Slaving Over a Hot Microwave
Name: Laura Simis
Age: 26
Occupation: Branding & Communications Manager
Location: Raleigh, NC
No. of days in quarantine: 22
Quarantine happy hour drink of choice: Vodka tonic
Ideal quarantine partner (real or imagined): Florence Pugh (so she can cook for me!)
Most ambitious cooking project attempted: Chicken and penne pasta in a lemon & parmesan cream sauce
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)
I’m a person who liked spending most nights and weekends home alone before it was “cool.*” (*Mandatory.)
Now, though, I find myself confronted with a case of “too much of a good thing,” trying to navigate a new normal where the things I used to savor feel like my only options.
I’ve been trying to use breakfast as an opportunity to create a morning routine that effectively tricks myself into believing I’m now living a luxurious reality where I’m independently wealthy and don’t have to get up early or get dressed for work, rather than state-mandated social isolation.
It feels decadent to start the day by wearing my slippers and taking my coffee out on the breezeway (My view? Literally, a dumpster.) Then I’ll toast a bagel and top it with cream cheese and pepper jelly, to be eaten on my couch before I “clock in” 4 feet away at my desk.
After breakfast, the illusions of luxury wear off quickly.
I know that I am very lucky to have a job with relatively strong job security in this economic climate, and one that allows me to work remotely while the pandemic rages on.
I’ve watched too many friends be laid-off or furloughed or plunged into uncertainty knowing that the inevitable is coming — and I’ve chosen to assuage my “survivor’s guilt” and distract myself from general COVID-19 anxieties by throwing myself HARD into my work.
By the time I come up for air at Noon or 1 PM, I can’t seem to summon the necessary energy for food prep that requires anything more than the push of a microwave Start button. This is a fancy way of saying that I’ve mostly been subsisting on microwaveable personal pizzas for lunch.
Other terrible lunches I’ve prepared for myself as I work from home include:
- Just one entire cucumber, artfully arranged on a dinner plate
- A Morningstar chick’n patty between two pieces of sandwich bread
- Jalapeno poppers I found wedged in the back of my freezer
There is room for improvement here; but it is, after all, my first apocalypse. I’ll try to step it up during the next one.
I pour some white wine at 4, promise myself that I’ll stop working at 5, and end up going until 6:30. I know that you’re only supposed to use stemless wine glasses for reds, but this feels like a rule you don’t have to follow when the world is ending.
Before quarantine began, my cooking style was probably best described as “snacks masquerading as meals.” I live alone and have a bad habit of ignoring leftovers in my fridge until they are no longer safe to consume, so dinners tend to be dressed-up combinations of various ingredients thrown on a plate more so than actual cooking.
Still, I want so desperately to be the kind of person who seizes this as an opportunity to hone my skills. There have been nights where I’ve eagerly thrown my efforts into preparing real dinners.
The meager remains of a container of parmesan cheese became a gorgeous greek pasta sauce. I found a red wine vinegar that I bought two years ago for one specific recipe and haven’t used since, and marinated some chopped tomatoes and red peppers. I made a pad thai that wasn’t half bad, even though local grocery store patrons appear to be hoarding toilet paper and all the fish sauce.
I know that I’m just grasping for proof that everything is fine, that everything will be fine — aggressively gathering evidence that I can push through an overwhelming situation to do this normal thing, even though cooking meals like this isn’t actually “normal” for me.
There are just as many nights where the pressure of having to exert creativity in the kitchen to make something edible feels like one more overwhelming thing I don’t want to have to do.
While I refresh the app to watch my GrubHub delivery person crossing town, I like to imagine that I am single-handedly holding up the restaurant economy.
I try not to think about how I’ve just spent $16 plus $3 of taxes plus $3 delivery fee plus $3 tip to have a plastic container of very mediocre tonkotsu ramen left on my doorstep. I try not to feel guilty for ordering food when I have perfectly good groceries, while there are people out there who don’t know how they’ll pay rent this month.
I soft-boil an egg to add on top, both to make myself feel even remotely like I’ve earned this meal, and stupidly, to make it more Instagrammable.
They say “If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen,” but when you’re living in a one-bedroom apartment that you’re not allowed to leave, there aren’t many other options.
