THE VIRUS MADE ME DO IT: Cooking in the Time of a Pandemic

I am not much of a cook.  (Go ahead; ask my friends and family.)  In saying this, I don’t mean to say that I can’t cook – I can get a meal on the table – or that I don’t cook – I do.  It’s just that it isn’t a passion or even a pleasure most of the time.  True, there are rainy days when I enjoy making a big pot of soup, but most of the time cooking is just something that has to get done.

Like many other uninspired cooks, I have a small but sufficient repertoire of meals that I rotate through. And although the rotation may be limited, we eat well.  My husband doesn’t like to cook either, but he can chop – we eat lots of salads, lots of fresh stuff.  

I have even been known to cut out interesting-looking recipes from the paper and put them in a notebook—a notebook that, I confess, mostly stays closed until I have to figure out what to take to a potluck or some such event.  

So, this isn’t a cry for a meal service; it’s just a report that, to my great surprise, I have, since being homebound by the virus, taken an interest in cooking.  The other day, for instance, Bill announced that he was going to the store, and I heard myself say, “Let me get out my recipes.”  

These are not words often uttered in my house. 

I made a list.  He brought home ingredients.  I started to cook.  

I cooked new things.   

I don’t know what to make of this.  I look at myself in the mirror and wonder whether I have been replaced by a pod person.

Pod person or not, though, it has been—dare I admit it—kind of fun, punctuated, of course, by other more familiar kinds of fun, such as gardening.  (I wouldn’t, after all, want to go overboard with this cooking thing.)

Let me pause here to note that most of the gardeners of my acquaintance seem also to be enthusiastic cooks.  I don’t know why I don’t share that enthusiasm.  I have often thought that cooking resembles gardening in this regard:  If you don’t enjoy the process, the whole business generally feels like drudgery.  After all, gardening, like cooking, is never finished (although you do get to take a break for much of the winter.)  

Still, I love everything about gardening.  I don’t do it to reach a final result.  I do it because I find the repetitive tasks to be relaxing and rewarding.  I do it for the beauty and peace that I experience along the way.  My garden will never be finished.  I will never be “caught up.”  And that’s OK.  There are whole days and weeks and months of glory to be enjoyed before plants die back or go dormant or lose their leaves or their lives.

Cooking, on the other hand – such an ephemeral outcome. All that work and the food is gone in minutes.  So, I will say it again; you have to be in it for the process. And for most of my life, on most days, the process has left me cold.  

Those of you whose interests are the opposite of mine are in a better position than I.  After all, if you don’t like gardening, you can just plant junipers in a sea of bark dust and call it good.  But, if you don’t like cooking, well—you still have to cook, unless you have the means to hire a chef or go out to eat every day.

I, for one, cannot afford a chef (nor would I want one hanging around my house) and have no interest in going to restaurants on a daily basis.  In any event, we can’t go restaurant hopping during a pandemic.  So, I am delighted, if baffled, by the sudden and unexpected uptick in my interest in food preparation.  

Will this enthusiasm outlast the pandemic?  If I were a betting person, I’d bet not.  You know what they say about old dogs and new tricks.  Still, cooking is helping to solve the existential dilemma during this time of social isolation and giving me something to look forward to as evening approaches each day.  

Maybe being a pod person isn’t such a bad thing, after all . . .

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

(Stay safe, everyone!)