Item

How Stuffed Peppers Kept Me From Killing My Roommates

Title (Dublin Core)

How Stuffed Peppers Kept Me From Killing My Roommates

Disclaimer (Dublin Core)

DISCLAIMER: This item may have been submitted in response to a school assignment prompt. See Linked Data.

Description (Dublin Core)

In March of 2020, I had just turned 22. I was prepping to graduate from Loyola University Chicago and searching for a job in journalism — a notoriously tough field to start out in, pandemic or not. The virus started spreading, and the jobs started disappearing. Chicago, my once-vibrant home where people scattered like ants as the CTA trains screeched into the station, was deserted. It was eerie. The internet was swarming with newly viral recipes: banana bread, sourdough starters, homemade pizzas. I wasn't interested in those, they didn't strike my fancy. In a time of severe isolation for most, I was stuck with roommates. Don't get me wrong, we had our issues. The dishes were almost never done, and we disagreed on whose responsibility they were. But in my boredom, I took up cooking, and for once I didn't mind cooking for them as well. I was one of many COVID-induced chefs who began as amateurs and blossomed into connoisseurs that rivaled the best of takeout menus. The only problem was, I'm a vegetarian, and my roommates are born-and-bred Midwesterners, set in their ways of eating and enjoying meat at nearly every meal. But by April, I had sprung head-first into a phase of cooking stuffed peppers several times a week, and they had followed me down the rabbit hole. There were no disagreements about whether to put meat in the filling or not — we didn't need it, there was enough flavor and protein regardless. And the dishes were always done, somehow without a single argument or passive-aggressive slam of a door. The peppers were fun and colorful, Instagram-worthy in a time that lacked almost anything visually intriguing. They became a source of collaboration instead of the division that had seeped in through our 100-year-old Chicago apartment's walls, a result of being trapped with no one but each other for weeks on end. It's superstitious, maybe, but I think these peppers may have saved us from severing our relationship forever. We mended our fracturing friendships and became a family once again, eating dinner together and making sure the kitchen was clean.

Date (Dublin Core)

April 2020

Creator (Dublin Core)

The Modern Proper Chefs/Bloggers

Contributor (Dublin Core)

Mary Norkol

Event Identifier (Dublin Core)

HST643

Partner (Dublin Core)

Arizona State University

Type (Dublin Core)

recipe

Link (Bibliographic Ontology)

https://web.archive.org/web/20210303045500/https://themodernproper.com/vegetarian-stuffed-peppers

Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)

English Food & Drink
English Social Distance
English Social Media (including Memes)
English Conflict

Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)

Sensory History
cooking
stuffed peppers
The Modern Proper
vegetarian
omnivore
meat
TikTok
recipe
viral recipe

Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)

Sensory History
cooking
stuffed peppers
The Modern Proper

Collection (Dublin Core)

Foodways
College COVID Stories
Mental Health

Linked Data (Dublin Core)

Sensory history submissions and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Date Submitted (Dublin Core)

02/04/2022

Date Modified (Dublin Core)

02/08/2022
03/15/2022
03/25/2022
3/25/2022
06/09/2022

Item sets

Covid 19

This item was submitted on February 4, 2022 by Mary Norkol using the form “Share Your Story” on the site “A Journal of the Plague Year”: https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive

Click here to view the collected data.

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