Cooking in Captivity
The instructions on the bag read: “Soak for 24 hours, or boil for 10 minutes.” The bag lied.
It took 48 hours, two separate boils, two different attempted meals, and painstaking one-by-one extractions to get a handful of dried beans not to taste like a mouthful of gravel. Apparently, the legume learning curve is steep.
Since lockdown started, my eating habits have completely changed (I’m guessing yours have, too). I’ve always found cooking to be therapeutic, but I barely ever used my kitchen in New York. A month ago, the only thing in my fridge was booze and yogurt.
Now, in “captivity,” I cook every meal myself. I’m no expert, but I’ve been learning a lot about making things last, limiting waste, working around unavailable ingredients, and trying to get as much flavor and variety out of the things I panic-bought before hunkering down. I’ve started this project as a way of sharing some of this knowledge and the great resources I’ve found. Let’s make some interesting meals as we muddle through captivity together.
In addition to recipes, some topics I’ll address:
Preservation: Pickling, fermenting, and freezing
Pandemic pantry MVPs
Beans. WTF.
Do I feel a little silly starting a cooking blog during a global pandemic? Totally. I’ve wrestled with this question over the past 22 days and the best answer I can come up with is that faced with the crushing futility of basically everything and the abrupt severing of our social ties, food is something that still knits us together. It nourishes us, gives us pleasure, keeps us creative, and as weekdays blend into weekends, meals have become our most important markers of time. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner give shape to the endless blur of pants-less Zoom calls and binge-watching Tiger King.
I realize how immensely privileged I am right now. I still have a home and a job, the resources to buy food and the time to obsess over it. Compared to many friends—friends who’ve been laid off, who are struggling with the mental health impacts of isolation, who are parents trying to keep their kids safe/sane, who are medical workers heroically laboring on the front lines—I have it pretty easy. There are many brave souls laboring to keep the world spinning right now, so at the end of every post I’ll spotlight an organization, person, or company that’s doing great work and could use a little help. If you come across any that you admire and would like to share, please let me know!
So if you’re in need of meal inspiration, if you don’t know what to do with all those dried beans, if you need a break from Joe Exotic, join me as we do some Cooking in Captivity! We’ll get through this together.