Items

• 
  2020-08-08

  Relearning to Cook

  I have loved to cook for as long as I can remember, but I had a few rough years and stopped cooking. With the onset of stay-at-home orders for the COVID-19 Pandemic, I went from 60-hour work weeks between my two jobs to nothing. My mind and hands were itching to do something, anything. As many of the grocery stores started to have supply shortages and I now had a much more limited budget; I had to get creative. So, I began to cook. I started slowly with fancy coffee drinks and eggs and moved to bread and pasta. Nationally people were baking bread so I thought well I’ve got the time I might as well try. What started as something I had learned to dread suddenly became my day’s highlight. I was cooking again! The dance of moving through my small kitchen. The clank of pots and pans and knives and wooden spoons in metal bowls playing in time to Otis Redding. The joy of tasting a recipe and nailing both the flavors and the serving size (many recipes serve 4-6, I live alone). It was truly a full-body experience. I soon realized that I hadn’t repeated any meals in about two weeks and decided to challenge myself to go as long as possible without repeating a recipe, if a meal required a repeat that portion simply didn’t count in my tally. I ended up making over 225 different recipes.