Pandemic Cooking with Pantry Items

March 22, 2020

Social media is awash in titles like the above. They’re decidedly grim, but no sense messing around, is there?

Unrelated pretty picture.

I’m sorry if you’re sick of these kinds of posts. Who could blame you? By now you’re probably sick of just about everything. You long to go outside. You long to go to the supermarket, walk in, and gaze at abundance. Oh, to stand cursing in the feminine hygeine aisle! (is that too tmi? Sorry.) To hunt among seven hundred bottles of soy sauce! To sort amongst piles of limes, to guiltily hide a tomato from Chile in your shopping cart!

Blue wall, San Francisco. Taken maybe last summer.

Instead, we’re checking the news every ten seconds. And the news is terrible. Terrifying. Since when do hospitals not have enough ventilators? Since when are there not enough masks? A group of neighborhood women have taken up a mask collection for our local hospital. They are being hailed as saints. Perhaps they are.

Oakland, Lake Temescal, two years ago. A lifetime.

You don’t need another recipe promising canned tuna and pasta are delicious. (If they were, we’d all have been eating them together all along, right?)

More of Oakland. I’d joined a cookbook club that met in an apartment above Lake Temescal; the moderator held two meetings, then disbanded the club without explanation. I got some nice pictures out of it.

Anyway.

Living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome has made me intimately acquainted with sudden, incapacitating illness. I know what it’s like to wake unable to shop or cook for myself, much less my disabled spouse. It’s a feeling I wouldn’t wish on anyone, much less the entire planet.

Yesterday I paged through the blog, linking to a few simple recipes. These require little by way of ingredients; you won’t need to go shopping. As always, feel free to use what you have to hand. I hope these recipes bring some variety to your table. May you and yours be in good spirits and perfect health.

tortilla pizza.