Items

• 
  2021-08-08

  Cooking with Canned and Frozen Foods

  The file that I have included is a description of how My wife and I were essentially forced to resort mostly on canned and frozen foods for our meals rather than using fresh ingredients.
• 
  2021

  Home Brewing Beer During The COVID-19 Pandemic

  I think my story in the attached document details how someone coped with the monotony of restricted activities from COVID-19, as well as the shutdown of social drinking.
• 
  2020-04-14

  Sweetness At Home During the 2020 Covid Pandemic

  I had just quit my job on February 28, 2020 since my military spouse and I were about to PCS (Permanent Change of Station) from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to New Orleans, Louisiana in late March. Mid-March the DOD issued a Stop Movement order for all troops so we ended up not moving until it was lifted on July 1. During the wait, we were in limbo not knowing what would happen with our moving situation, but fortunately we still had our house and stuff. My spouse picked up Covid on our house-hunting trip to New Orleans the first week of March before the Stop Movement was issued, but was never diagnosed since there were not enough tests to go around in North Carolina. For about two months we stayed home together, enjoyed each other's company, and made the best of it. I spent a lot more time in the kitchen than was previously normal, and loved every minute of it. Two years previously, my spouse gave me an ice cream maker for Christmas, but I never took it out of the box and it ended up in one of my difficult-to-reach upper cabinets. When I was organizing my pantry and kitchen cabinets one day to prepare for the time we would actually get to pack up and move, I spied it and thought I would finally give it a try. I have wonderful childhood memories of sitting around with my family and grandparents outdoors while the homemade ice cream my mom and grandmother made, churned in the electric ice cream maker on a hot summers day. I called my mom for her recipe and found a similar one online to reference (published by the Taste of Home test kitchen). The military commissary was out of a lot of groceries, so I made an online order at Sams since they had still had milk and heavy cream, and picked it up. I already had plenty of sugar and vanilla in my pantry. Before Covid, I rarely had time (because of work and school) to make desserts, so this dish was a real treat, a simple recipe, and was super fun to make. The taste of homemade ice cream was so lovely and smooth, with texture velvety, eating it right from the churn. It brought back all the wonderful memories eating homemade ice cream with my family as a childhood, to comfort me during a time I could not travel to see them. Food memories like this can transport one to a time when the world was full of closeness with one's family, when forced to separate due to a world-wide pandemic.
• 
  2021-08-08

  Green Tomato Pickles

  Due to school closures because of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, I finally had time to start a vegetable garden. This was something that I had wanted to do for years, but by the time I was out of school in June and had the time, it was too late in the season to begin. As a side note, the fact that school buildings were closed in no way means we teachers were not working hard to try to continue the education process for our students. The pandemic did change how we taught, though, giving me more time to finally begin my vegetable garden. This story is specifically about my tomato plants and the green tomato pickles I made from them. I originally began my tomato plants from seeds on my kitchen windowsill in April. In mid-May, when they were about 8 inches tall, I transplanted them to a raised garden bed. This was my first experience growing a garden, so I overdid it with the number of vegetables I attempted to grow in my 4’ x 4’ space. Besides the tomatoes, I planted green beans, carrots, onions, beets, squash, zucchini, and cucumbers. The tomatoes and squash took over and that was all I got. For some unknown reason, the first set of blossoms on the tomato plants didn’t produce any fruit. Late in the summer, I finally started to see some fruit, and it was early September before I was able to harvest any. At that point, though, they exploded with fruit. I live in the high desert north of Los Angeles and our weather is not quite as mild as the rest of LA County. We go our first freeze in mid-October. At that point I harvested about 5 lbs. of green tomatoes. A friend of mine had the same issue and decided to make green tomato salsa. I decided to make green tomato pickles. I used a combination of recipes. I have a Little House on the Prairie Cookbook that I experiment with from time to time, but I modified some of the spices that recipe called for because I wanted dill pickles. So, I played around with it until I had what I wanted. They were excellent! Then I did one more thing that I had never done before. I experimented with hot water bath canning so that I could preserve them longer. I ended up with eight jars of green tomato dill pickles, some of which made their way into Christmas gift baskets for friends and family. All of this was because I had more time on my hands due to COVID-19 and California’s Stay at Home order.
• 
  2020-04-09

  Pandemic Dinner of Gluten-Free Orange Chicken is a Sensory Reminder of Evolving Grocery Shopping and the Effect on My Mental Health

  Pre-Pandemic, my small family of three went shopping altogether at our local Frys Grocery every Sunday. As the type of person that lives inside their head and has difficulty multi-tasking when distracted, this was usually an overwhelming experience. It involved avoiding people parked sideways in aisles, answering questions from my wife and daughter (somehow usually at the same time), and being interrupted by loud intercoms. To me it was sensorial overload every week of my hearing and vision to the point where I wanted to leave. When the pandemic really started up in April of 2020 my wife and I decided that my daughter should stay home and we would take turns shopping every week individually to decrease the chances of affecting the employees, the other customers, and ourselves. Along with this was my increased effort to come up with meals and recipes on my "turn." The recipe attached, gluten-free orange chicken from https://www.evolvingtable.com, reminds me of this interesting evolution in shopping that still takes place, as it is my turn to shop today. While my wife looks upon the idea of shopping individually as a loss and misses it...I am able to shop without being overwhelmed. Between less customers in the store (due to ordering online and pick up), the store progressing to using handheld radios, and being by myself, I can really focus and no longer am stressed and overwhelmed to the point where I just want to leave. Every time I make this recipe and taste the delicious orange flavor and smell that hot sesame oil that I had never used before the pandemic, it reminds me of how a stressful pandemic has strangely (and selfishly) made one recurring weekday of my life less stressful.
• 
  2020-03

  Baking: Impossible

  Back in December of 2019, my wife and I were visiting my parents and grandparents in Mesa, Arizona. It was Christmas time, so we were enjoying a bit of leisure time that we typically didn't have. I had just graduated from Brigham Young University-Idaho with a degree in History Education, and my wife just finished a rigorous semester in her study of English at the same school. We were ready for a break. Before meeting up with the family, my grandmother brought up the idea to teach my wife and I how to make homemade bread. It was her grandmothers recipe, and I loved it, as she would occasionally make the dough to make scones or kraut biscuits. This particular recipe made a lot of dough and needed to rise three times. Because of this, making bread was an all day event. Just a few short months after learning to make bread in my grandmother's kitchen, COVID-19 shut down the world. We were living in Rexburg, Idaho at the time-a small town of around 28,000 people located in south-east Idaho. Given that we were in a rural location, we didn't feel the immediate effects of the virus like Seattle, New York City, and Los Angeles. However, around early March, schools shut down and we were told to stay indoors whenever possible. Given that I was a teacher, I was suddenly learning how to run applications like Google Classroom to teach from home. The school district wasn't sure how long I would be working from home for. Initially, they only wanted to close for two weeks to deep clean the school. However, this ended up lasting through the end of the school year. My wife was now also at home. Her studies switched from in-person courses to online courses. Professors who had spent their life in the classroom were suddenly figuring out how to teach via a new medium. It was challenging for all, but everyone seemed to be more patient with each other. Given that my wife and I were home, and given that we had more time, we decided that we would make the bread recipe that my grandmother had taught us over Christmas break. Everyone was encouraged to only shop when absolutely necessary, so we added the flour and yeast to our shopping list. However, when we went shopping only a few days later, the baking isle had been decimated. The only types of flour that were left were expensive bags of specialty flour that came in much smaller portions. Yeast was nowhere to be found. Even things like baking soda were gone. When I think back to the early days of the pandemic, I think of panic. While my wife and I were able to remain calm, many people worried they would not be able to find basic necessities. Grocery stores ran short on many items-toilet paper, canned food, flour, sugar, paper towels, cleaning supplies, amongst other things. Many things that were taken for granted were now an uncertainty. So while we did have more time on our hands, baking bread wasn't an option.
• 
  2020-03-14

  One Last Family Gathering

  The world changed as we Alabamians knew it on Friday, March 13th, 2020, as that was the last day that our school systems remained physically open before our governor mandated forced early system closures ahead of the approaching COVID pandemic. As a high school teacher, I uneasily said goodbye to my students and promised to see them on ZOOM the following Monday. When I arrived home, I found that my wife had contacted each of her family members to invite them to a seafood feast planned in our home for the next day, Saturday the 14th. We had recently purchased a tremendous variety and quantity of seafood for a planned early summer river gathering, including shrimp, crawfish, and fish; however, the pandemic was likely not going to allow for such a future gathering, and we knew of no way in which we could consume so much seafood ourselves, and were equally incognizant when we might gather as a family again, so this was essentially planned as a “McRight family last supper” (pardon the blasphemy, but that’s how we coined it). We had prepared each of the dishes before, save for Tamsie’s new experiment, her crawfish cheesecake. We had enjoyed crawfish and shrimp cheesecake at a wonderful restaurant, Roux 66, while traveling through Natchez, Mississippi several months previous; that culinary experience informed our desire to recreate the recipe at home! Thus, our sensory memory of better times and a delicious meal beckoned us to return to that sensory experience and give the recipe a try. We researched online recipes to combine basic ingredients, including shrimp, crawfish, cream cheese, onions, eggs, and bell peppers, with two cheeses, minced garlic, Creole seasoning, salt and pepper, heavy cream, and a shrimp boil mix. The cheesecake was delicious, and the combination of garlic, crawfish, and shrimp contrasted with the sweet richness of the cream and eggs to make for a delightful dish. To this day, the smell of shrimp makes me think of those early days of the pandemic because our kitchen was filled with the aroma of that decadent crawfish cheesecake, shrimp scampi, a shrimp boil, fried fish, boiled shrimp, and fried shrimp. We hosted approximately twenty-five family members, we laughed, we talked about the future, and we expressed concern over what the coming days might bring. Afterward, we dismissed pandemic talk to release our concerns for the shank of the evening, as we were living for the moment and celebrating our being together. I remember thinking but it might be a long time before we could get fresh seafood again, because we did not know if the opportunity to find fresh seafood would avail itself again in the near future, nor did we know if grocery stores would remain open. That was a time of complete uncertainty. I will likely never again enjoy a shrimp meal without thinking about March 14th, 2020, as the world in which we had lived mere days before somehow now seemed different, foreign, and unsettling.
• 
  2020-03

  How to lighten the mood? Homemade brunch!

  Before the pandemic, one of my favorite ways to celebrate a special occasion was by going to brunch in New York City. Understandably, once the pandemic began, I knew that it would be a long, long time before I would see those city lights again. Rather than get down in the dumps, I decided to improvise and bring the brunch experience to my family home as a way to lighten the rather grim mood. A few weeks into the lockdown mandate in March 2020 I told my family to stay away from the kitchen. I organized a brunch with avocado toast, bacon, fried potatoes, and the centerpiece, a meal I had never made on my own, and a brunch staple, eggs benedict. I learned how to poach an egg for the first time with a few failed attempts. I then decorated the plates with the hollondaise sauce as if it were at a 5 star city restaurant. I made menus with drink options ranging from mimosas to bloody Mary’s and served my family, pretending I was out in the city for a celebratory brunch, despite the lack of celebrating going on in the world at the moment. Even if for an hour, this experience eating brunch lightened our moods and reminded us that despite what was going on outside our home, we at least had each other.
• 2021-01-14

  Online learning

  This is how my life was during online learning. I normally would wake up at around 7:50, I feel tired and exhausted and not motivated to do anything, I just want to go back to sleep. I do my first class and then have breakfast. My breakfast gives me some energy but not that much. I then just finish the rest of my classes and then have lunch and do homework. When i was going online school it just felt that life was on repeat, like there was no other thing I could do. I wouldn’t see any friends which made me feel that I had to talk to people a lot so I would video call people all the time after class, but I wouldn’t see them in person like normal. I never was motivated to do online school and only did it since it was school. I just felt tired, I was annoyed that I couldn't see any of my friends and I just felt constrained to my computer, as if I was locked in my room and I had nowhere else to go. Some of the benefits of online learning was the fact that I would be able to travel to another state and then still be able to do school like everyone else. Also I was able to make my schedule however I wanted it to be since I was online. I also liked the fact that I could get closer with my family since I was with them stuck in the house for a long time. So there are a good amount of benefits of online learning, but going to school on campus is way better, believe me.
• 
  2020-01-01

  My 2020

  2020 was rough from the start. My birthday is January 29th, So the first bad thing that happened was I got the flu on my birthday, and couldn't go back to school for almost 2 weeks. The second thing was my birthday party was pushed to February 29. The third bad thing that happened was when quarantine happened. So for a couple of weeks, I was with my dad, then five of my family members got covid including my dad. So I stayed at my mom's house for about 2-3 months then my dad was clear so I got to stay with him again.
• 2020-09-17

  A State of Constant Contradiction

  Over the past six months we have all found ourselves isolated from our friends, family, communities, and the world we once knew. Society has had to adapt to changes we never expected to happen. Throughout my education, I have been taught about the great tragedies and historic moments that people have faced over past centuries but never imagined that I too, would be living through a moment in time that will be forever talked about in history books. Life since the beginning of the pandemic has not felt real. The world has stopped, yet time is still quickly moving along. In order to stay safe, we must completely isolate ourselves, yet find a way to still live day to day. Follow regulations and guidelines but still have the money to feed, house, and take care of ourselves. The people of the world have had to find a way to stay safe and stay alive. The pandemic has made me feel as though I am in a constant state of contradiction. I have reached a time in my life where everything is changing, and I am constantly evolving. I have never felt better about being out on my own and figuring out who I am, while also feeling stuck, hopeless, trying to manage my crippling mental health and the harsh effects of isolation. Constantly battling between being optimistic versus sinking into a pessimistic hole. I feel like I am thriving in some aspects of my life and deteriorating in so many others. Feeling stuck, yet still trying to be hopeful for the future. Feeling good about accomplishments and milestones in life while also feeling bad knowing that there are people who are being confronted by this deadly virus daily. Every day I feel as though I am faced with a constant dilemma between myself, my mind, and the ever-changing world around me. Nevertheless, I know I am not alone in feeling this way either. Everyone across the globe is also dealing with the ramifications of COVID-19. We are all dealing with the constant moral hypocrisy of knowing that life still has to move forward and that life can be good while also being in utter chaos. I view life right now as a fine line that we are slowly treading. However, one day we will look back and realize we have crossed it, confident in knowing that we are alright.
• 
  2020-08-05

  Stuck on the Highway

  This picture is significant to my COVID-19 experience in 2020 because it caused me to stay on the highway for approximately 3hrs. Due to new Covid laws usually when a high-tension wire hits the ground, they can find ways to get everyone away from the wire. However, since we have to stay 6 feet apart the cops and fire department couldn’t speak directly to everyone. We had to remain in our vehicles and just assume everything was going to be alright. This was my first time experiencing something like this. A lot of people couldn’t handle just sitting in their vehicles not having answers and so they turned around on the highway and tried to drive backwards to get off the road.
• 
  2020-03-12

  Trapped With a View

  When the entire country first started shutting down in March, I was forced to pack up everything I own, and drive from my college in Illinois, to my home in California, alone. I got stranded in a blizzard in Colorado and was run off the road. A kind family took me in until the blizzard passed, and let me stay in their basement until the roads cleared the next morning. This was the view from their backyard.
• 
  05/06/2020

  Circling

  The students are 6th graders at Colorado Academy, a PreK - 12 independent day school in Denver, Colorado. After departing for Spring Break, and not returning to physical school, the students began Learning From Home and taking classes via Zoom. After 8 days in this “new school” the students wrote reflections on their “new reality." They were given complete freedom to craft any type of statement that tapped into their emotions about the change forced upon them by the Coronavirus pandemic. Please note that neither of these pieces was edited by me or by their parents (they actually had not see them until I asked for permission, and I did not read them until they were turned in to be graded).