#COVIDcooking diary

What is it like to be forced to cook when you hate to cook but restaurants are closed due to a global pandemic? Perhaps I inherited my dislike of cooking. My mother tells me she rejected my father’s marriage proposal multiple times, finally telling him “I don’t want to cook for you.” His insistence that he wanted a wife, not a cook, led to their wedding. Because of the nature of their employment, she was nonetheless the main provider of meals in my childhood home until my teens. Money was tight, and I have memories of the jam bunwiches she would send with us to school: homemade buns (delicious if freshly made, freezer-burned otherwise) with an almost invisible layer of homemade jam. Their dryness made them a chore to eat. She made excellent soups, though: her cabbage borscht (heavily dilled) and green bean soup (with summer savory) were delicious. She cooked some favourites of my dad’s, despite their questionable nature: pork chops, fried so long that they curled in the pan, served with a layer of Bick’s green hot dog relish to rehydrate them. But other favourites of his that she personally hated she would refuse to cook. As a result, I learned to make “summer borscht” from my dad. Summer borscht takes advantage of the early appearance of the bitter weed sorrel in spring. Its only ingredients are water, butter, onion, potatoes, farmer sausage – and huge quantities of sorrel. My dad took over cooking when he became a full-time textbook author, working from home, and mom found paid employment outside the home. He would write until mid-afternoon, when he would come upstairs from his basement office to watch Wok with Yan on TV. We only occasionally ate at restaurants, due to the expense, but as prairie inhabitants we were familiar with Chinese Canadian food. The show inspired him to attempt some of Martin Yan’s recipes, modified to make use of whatever ingredients were readily available in our Russian Mennonite kitchen. Minute steak, onions, and mushrooms, diced and fried with hoisin and oyster sauce and served over instant white rice, became a staple. Other stir fries (cooked in a frying pan since we had no wok) were less popular in our household, as he would toss in peas, carrots, corn and whatever else was lingering in the fridge. When I first moved away from home, my diet consisted of some favourite meals of my childhood. Fried potatoes and eggs, eaten with diced raw onion or slices of Klik luncheon meat drowned in vinegar (my dad would have substituted frozen uncooked farmer’s sausage for the Klik). Cans of Heinz spaghetti or baked beans. Hungry Man frozen dinners of Salisbury steak. Macaroni with my dad’s version of Marcella Hazan’s classic tomato sauce: diced onions fried in butter, a jar of home-canned tomatoes, a splash of vinegar, a teaspoon of white sugar, and dashes of ketchup and bottled chili sauce. As my income increased and my available time decreased, I was able to outsource the chore of regularly feeding myself. For the last twenty years, I’ve lived in a downtown neighbourhood with a large variety of local independent restaurants. Restaurant food on a regular basis was finally affordable for me, and I took advantage of the many Vietnamese, Chinese, Italian, Greek, Mexican, and Indigenous offerings nearby. I got almost all of my lunches from Diversity Foods, the social enterprise that operates food services on my university campus, and most dinners from restaurants on my walk home. I ate well. On March 20, 2020, to combat the spread of the COVID-19 virus, my …