Eating my way through a pandemic
So Thursday I did a crazy risky fantastic thing - I ate WITH ANOTHER HUMAN! Wait, there’s more. We were IN A RESTAURANT! This was a first for me in nearly two years.
As with so many things, my shopping and eating changed overnight on March 13, 2020.
If you knew me in the 90s, you’d remember my insatiable need to eat out. In the Clerk’s department kitchen, you’d see my meagre lunches in the fridge abandoned in favour of going out with anyone who asked. At my next job at ICLEI, I ate Thai Thani takeout so often I’m pretty sure I financed the owner’s kids’ university educations. I didn’t have a clue how to cook. A decade earlier, I’d once served a friend Kraft Dinner when I invited her for lunch. Well, it was PC white cheddar zhuzhed up with mushrooms but still…
If we’d had a pandemic then, I would have starved.
To save money to go back to school, I started eating food I prepared myself. The spark caught. Returning from law school nearly 20 years ago now, I’d become a fairly reliable cook. All vegetarian then - I had, after all, been in Victoria. I met Jack shortly after and we spent our time cocooning. I resumed eating and cooking meat. I believe there may actually be a Polish rule that you cannot be vegetarian or perhaps one that deems pork a vegetable. Regardless, it was fun to expand my cooking repertoire and to have someone to eat with every night. Living in Weston made it even more imperative since restaurants here are hit-and-miss. Together we hosted dinner parties of family and friends, intimate or large, we didn’t care.
Call it pandemic preparedness. (well, not the hosting part, but the cooking part).
In the before-days, I shopped at Superstore every weekend and, in the summer, at the farmers’ market too. Even after Jack died, I cooked and ate nearly every dinner at home and treated myself regularly to lunch out in the restaurants near my office.
First step of COVID - I immediately shifted from weekly supermarket shopping to ordering my food through an app and reduced the frequency to monthly. To avoid scurvy, I set up a biweekly produce order from FoodShare. These habits have stuck. I have not been in my local supermarket now for 18 months. OK, so I’m currently fed up with cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and onions from FoodShare but they keep costs down by delivering stuff that stays fresh through the winter. It makes the approach to spring just that much more exciting. Last June I drove to a friend’s farm in Niagara Region to buy $75 of asparagus and just gorged on that for a couple of weeks. Can’t wait to do that again!
In May 2020, I made my first foray out of town to get goat’s cheese and locally produced meat from the River’s Edge Dairy Goat in Arthur, Ontario. I have since supplemented my deliveries with trips to the King Cole Duck farm in Aurora and various shops in Prince Edward County. I blogged about it earlier. Each of these trips has perked me up immensely. Nothing like a big batch of sautéed duck hearts with mushrooms and onions in a cream sauce. NOTHING!
Nearly a year into COVID, I discovered the pleasures of curated boxes from Culinary Adventures and later still, the cheese box from Fruit Cart. My fridge is typically overflowing with jars of this and that - things I would not have chosen in a store but that I delight in. OK so nobody NEEDS a curried miso oil or champagne jelly, but everyone appreciates these things. I even tried Hello Fresh to vary my diet. Good to have a change. Too much packaging though. Seriously, they actually sent me a sachet of 1 tablespoon of all purpose flour! Who are these people who don’t have flour in their kitchens?!?
Somewhere along the line, I began to feel comfortable ordering food in: Chinese, Italian, Korean, Mexican. As I write this, I’m tucking into hot and sour soup, green curry tiger prawns, Thai style glass noodles, and spicy basil, tofu, and eggplant. Damn, I can’t make this stuff! Now I can eat it all weekend.
But ordering in is still the exception, not the norm. In December 2020, I acquired a sourdough starter and I’ve made sourdough bread, bagels, muffins, and banana bread regularly throughout, distributing starter to friends who’ve come by for outdoor visits and passing baked goods to neighbours. I learned as a kid how bread-making is both an art and a helluva good way to pass time: my mother used bread to cope with the winter storms that settled into Huron County for days at a time. (and hey, those in Toronto angsting about this snow that has been with us for over a month now, try having your road impassable for a week leaving you no way out at all.)
To brighten COVID meals, I let my fingers do the walking to the Le Crueset website where I ordered a set of orange bowls that set off pretty much all the meals. These bowls will outlive the pandemic but will always remind me of this strange time.
And then there’s where I eat. I started being very disciplined and eating at the dining table at least once or twice a week. I still use plates, bowls, and cutlery, but it’s months since I ate anywhere other than the butcher block counter in my kitchen listening to CBC radio and reading Twitter. Oh Twitter, my nightly dinner companion. What would I do without it. The Twitterverse dines with me and more often then not, comments on photos of my dinner. Say what you will about social media (and I’ve said it myself in this blog) but it serves a valuable purpose to those of us who live alone.
I cannot wait to eat outside again and with people again and - maybe one day - inside my house with people. But now I must sign off so I can go and watch my pandemic friends on the Food Network. What will the Chopped basket contain tonight?!?
