The Commercial Appeal - Go Memphis
Stuck inside the kitchen with the COVID-19 blues again
The COVID-19 blues are getting me down. When I’m down, I want to eat something. When I want to eat something during this time of pandemic, I nearly always have to cook it. But cooking is part of my job, so I essentially have to do my job whenever I want to take a break from my job.
The COVID-19 blues are getting me down.
I have about 200 cookbooks in my kitchen at home. I have maybe two or three times that number at my office, as far as I remember. I haven’t been to the office, except for occasional forays into straight news writing, for nine months. I could have had a baby in the time it has been since I last cooked in the office kitchen, if it weren’t for a few obvious physical limitations.
When I started this whole stay-athome thing, I thought I was set. I could cook to my heart’s content. Two hundred cookbooks is a lot of cookbooks. And on top of them (technically, on the shelf below them), I have every St. Louis Post-dispatch Let’s Eat section from the past seven years. That’s thousands of additional recipes.
But owning 200 cookbooks is not the same thing as cooking out of 200 cookbooks. We all have our favorites, and in my case those do not include “Modern Meals” published in 1936 by the Milk Foundation, “How to Get the Most Out of Your Sunbeam Mixmaster,” “The New Banana,” which I’m pretty sure I picked up as a joke (it has a recipe for bananas wrapped in bacon) and “Kitchen Fun,” a 1932 cookbook for children that I just now saw for the first time. It belonged to my wife’s cousin.
“Kitchen Fun” includes a recipe called Mammy’s Corn Bread.
I am not going to make a recipe called Mammy’s Corn Bread, even though the recipe itself is not very different from the cornbread I do make. Neither am I going to make a dish from the same book called Surprise Carrot Loaf. It is made by combining one cup of ground carrots, one cup of peanut butter, one cup of breadcrumbs and one cup of tomatoes with a tablespoon of butter and four eggs, all cooked in a loaf pan.
Instead, I tend to go back to the same books over and over again. And I have my favorite recipes from within those books, too.
Is it possible to be in a cooking rut when you have 200 cookbooks? Apparently, it is easier to be in one than when you have 500 cookbooks at the office.
For the sake of this column, I am going to just pretend that the internet does not exist. Besides, internet recipes taste too … digital, I guess.
And yes, I do frequently create my own recipes. But not every day. And in almost every circumstance, I would rather have a recipe developed by Jacques Pepin than one I invented myself.
I’m even getting tired of my lovely kitchen. It is a stylish and fashionable kitchen, or it would have been in 2003. But I have set up a makeshift office in it, and now I spend hours there every day. Hours of writing and, often, hours of cooking.
Did you know that a shiny black floor shows every speck of dust or dirt, and you can see it from the other side of the house, around the corner and down the street? It doesn’t matter how small it is. If an amoeba is walking across the floor eating amoeba-sized Cheetos, and it drops a subatomic particle of orange dust on the floor, you can see it from the living room. With the lights out.
And the same goes for shiny black countertops.
I’ve got those Stuck-in-the-kitchenwith-shiny-black-countertops COVID-19 Blues.