How COVID-19 made me a cook
I truly became a cook during this year of pandemic lockdown. Yes, I cooked before, and I cared about it, but it wasn’t till COVID-19 lockdown when I began cooking 2 or 3 meals every day, for what’s now almost a year, that I transformed into someone for whom the act of cooking is now at the core of her being.
Taking a break from work at 5 PM to prep a dinner salad, then cooking the rest of the meal at 7, have become activities I relish repeating. They comprise a culinary Tai Chi, a form that is centering, rewarding, and calming. In the past, cooking felt more performative, done for praise. Now, I’m invested in just making food everyone enjoys. When they dig deep into a dish, my race is won.
The satisfaction of making something new every day has also become important to how I cook. Bye-bye, stockpiling a week’s worth of dishes. These days, I plan for the day, not the week. Savory, salty, crispy, or crunchy; sweet, spicy, hot, cold, or room temp, I’m about immediate reward and something to look forward to every night.
For me, the daily act of cooking has become a salve. Preparing and eating meals together is a respite from the pain of friends we can’t see, jobs and classrooms we can’t go to, relatives we cannot hug, people who are in COVID-19 quarantines while we are not. A salad is a salad, but the dazzling bowls of Caesar kale, little gems lettuce with ranch, smashed cucumber with soy sauce and garlic, roasted butternut squash with red onion, tahini, and arugula are places we can find joy.
During COVID, I‘ve come to cook patiently, deliberately, intentionally moving through the kitchen like people who set out bread to knead and then rise. I prepare the mise en place, chop, mix, cook, then serve and eat. Part of the joy is doing it again, and again.
It’s all about providing, right? Like every hunter-gatherer, I’ve made a nest out of food, ensuring that my partner’s mandarin oranges and bananas, her teen’s bagels, Greek yogurt, and frozen acai, are available. And like my mother before me, I take pleasure in providing incidentals: home-made salad dressings, jars of fruit butter and jam, pickled red onions, cucumbers or beets, plus occasional tea loaves, cookies, and snacking cakes.
But this deepening love of cooking and food and service is also about fear; there is no way I cannot name that. In so many ways, outside our house, very little feels safe. An invisible virus, unhoused people suffering, friends’ parents and siblings ]sick or dying, separation from my son and his wife for most of this year — I have so much anger and so much grief.
In this pandemic, who wouldn’t want to be a cook? It’s my walking meditation, my ritual, one aspect of life I can control absolutely. 315 days in, with no solid vaccine distribution plans in sight, I’ve learned that cooking is a way to hold on for dear life.
More weekly stuff in your inbox
Would you like to read more? I started a weekly newsletter called Cover Your Bases. To keep up to date with other essays, links to great posts, stories, and videos — and more — sign up for email updates by following this link and clicking subscribe.
