I may not have homeschooled children, learned Spanish, or made a film in lockdown, but I have certainly leveled up in cooking. This was unexpected, since my usual position on food is, “It’s all right, I guess, but I don’t know why people make such a fuss over it.”
To be fair, there are reasons. My rooms in Boston and New York had terrible cockroach infestations which put me off home cooking. In fact, it was best to think about what you were eating as little as possible. Canned soup was a godsend, as was oatmeal in packets. The only other period I spent this much time cooking from scratch was the early postgraduate phase at Antti Korpin tie, where I had a clean uninfested basic kitchen and an audience of eaters for the first time in my life. There I mostly learned to bake from my mother’s recipes, which she sent. I also made a lot of chicken and rice.
Staying home this spring meant I had complete control over my intake – no more eating whatever was in the vending machine at work or whatever was least unappealing in the cornershop or Pret on the way to the evening train. Tins of grape leaves on the office shelf, samosas at Stratford eaten on the platform. Until March, if I bought fresh supplies, I wouldn’t be around enough to finish them.
Now over these four months, I have arrived an almost zero-waste kitchen: mostly pescatarian, mostly gluten free (no sourdough starter stories here), and shifting toward a low FODMAP diet. Surprise: when not constantly suffering from mild indigestion, I don’t feel hungry all the time.
The staples are a lot of brown rice and steamed vegetables, in ad hoc combinations; also gluten free pasta with vegetables, tofu and other soy-based vegetarian foods, and oatmeal porridge. More excitingly, each week I’ve tried to learn a dish that a friend had made. Some results are presented after the jump.
People especially loathe cup measures.
