Seeking Comfort Food in Quarantine, and other Kitchen Tales
Name: Ankita Satija
Age: 28
Occupation: UX Designer/Consultant
Location: Westchester, NY
No. of days in quarantine: 21
Quarantine happy hour drink of choice: Pinot noir or a French 75. 🍸
Ideal quarantine partner (real or imagined): A harem of golden doodles.
Most ambitious cooking project attempted: Paneer Jalfrezi. Not the most ambitious, but a new-to-me recipe nonetheless. Finally getting to brush up on my Indian cooking!
What has being in quarantine taught you about cooking? Describe a typical day of cooking in quarantine, your favorite meal that you’ve cooked, your failures, attempts, and the lessons you learned (or didn’t learn)
In this new way of life, I now spend 90% of my day thinking about food — planning meals, ordering and sanitizing groceries, prepping, actually cooking and then doing dishes. x3. So many dishes!
I’m lucky to be quarantining at my parents’ house in Westchester with my brother and my boyfriend Geoff. With 5 people and as many food preferences, it has been an adventure to keep everyone happy and well-fed. We’ve been ordering our groceries from Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh. While we’ve been able to avoid the stores this way, I feel conscious about hoarding and make sure we plan our meals well ahead of time to avoid wasting food.
A day in the new life
I typically start the day with a cup of coffee and try out Geoff’s latest cold brew iced tea. Each night, he’ll scavenge our tea cabinet and has now brewed everything from Singapore breakfast tea to Ladurée’s thé au caramel.
Breakfast is a bowl of oatmeal with berries, same as pre-quarantine. For lunch, my mom makes roti and some variety of sabzi, a cooked Indian vegetable dish. I end up stress-snacking on Goldfish crackers sometime in the afternoon (panic ordered from Amazon last week) and vow to eat a fruit tomorrow instead.
Dinner is my favorite time of the day. Once meetings and calls wrap up for the day, we congregate in the kitchen to catch up. We’ve been enjoying large family dinners where each of us is on duty. My favorite quarantine meal so far was the other night’s smorgasbord: my mom roasted chicken thighs with jerk seasoning from Grenada; Geoff and I made shrimp pasta and a salad; and my dad opened a bottle of Rioja. A random medley, but I loved it. After dinner we played a round of euchre, a card game Geoff taught us.
Although we’ve been reaching for familiar comfort foods most days, I’ve also tried a few new things in the kitchen. The paneer jalfrezi was a surprise hit and also makes a great taco filling. I also caved and made the Dalgona coffee that’s currently all over Instagram. Satisfying, but a bit sweet for my taste. No major quarantine cooking fails yet, but next week I want to attempt a rosemary focaccia. As a talentless baker, that should be interesting…
As our world undergoes these difficult times, I am comforted by these slow meals and time spent in the kitchen with my family. Cooking while in quarantine feels more urgent in many ways, but I am already feeling less intimidated by obscure ingredients and lengthy recipes.
May we all continue our kitchen experiments when we come through the other side.
