Quarantine Cuisine Cooking to feed the soul.
by Perry Continente
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s we drag ourselves into a second year of this interminable purgatory, it is easier than ever to slip into an unhealthy and uninteresting routine. Some of the most insidious enablers are the plethora of food delivery apps. What could be more tempting than having a McFlurry only a few clicks away? They certainly had a soporific effect on me, I spent a lot of money on honestly terrible food. Why pay $8 for a meal at the store when I can just stay home and pay $16 plus tip? One of the best ways to break out of this culinary monotony is to start pushing the bounds
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of your palate. Maybe try a new restaurant, order something you never had, or best of all, cook something new. It doesn’t have to be labor intensive or exorbitantly expensive, there are several little things you can do to punch up common and inexpensive ingredients. Cooking is ultimately about transformation, it is taking the component parts of a dish and synthesizing them into something far better than they normally would be. For example, almost every component part of a cake tastes terrible. I would never eat flour, baking powder, raw eggs or cocoa powder by themselves,
but given the proper mixing, time and heat they make something extremely palatable. Think of learning new recipes less as hard and fast rules, and more as processes, like a new shade of paint on your palate. The following recipe features many of my favorite processes without getting too technical. This is far from beef wellington, but it is quick, inexpensive, tasty and versatile. This recipe only needs a skillet, a baking sheet and an oven. If you don’t have an oven but do have a hot plate, the pasta portion of the recipe is still totally doable.
Photo by Perry Continente
