Pandemic Cooking or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Like to Cook
Pandemic kitchen fads have become a joke — first sourdough, then banana bread, then how on earth to use all the beans everyone panic-bought. For many, that’s as far as the experimentations went, and dinnertime became soul-numbingly repetitive as folks faced being stuck at home for months on end. Early on in the pandemic, I made a meal plan for the week’s dinners and joked on social media, “I don’t know if that’s great organization or theft of a key daily topic of conversation while cooped up together.” Turns out, it was the beginning of something else entirely.
Like many other people, I have experienced a lot of anxiety during the pandemic. There is so much that is outside our control, and the world is a scary place. Just going outside my apartment requires more thought than simply grabbing my keys. Visits with my parents are weather-dependent and have to be carefully orchestrated. Teaching, my career of a decade, suddenly felt foreign to me as I navigated remote and socially-distanced learning. Mid-fall, I even took a leave of absence because I felt teaching in person was a threat to my physical and mental health. Reading is often a relaxing activity for me, but these last nine months I found that I often lacked the ability to focus on books. During this year of often feeling untethered, we have all searched for anchors, and cooking has slowly emerged as one of mine.
I have never been a skilled or confident cook, other than my famous latkes. I’ve enjoyed baking desserts since high school, but though my parents are both excellent cooks, I never showed much interest in learning. When I moved out after college, I’d make some basic dishes, but relied a lot on pre-made meals. Cooking for one seemed like a lot of wasted work, and it was the last thing I wanted to do after a long day of teaching and grading papers. It also intimidated me. Whereas I love teaching literature because there is so much room for interpretation, when it came to cooking, I was freaked out by how much of my own judgement I’d have to use. Baking desserts was more precise, and there was comfort in that, but it felt like there was so much that could go wrong in cooking. Everyone says that cooking a chicken is so basic and a skill all people ought to possess, but if you overcook it it’s dry as all hell and you’ve ruined it, and if you undercook it you might kill someone. NO PRESSURE.
When my now-husband and I were dating, we’d cook some meals for one another, and when we moved in together I started cooking a little more. I no longer had the excuse of cooking for one, and thankfully he liked my cooking and gave me the positive encouragement I needed to try new things. I slowly added a few more dishes to my repertoire, though I’ll admit that most of my standbys involved pasta in some capacity. During the nights when Joel wasn’t home, I’d often eat something easy like a Lean Cuisine or a sandwich. Then the pandemic hit, and we were eating dinner together every. single. night. Boredom with what we usually made was quickly settling in. We also started using Instacart, so the days of just swinging by the grocery store to pick up food according to my whims were gone.
After a while, I started getting into the habit of making a meal plan each week as I worked on our grocery list. I wanted to make sure we had everything we needed and would minimize food waste, and Joel loved being able to look forward to certain favorite meals and plan for the nights he was in charge of dinner. I also check over the plan to make sure there’s a good variety of vegetables, fruits, and proteins in there, not just the carbs I love so much. Even though I haven’t exercised much during the pandemic, I’ve been able to take charge of this aspect of my health in a positive way by making sure I’m nourishing my body with good foods. It’s almost like a puzzle, trying to put all these pieces together, and I feel better knowing that I’m doing something good for myself and my partner.
I also began experimenting with cooking and baking more often. I learned how to make a couple different types of soup, including matzo ball soup (thus earning me my next badge as a Jewish-mother-in-training). There is a dish of breadcrumb-crusted baked fish on a bed of potatoes that I adapted from a recipe that I now make probably twice a month, and every time I make it, Joel says, “I love it when you make this,” but I never actually tire of hearing him say that. We had a sushi-making party with Joel’s family over Zoom, and I was inspired to later begin making poke bowls pretty enough for Instagram (and tasty enough to gobble up). I dipped my toe into the world of pickling, making pickled red onions to go with falafel sandwiches. I discovered that lamb chops aren’t terribly difficult to make, and that they pair wonderfully with a tehina sauce I created. I finally conquered my fear of chicken and roasted a cornish game hen; it was neither dry nor deadly, and it made for quite the special Shabbat meal. I made a big veggie lasagna for our kosher dairy Thanksgiving. I fried apple cider donuts for Hanukkah. Since we missed going out for Ethiopian food, I made misir alicha and ye’abesha gomen, the blend of spices a welcome change of pace. And yes, I even delved into breadmaking, once I was finally able to get my hands on yeast after months and months of trying. I’ve made challah, focaccia bread, rolls, injera for the Ethiopian meal, and even took a crack at some rosemary and olive oil crackers.
What I’ve realized after all these experiments and others is that yes, some of the recipes are challenging, but once I made them, my years of avoidance seemed foolish. It’s pretty rare for one of my experiments to be an unsalvageable disaster, and most are actually pretty delicious. I’ve even become more comfortable with improvising, taking pieces of recipes and putting them together with my own ideas. Looking back at the list of all the new things I’ve made this year, I feel a sense of pride. There’s so much I haven’t felt good at this year, but this is one area in which I’ve gained confidence. When my mother asks me what’s for dinner and if I’m eating enough vegetables, I actually have good, truthful answers to share with her.
The pandemic has given me a lot of anxiety, but ironically it’s helped me conquer a lot of my kitchen anxiety. Cooking has become a nice way to end the day, and tasting my creations is incredibly satisfying. And yes, I know I may feel differently once life is back to normal and I’m a lot busier. But I’m hoping that by then, I’ll have conquered enough new dishes and practiced enough that this will all feel so much easier than it used to. I want the kitchen to remain a place where I can be excited to try new things, where I can take comfort in cooking what’s familiar, and where I can make the meals that nourish our bodies and help bring us together in times both good and bad.
