Instead, I was intensely focused on the task at hand. I wasn’t thinking about my mother’s late-stage lung cancer or my father’s undiagnosed illness and the added As I went from one step to the next and that mound of dough and egg began to more closely resemble what I know of pasta, I wasn’t thinking about a respiratory disease with no vaccine or the shattered global economy or the fact that I probably won’t have my main source of income (from public speaking to large crowds) until 2021. Then I was pouring flour onto my island, making a small well, and breaking four eggs into it.
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I read the instruction manual and found a recipe for making penne alla vodka. This is not something I had ever accomplished before, but the KitchenAid mixer I got a few years ago did come with a set of pasta-making attachments, and there they were in the back of a cabinet. We may be stuck at home, but we are well-fed.Ī month into quarantine, I decided to make my own pasta. It is a reminder that as the world falls apart, we still have basic needs-to nurture and be nurtured, to nourish and be nourished. It doesn’t, at all, but it is a distraction.
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As Debbie, a news junkie, watches Rachel Maddow update us on the latest travesties with tightly controlled, eloquent rage, I bake and cook as if that might temper the terrible news. It’s all too much, and feeling that way is also a privilege. I am overwhelmed by this privilege as I read the news each day, knowing that more than 22 million people are unemployed that there are endless lines at food banks across the country that people are getting sick and they are dying and cities across the country are hampered by inadequate testing, no contact tracing, and an anemic federal response. It is an immense privilege, and one I do not take for granted, having access to fresh food, having the money to buy it, having the leisure to track down ingredients, and the time to cook.
A great many people around the world are managing their stress with culinary labor. I have long enjoyed cooking, but during this pandemic, with a great deal of unstructured time on my hands and anxious energy to burn, I have taken to cooking and baking the most elaborate dishes, making every component from scratch, and carefully documenting the experience with my phone’s camera-partly for myself, and partly to post on Instagram, where unsolicited advisers do not hesitate to tell me when something looks ugly or explain how I am “doing it wrong.” I am not alone in all this pandemic kitchen activity.
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I consulted Google as to how to remedy this and eventually it all worked out, but it was a trial, indeed. Every time I took it out of the refrigerator for more folding and rolling, it would come apart, butter oozing through the dough. Puff pastry is a finicky thing to make-lots of folding and rolling layers of dough and butter with rounds of chilling in between. Turns out, there is a reason so many recipes call for store-bought. Puff pastry comes from somewhere, after all. When I attempted Gordon Ramsay’s recipe after years of listening to him bellow about the dish on Hell’s Kitchen, I also endeavored to make my own puff pastry (the Bon Appétit recipe, in fact) because surely that was feasible. Beef Wellington is a strange and incredibly labor-intensive dish to prepare-tenderloin wrapped in duxelles wrapped in prosciutto wrapped in puff pastry.