With so many of our normal activities curtailed these days, it’s no wonder that the kitchen has become a favorite refuge—food is not only sustenance, but a way to connect with our creativity and nurture our spirit of hope and resilience. So in this month’s Ask A Wench feature, we’re answering this question: By all accounts, activity in the kitchen has skyrocketed during the pandemic. Have you been busy trying recipes? And have you discovered a favorite comfort treat?
Nicola: I ate far too much at the start of Lockdown and have been spending the last few weeks trying to get myself back to healthier eating. I’m not much of a cook or baker and am totally spoiled because my husband is a very talented chef. One of his pandemic projects has been improving his sourdough bread and I have been an enthusiastic tester of the results.
My own kitchen efforts have been focused on trying out some new salad recipes. My current favourite is salmon with rocket/arugula, pink grapefruit and avocado. Sometimes I throw in some little sweet tomatoes as well. The dressing, which is oil with crushed roasted fennel seeds adds something extra-delicious to the mix.
To make it, you grease a muffin tin and preheat the oven to 200C. Put one whole egg, two additional egg yolks, 115grams of brown caster sugar and 2 tablespoons of cornflour in a saucepan and mix well together, then slowly add in 400 mils of full fat milk. Place the pan on a medium heat and stir until it comes to the boil and thicken. Remove from the heat and add in two teaspoons of vanilla extract. Put the custard mix into a bowl to cool whilst you cut out your rounds of pastry to fit the tin. Once the custard is cool, spoon it into the pastry cases and bake for 20 – 25 minutes. Leave to cool for 5 minutes in the tin before moving the tarts to a cooling rack. Best eaten warm but cold is also very tasty!
Anne: I've been watching the proliferation of baking posts on Facebook and other places, and drooling over some of the luscious photos, but though I love to cook and really enjoy baking, I usually only do special things when I have visitors or when I'm visiting and taking a little something as a gift. Otherwise for me, it's ordinary everyday cooking.
I did bake bread in the first few weeks of lockdown when I was unable to get my favorite brand of bread. Baking bread is fun and easy -- especially with the no-knead method, but when the air is full of the smell of warm, fresh-baked bread, it's so hard to resist having another slice, and another. So I limit my bread baking.
I cook most meals -- I'm not one for zapping food in the microwave, or getting take-away meals, but it's fairly basic. I can't be bothered going to a lot of trouble just for me. It's winter here, so I've been making big pots of soup -- mostly some kind of veggie soup, usually what I've got in the fridge with lentils or barley and a lamb shank if I have one. Again, nothing fancy.
If I did want to bake something sweet to take to friends, it would probably be an orange almond cake, or little raspberry (or blueberry) and almond friands (aka muffins). Cakes made from almond meal (ie ground almonds) are surprisingly moist and light, and these are quick, easy and and not too sweet -- perfect for gluten and/or dairy intolerant friends, of which I have quite a few. The recipe for the orange cake sounds weird, because you start by boiling a couple of whole oranges, but trust me, it's really yummy. You can top it with a glaze, or masses of flaked almonds, or simply dust with icing sugar (powdered sugar). And serve with cream as a dessert.
Pia: Far from trying recipes and cooking delicious treats I’ve been avoiding it as much as possible! Being at home all the time makes it far too tempting to head for the fridge and I’m eating way more than I should, especially chocolate, plus I’m allergic to exercise – not a great combination. However, sometimes you’ve just got to live a little and one thing that’s hard to resist is newly baked bread. Because I’m lazy I usually only make soda bread, but my favourite is a delightfully naughty variety with lots of syrup which means it’s sweet. It’s great on its own with just butter, although it goes well with cheese too. Here’s how to make it:-
Put 1 ½ decilitres (0.6 of a US cup) of bran, 4 ½ dl (1.9 US cup) of normal white flour, 6 dl (2.5 US cup) of wholemeal flour, and 3 teaspoons of baking powder in a bowl and thoroughly mix these dry ingredients. Add 4 dl (1.7 US cup) of full milk and 4 extremely heaped tablespoons of golden syrup. Mix it all together and roughly split it in half. Pick up the dough with your hands and form two loaves (very sticky and messy but that’s ok). Put these on a greased baking tray and bake in the oven at 175 degrees Celsius for about 35-40 minutes. Eat while warm!
Mary Jo: I can't say I'm cooking more than usual; since I work at home, I'm as busy as I usually am. But I have a fun thing or two to mention. Firstly, my sister-in-law introduced us to her home made ice cream sandwiches. She uses Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers, which I'd never heard of, but which apparently have had a long and successful career as the basis of ice box cakes. They're quite thin, which works well for ice cream sandwiches. Simply soften the ice cream until it's malleable but not melting, slather on a wafer, cover with another wafer and press together to spread the ice cream, then refreeze. Fun and easy! My test batch aren't as neat as hers, but they taste good. Since we saw her on the Fourth of July, she'd made a batch with vanilla ice cream and chopped strawberries and blueberries mixed in. Hurray for the red, white and blue!
This second item isn't a recipe but an ingredient. I grow some herbs, and the basil has really gone to town this year! (That's sage to the left of the basil.) I particularly like adding chopped fresh basil to an omelet with cheese, or tossing leaves in a salad, or mixing basil with sliced tomatoes and a bit of olive oil. (This is a traditional tomato salad in the Mayhem Consultant's family.)
Fresh herbs add amazingly to flavor in all kinds of foods. After basil, my favorite is rosemary. If you have no place to grow herbs, most grocery stores have fresh packets in the produce department. If you haven't used fresh herbs before, I think it's time you did!
Jo: I’ve spent a little time in this Isolation Situation trying out new recipes.
(There’s a ricotta cheesecake, for instance, that’s baked and it looks like a cake. I cannot find the exact recipe I'm trying to recreate. It makes for very tasty failures though.)
What I’ve mostly done is make old and familiar stuff I haven’t got back to for a while.
Like strawberry shortcake.
Shortcake is a flaky biscuit sort of thing. Properly, it IS a biscuit. I will not dis folks who choose to make strawberry shortcake with a bit of sponge cake. They doubtless have their reasons. But I make it the right way.
I start with biscuits. My aunts used lard back in the old days. I use vegetable shortening, but you can use butter in this special case if you are, as my Aunt Doc would have put it, “made of money.” I add a good bit more sugar to these biscuits than I would if I were making some to be filled with bacon and tomato or set alongside eggs and grits. I top 'em with strawberries cut with some sugar and I decorate with cream on top if I have it handy.
Forget angelfood cake. This is what angels actually eat.
Andrea: I enjoy cooking, and with the covid-19 forcing so many of us to shelter in place, I found the flood recipes appearing on online one of the silver linings. (Though I do wish that butter and sugar would announce that light of the emergency, they deemed their calorie count to be cut in half. One of my favorite features has been Melissa Clark’s entertaining (and delicious) column on pantry cooking in the New York Times, where she offers wonderfully simple recipes from humble ingredients. (The Food section of the NY Times, along with its amazing recipe section is fabulous resource!)
I confess that I’ve gravitated to sweets in my lock-down cooking (I am taking VERY long walks to compensate!) Along with my go-to chocolate chip and walnut blondies, my new favorite new treats are the Banana Everything cookie (no eggs and olive oil instead of butter, so a moderately healthy snack) I’ve taken the liberty of adding dried fruit—raisons, cranberries and cherries—to the mix, which I modestly announce to be an improvement on the original! I’ve also tried Clarke’s pound cake recipe . . .and to show I eat more than sugar and butter, I also adore the Quinoa and Bean soup from the pantry recipes. (I add chopped fresh spinach at the end . . .but I love to tinker!)
Now, before you all rush for your pots and pans, please share what you've been cooking lately! Have you discovered new favorites from all the recipes being showcased online? (We all have our forks and spoons ready!)