Got cooking fatigue? Here are some tips
It’s not necessary to cook three meals a day when meal options abound
Megan Rafuse relished the start of quarantine.
She was experimenting with new recipes, nurturing a sourdough starter and spending more time with her fiancé. Around four weeks into lockdown, the clinical therapist and co-founder of Shift Collab threw in the kitchen towel.
“I was trying to keep my business afloat while struggling to keep up cooking as well,” says the Hamilton resident. “My meals didn’t look like my friends’ on Instagram. The dishes were always piling up. Cooking was suddenly very overwhelming.”
Rafuse isn’t the only one hitting a wall. Since the COVID-19 pandemic forced us home, quarantine fatigue has been a draining side effect. Now mealtimes have multiplied threefold and trips to the grocery store are ridden with anxiety. The initially exciting resurgence of home cooking has returned to what it simply was — a daily chore.
“I find you are either in the mood to cook because you’re emotionally eating or you are so spent you can’t clean another dish,” says Kyla Zanardi, cofounder of Fidel Gastro’s, a street food brand in Toronto.
Five weeks into being home, I grew tired of whipping up three hot meals a day. In fact, I stopped turning on the stove altogether. “Let’s have a picnic lunch,” I’d tell my quarantine partner, setting out the cured meats, condiments and bread to make sandwiches. Soon, that was the norm.
“My fatigue has more to do with the planning and procuring ingredients rather than the cooking,” says chef Vanessa Yeung, owner of Aphrodite Cooks, a catering company and cooking studio in Toronto.
“There’s also this expectation that you’re supposed to be super productive in quarantine … clean out your spice drawer, make sourdough bread … but realistically, we just need to go back to basics and eat to nourish ourselves.”
Yeung cooks mostly from scratch, but stocks up on storebought items, such as chicken nuggets and deli meats, for convenience. “Not all meals have to be fancy,” says the mother of two. “Some days it could just be soup or a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner. If your supermarket has good roast chicken, grab one and use it in a burrito or a pasta dish. The bones can be used to make soup later.”
With COVID-19-induced panic-buying cleaning out shelves of fresh ingredients, I turned to canned goods for reprieve. From pantry to table, we were eating in minutes. A no-cook lunch featured preserved sardines tossed in olive oil, lemon juice and fresh herbs on buttered toast. Baked beans just needed reheating for a hearty breakfast or brunch.
One-pot meals are a time saver for Candice Cardoz, mother of triplet boys in Brampton. She leans on the Instant Pot to serve up rice-based casseroles, soups and stews — no sides or extra dirty dishes to contend with. Making large batches of ovenroasted vegetables is another shortcut, which she uses for tacos and salads.
“I do a lot of picnic meals,” she adds. “It’s usually some leftover meat, shredded, served along with crackers, a variety of vegetables, cheese, nuts and so on. I put them into a silicon muffin container, so each of the kids gets their own mini buffet.”
Grazing suppers are a go-to for Rafuse as well, who puts out charcuterie or hummus and vegetables for low-maintenance sustenance. “On Thursday we get takeout,” she says. “We celebrate date night by not cooking and support local restaurants.”
Rafuse has also found relief from the COVID-19 cooking fog by applying flexibility to foodrelated tasks. On grocery shopping day she avoids prepping an elaborate dinner. Sometimes, grubby dishes are dealt with the following morning.
“I see how much bandwidth I have,” she says. “If I put a big effort into one out of every five meals and the other four are just to nourish myself — that’s fine.”
“Not every dinner has to be a winner,” says Zanardi. At the onset of lockdown, she and her partner, Matt Basile, turned to their Italian roots for comfort indulging in more pasta than usual.
To maintain the cooking momentum, Basile, the founder of Fidel Gastro’s, channelled his professional culinary skills into their home kitchen.
“Meals are planned two to three days in advance,” he says. “We rotate items in the fridge and put things that need to be cooked sooner at eye level. Dinner is based on what is going to go first.”
Basile is optimistic warm weather will get Canadians excited about cooking again, especially since it’s barbecuing season. “Being able to cook outside and the change of scenery will open up people’s appetite to try different things,” he says.
Rafuse agrees. “It’s less like cooking and more of a social outing.” For now, she has chosen baking sourdough bread as her sole quarantine project. And when demotivated, Rafuse reminds herself we are trying to survive in a crisis. “Many of us are grieving and dealing with a new normal, whether it is being laid off, a change in finances, working from home …,” she says. “I had to reframe the idea of cooking through the lens of a pandemic. It’s less about the perfect meal and more about self-care and nourishment.”