Sheltering at home feels ‘weird’ for TV’s Alton Brown
Chef and TV personality Alton Brown has been sheltering at home outside of Atlanta with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two dogs. Despite Georgia beginning to reopen, their quarantine “hasn’t been affected” much, he says. Outside of masked trips to his nearby test kitchen, “we’re making the decision to remain as isolated as we possibly can for the near future.”
As Brown’s show “Good Eats: Reloaded,” returns to the Cooking Channel, here’s a peek at one day of Brown’s quarantine.
6:40 a.m.
Well, things have been weird. I’ve been going to bed later and later and getting up later, but Tuesday I got up at 6:40. I’m very careful when I get out of bed to try to not wake either Elizabeth or either of the dogs, who sleep with us, including one that snores like Winston Churchill. One of the only things I do every day is make Elizabeth celery juice, so I get out the juicer.
7:30 a.m.
I’m getting ready to do another season of “Good Eats,” a show that I do on Food Network, which is a completely scripted show. So I wrote until almost 9 a.m. and then that’s when everybody else came downstairs.
9:10 a.m.
My wife and I walk the dogs to a small coffee stand in our neighborhood, where people are very good at social distancing. I got another coffee, she got an almond chai.
Noon
We had breakfast for lunch: a scrambled egg and some canned sardines. We eat a lot of canned fish and that’s very, very good quarantine food cause, you know, it never goes bad.
1 p.m.
I went to my office [about two miles away] because we’re fermenting hot sauces. That’s where all my test kitchens are, the “Good Eats” set, editing, everything’s there. So I went to a hot sauce tasting session and it’s funny, ’cause we’re all wearing masks and then we put all the hot sauce on crackers and we lift up our masks and shove the crackers in our mouths and then put the masks back on. There’s nothing like getting Sriracha burps when you have a mask on, because it doesn’t dispel out into the atmosphere. It stays right there with you.
4:25 p.m.
I had to steal some avocados from the office and some tortillas and then rushed home to try to concoct a new margarita recipe, which I did. And drank three margaritas in the process.
7 p.m.
That’s when “Quarantine Kitchen” goes live on YouTube. It was a fun show because I’d had three margaritas before we even started. My wife made her pico de gallo and I made guacamole and then I burned some corn chips. And then we ate it.
10:10 p.m.
We walked the dogs around the block and then I washed the kitchen up. (Corrects himself loudly.) WE washed the kitchen up. I would never claim to have washed the kitchen up by myself. And then [after my wife went to bed] I stressate a pint of ice cream.