’s stock simmers at least six hours; the Cook’s Illustrated stock is ready for the soup in a little over one hour.)

Simplicity has its virtues, but boiling three whole chickens to make five quarts of stock is not that virtuous for anyone with a budget.

No, Ina (and other coastal chefs), we don’t have Fromage Blanc or even red snapper in our grocery stores. We can’t spend $11 per quart to make chicken stock so the pan sauces come out better. Fresh berries are sometimes available out of season, but they taste like plastic. Fingerling potatoes are about $5 per pound when available, and a few ounces of fresh herbs (other than parsley and cilantro) costs $3 per herb, and that includes basil, thyme, oregano, rosemary, chives, and sage. That’s why we don’t fry fresh herbs just as a garnish—they’re too expensive.

Herbs like tarragon and chervil are rarely available fresh at all. Fresh fish is expensive, and frozen fish comes in four-ounce portions because four of them equal one pound, so the 50,000 recipes you have for fish “no smaller than six-ounce portions” don’t work here. Extra-virgin olive oil costs $18 per liter for mediocre brands, so we don’t use the good stuff for everything because it’s too expensive. It is simply infuriating to watch Emeril Green and see Emeril Lagasse pouring $30/liter top-quality extra-virgin olive oil into a rocket-hot pan, immediately sending up huge clouds of smoke. Once you heat olive oil to the smoke point, any flavor differences between the best stuff and the supermarket stuff are eliminated. Emeril can afford to waste money like that, but here we can’t. We use the good stuff for things where it’s not cooked and where we can taste it.

Shallots are expensive. Creme Fraiche, when available, is expensive. No stores in my town stock pancetta or prosciutto, though I could get some about 15 miles away (if it were low enough in sodium for me to eat). Pine nuts cost about $3 for four ounces in the grocery stores if they’re available (the warehouse clubs sometimes have them cheaply, but not always). We have fresh button, cremini, and portobella mushrooms, but rarely see fresh shiitake, oyster, or lobster mushrooms even though there’s a very large mushroom farm in northeast Oklahoma. I have never seen fresh morel, wood ear, or porcini mushrooms, and even the dried ones approach $5 per ounce. (The Oklahoma Food Coop has some fresh mushrooms, but it’s one of those “order once per month, come pick it up in this two-hour period on the third Thursday of the month or pay $20 extra for home delivery if we offer it in your area” kinds of deals. No one has “very fresh” mozzarella or goat cheese, period.

If I make it sound like a culinary desert, it’s not. We have fantastic beef. No TV chef ever uses pre-ground beef because they don’t know what’s in it, where it came from, etc. I only use ground beef from the megamarts in things where they get completely cooked (like a long-simmering meat sauce), but our local grocery store has fresh, high-quality beef that was ground in the store, the kind you can make medium-rare hamburgers from safely. Not every store stocks every cut of beef, but a local store can usually get any cut you want with a day or two’s notice, and it’ll be very fresh, not vacu-frozen from a warehouse in Omaha. If push comes to shove, you can go near the stockyards in OKC and get whatever you want.

We have fresh and plentiful southwestern ingredients: cilantro, all colors of bell peppers (though mostly green in the off-season), onions, and multiple kinds of chile peppers in every supermarket (at least jalapeños, serranos, and usually poblanos and anaheims as well, with habañeros not uncommon at all), and a wide variety of dried chiles, enough to make Rick Bayless happy. We often have corn husks for tamales, loads of flour tortillas (most too high in sodium), masa harina, chipotles, tomatillos (though not year-round), quesa fresca, and lots more.

Our poultry isn’t bad, although it’s all mass-produced even if it’s not too far from here in Arkansas. The pork comes from farther away and is usually pre-salted, but the local grocery store often has Hormel’s “100% Natural” pork, which has not been enhanced in any way. Most area stores don’t have that.

In the summer, the farmers’ markets are bursting with fresh produce, and the stores are pretty good, too. The Braums dairy is about 20 miles from here as the crow flies, so the dairy products from there (more milk and ice cream than cheeses) are quite good and fresh, but they don’t sell things like cream, and they don’t sell much butter. There are other semi-local dairies, though, so the non-cheese dairy isn’t bad. And, of course, the pantry staples like carrots, celery, onions, garlic, lettuces, citrus, potatoes, and the like are as good as anywhere else—in the standard configurations. Russet, red, and gold potatoes are cheap. Fingerling potatoes, purple potatoes, and other less-common ones are expensive if they’re available at all.

It’s not like we live in the 1950s or anything, but imagining that we have all the things in Ina’s recipes? Please stop. We don’t expect you to have anaheim chiles year-round, stop expecting us to have fresh shiitake mushrooms and plentiful cheap herbs and fromage blanc.

Not every place is The Hamptons.