Cooking while Rome burns

...or, please put down the monkey's paw before saying I Wish I Had Time To Learn How To Bake

So it’s been a minute, hasn’t it. My profound apologies for vanishing off the face of the earth (moving across the country and trying to set up a new life as a freelance editor have kind of eaten my brain, which is only now beginning to regenerate).

Everyone else has already said most of what I’d like to say about the current situation. My wife and I are lucky to be where we are in Santa Fe — but my parents are in Washington state and her family is in NYC, so we are terrified by proxy, and doing what we can to distract ourselves with work and housework. It looks like none of the cons we’re scheduled to attend are going to happen this year, and frankly I don’t want to fly anywhere at the moment, but hopefully we’ll still be able to teach online for this year’s Alpha workshops.

In the meantime: I’ve spent most of my adult life living in an apartment without a proper kitchen, and now that I have access to an actual functional food-preparation space and basically unlimited time to fuck around in it, plus fresh produce delivered every two weeks from a farm-share, I have transitioned from “wouldn’t it be nice if I could do the thing” to “gonna try to do the thing,” and it’s kind of enormously satisfying. The way I’ve always cooked (except for baking) is off-the-cuff and casual, with limited use of recipes — if I’ve never made a thing before, I look up several versions of how to do the thing, and then wing it based on the common elements — and thus it is difficult to offer my own recipes to other people. But I’m going to try anyway.

The things I’ve made for the first time so far during coronalockdown are:

Pork and ginger dumplings (no pictures)

Mushroom and smoked turkey ravioli

Soup with shiitake mushrooms, bok choy, scallions, and ginger-garlic chicken meatballs

No-knead bread

(also various pressure-cooker stocks to use up veg that would otherwise go bad; we haven’t yet reached the sourdough starter/homemade yogurt level, but I can see it on the horizon)

Next week, recipes for these and other experiments!

Stay inside, be safe, be kind to yourselves, wash your hands, tip your delivery people with extreme generosity.