Items

• 
  2021-07-06

  Covid Testing the Potatoes

  Humor with temperature testing during Covid-19 pandemic.
• 
  2020-06

  Pandemic Gardening

  While there were a lot of terrible things that happened as a result of Covid-19, I feel that one positive was humanity's return to nature. With so many places closed down, people were forced to go outside and enjoy forests, beaches, yards, etc. I was one of these people, and I discovered a talent for gardening. I enjoyed gardening before Covid-19, but the hobby really took off during the 2020 lockdowns. I grew potatoes, onions, flowers, herbs- anything that could be planted, I planted!
• 
  2020-11-30

  Creating New Traditions in a Pandemic

  One of the traditions in my family is to make lefse, a type of Norwegian flatbread, at Christmas time. This tradition was started by my grandmother, because it was one of the foods that she associated with her childhood Christmases as the child of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants. Every year, no matter what was going on, we gathered together as a family at the start of the Christmas season to make lefse. If you’ve made lefse before, you can attest to it being a labor-intensive process, which involves ricing pounds of potatoes, rolling out dozens of balls of dough until they are paper thin, and frying them one by one on a hot griddle. It’s one of those recipes that works better if you have several people to help. In my family, everyone had a job to do. The youngest children of the family were put in charge of popping air bubbles that rose from the dough while it cooked. The older kids took turns flouring the rolling boards and rolling out the dough. The adults were responsible for cooking the lefse, a process that involved transferring huge rounds of dough to the hot griddle using long turning sticks. Even family members who were not culinarily inclined were put to work, folding the finished lefse and packaging it up so that it could be frozen, so that it was available for Christmas morning. It was a family affair, that filled the kitchen up with laughter and stories and more than one flour fight. Family lefse day is one of the most enduring memories of my childhood. When the pandemic made it unsafe to travel or even to visit my family, I found myself facing a Christmas without being able to participate in my family’s lefse making tradition. There were many teary video calls to family members as we all came to terms with the fact that we would be missing this tradition for the first time in nearly 40 years. At this point, after enduring months of isolation because of COVID-19, I was devastated. It didn’t feel like the holidays without this tradition and making lefse by myself felt overwhelming. I was telling my friend Mike about how sad I was over missing out on this tradition, when he offered a solution. We would both quarantine for 14 days, purchase all the ingredients we needed and have them delivered, and then he and I would make as much lefse as we could. I was stunned by his generosity. After all, this was not his tradition. In fact, he’d never even eaten lefse before. But he saw a way that he could help a friend feel better after such a trying year. So, we did just that. With only two of us, it took us about six hours, but we ended up with nearly thirteen pounds of lefse that eventually got sent to family members in four different states. The best moment came when we all video chatted from our homes on Christmas morning, just to eat the lefse together. It was different than normal, but it was a joyous moment. Mike joined us on the call and shared some of the challenges we had making thirteen pounds of lefse in a tiny apartment in the middle of a pandemic. This year, he’s been invited to my parents’ house to join in on the family lefse making day. After all, it’s tradition.
• 
  2021-02-07

  Kitchen Organization during Covid

  During Covid, I started to cook a lot of different foods that I had never before. I was always cooking simple things with chicken and potatoes mostly, sometimes pasta and other easy dishes. During Covid, I started to experiment with new styles of cooking and cuisines. I quickly found that my small kitchen was filling up with items and ingredients which was causing chaos and disorganization. I bought a bunch of bins to get things organized. For all of the terrible things going on during the Covid year of 2020, I tried to take advantage of the time by upping my kitchen game as best as possible.
• 
  2020-08-09

  First Potato Harvest

  I have been a home gardener for a few years now, and love to cook using the things from my garden. When Covid started to hit the US in late February/early March, the resulting panic resulted in widespread shortages in the grocery stores for many common items of American households. News reports consistently told us that food supply networks were in jeapordy. I had never grown potatoes before (though I have grown sweet potatoes), but I decided that for its nutritional value to space ratio, it would be worth growing potatoes this year. Thankfully, the media had seemingly overblown the shortage problem (at least in my area), but that didn't matter because I enjoyed growing potatoes and had a great harvest. My first dish I made with my homegrown potatoes (and homegrown carrots) was a delishous pot roast. I was able to include a glass of y homebrewed beer to complete the meal. Sitting down for this meal was certainly a bright spot during the pandemic and was the culmination of several months of labor and enjoyment.