The Quarantine Cookbook

Intro

Living alone in a city is usually okay, and I've been three steps from collapse for years now but those steps always felt like a croissant or a good workday or a stiff drink or a few hours staring at the waves would fix it. Since none of those are options, I've had to start finding my food, drink, and meditations elsewhere. I suppose it finally is time to start writing again in earnest. On the other hand, my passins are not what they were when last I did this sort of thing. I'm simpler, and older, and far too aware of the ways in which I sound like a spoiled child to myself. I don't know how to indulge, and my youthful genius has, alas, passed with those foibles.

(Or maybe it hasn't, but let's not unearth those fears just yet. It'll take awhile before we're readdy to address that set of fever-dreams).

Welcome to quarantine, folks. You're stuck with yourselves, and so am I. There is no amount of self care that will do more than keep me living, at this point, so let's put some attention where the bulk of my Sisyphean effort feels well spent these days. If your idle curiosity or your philsophy seminar needs you to reflect on the circularity of time and narratives, take my word for it that there's nothing quite like your mother's most hated chore becoming your only remaining touchpoint to sanity.

Moussaka; or, how to dress up your root vegetables and dairy.

If you're like me, and in this solipsistic blog universe who isn't, you stockpiled; and, having stockpiled, feel embarassed, nervous, deeply satisfied and yet almost nauseated, looking at the fruits of your labours. If you're like me, your idea of a stockpile is fairly akin to every vague cliche you've ever heard about the European peasantry, coupled with every small-scale kitchen shortage emergency you ever witnessed in your childhood. I don't know if anyone reading is like me. Of course, principle of explosion, I can decide you are, and have a laugh with you. You've got too much dairy, and you've got too many root vegetables. Those liters of tetra pak milk seemed reasonable enough in the online shopping cart; here, in your home, you don't really undeerstand how they translate into food. You're too young for this. You cook for one person. And yet, there is a simultaneous, opposing anxiety in the undertow of your brain: you know that you don't understand food quantities properly. You barely cook for one person. Disasters are not meant to be reacted to, they are meant to be anticipated.

You might be like me, where you don't question this tendency too closely. If so, you're wise; or at least I think myself wise for not questioning that too closely. Look, disasters can't be reasoned about easily. The quiet voice in the undertow has a point that I don't want to look at too closely, just yet. I don't want to think about the ways in which the world changed over the course of the first half of March 2020. I don't want to question my instincts, to second guess their fear. They are doing a job that I don't want to do. They are preparing for a world that I don't understand, by getting me what I know I'll need in any case. Things that will last, that won't go to waste.

If I can't justify these instincts, at least I can forgive them. They haven't done any harm. But their outcome is still rather overwhelming.

As evening comes and goes, and I turn off my evening water supply alarm, and firmly close my work laptop, and stare at my potatoes-and-onions basket, I acknowledge that I don't know what this means for today. That's been the challenge all day, hasn't it? I'm treating being trapped as an adventure, because adulthood teaches you to choose your approach to an problem and I've chosen to handle this one as an exciting new adversary with a story buried in it. But that doesn't let me escape the problems of today, or the fact that everything about today is new. It's not an aberration in my old routine; it's the creation of the routine that will replace the one that got destroyed last week, after over a year of careful work cultivating it into something approximating functional adult humanity.

It's been so seamless, hasn't it, the process of remembering research student habits, of reconstructing your Day to match what your mind half-remembers and your bones never forgot? Tuesday will be harder, you think; everybody you've spoken to today, and there are a lot, seems to be doing so much worse. For you, this is a relief, but a fragile one. It's going to be worse going forward, I'm sure; you half apologize to them for doing better than they are, and half portend, in an attempt to convey what you yourself only half understand. The fact is, you're better equipped to handle this than so many of the others. Egotistic as it feels to think it, frightening as it is to realize you mean it, it's true. You're quite matter-of-fact about how this is going to go, because you know how it's going to go. You didn't first perform social distancing for the sake of a pandemic. You did it for the sake of your poor tapped-out brain.

But you've never had to cook for yourself while doing it before.

Self-care is so strange. Potatoes, you love potatoes. You have carrots (you should really clear out the crisper, there's too many carrots and they'll spoil if you don't get the old onions out of there). There's that lovely greek yogurt you made last week, it'll spoil if you don't use it, and you want the container back besides. All these components of a good life, of a working kitchen, spiralling out, unable to cohere.

I'm using this app called Plant Jammer, that lets me design recipes. I made one for moussaka just two days ago, didn't I?

And voila. It's a cross between a lasagna and a gratin, and you ate it years ago in a small Mediterranean establishment that has since closed down. You embark on your Proustian voyage, well aware that you're not going to get anything remotely similar out of this meal but willing to try anyway.

Two hours later, you have an entirely different memory in your bowl. It smells and tastes exactly like majjiga pulusu, the buttermilk stew your mother used to call your grandfather to crow about whenever she made it. The house version never involved mushrooms, but they are a beautiful addition. There's smoked edam on top, because you indulge yourself when it comes to cheese; and the taste, in combination with the rest, is beautiful. It tastes like more than the sum of its parts. It lives up to your cheese.

This app is wonderful. You evangelize it to everyone. You eat your meal. You feel sated for the first time in weeks.

Had you been eating that poorly? It's hard to remember. Isn't a sandwich at noon and a takeout meal at night enough?

Had you eaten today before this?

But you're not just full, you're sated. You don't need more. The meal is making you sleepy.

Two hundred grams of potatoes to a meal. You have 3 kg. You're fine.

The world will still be here tomorrow.