Week 2 - Only the beginning

Day 6 - Monday, March 16th: Sweet Potato Ravioli

Just the previous afternoon, the bay area decided to announce a "Shelter in Place" order starting Monday night and ending April 7th (read: never). Many of my friends decided to immediately jump ship and head to their parents. I thought about it. When asked, my brother said the odds he went back to Atlanta were "0%." Also, my parents told me they'd quarantine me in the basement for 14 days with no food, water, or sunlight. So it was an easy decision.

Now that I had decided to jump a few milestones in my relationship and move in more full time, I drove back to my apartment in San Francisco to get my most prized possession: my pillow. After a brief trip, I arrived back in Berkeley with 7 cans of tuna, 5 pieces of individually frozen salmon, 2 containers of light mayonnaise, a large bag of raw almonds, 6 eggs, and an unopened bag of King Arthur flour (which, unbeknownst to me, would actually become the most valuable thing I owned). Three hours later, however, I realized that my pillow remained comfortably on my bed back in the city.

Since this was the first full week of sheltering, I was energized, ready to take on the world of cooking. It’s like that first week that you decide to be one of those people that go to the gym before work. You not only get up early, but you are somehow excited to do it. You get out of bed with more energy at 5 am than you ever had at 7 am.

I started the week strong with some sweet potato ravioli. I not only found a pasta recipe that seemed to be simple, but it also encouraged mounding the flour on the table rather than in a bowl, which was a great excuse to relive those childhood memories of my family coming together at my grandparent's house in Florida, baking challah dough on the counter with our hands and making an absolute mess. Additionally, it gave me an excuse to take an artsy photo.

"Oh, no, I didn't make the pasta on the counter just for the photo. The recipe said to do it this way."

I wanted the ravioli to be filled with sweet potato, but I was a bit hesitant. Two years ago, I decided to make a whole bunch of sweet potato pastries. Unfortunately, they tasted like someone went into a 1950s Macy’s and dumped an entire bottle of my grandfather's cologne into the filling. Nonetheless, I sucked it up, boiled the sweet potatoes, added in butter and sugar, added in the other seasoning, and hoped to at least graduate to the 1970’s when Bridge Over Troubled Water was on the radio and everyone was wearing tie dye (although, let’s be real, as a cis white male, the 1950’s weren't so bad. 2020, however, is shitty for everyone).

Now was the fun part: making the ravioli. Or so I thought. For some reason, I can never make the proper amount of food as I'm always worrying that maybe some random guests would show up hungry and feel unwelcome if there wasn’t enough food. That said, if random guests did show up, they would 100% be unwelcome. It’s illegal.

Anyway, with something as time consuming as making ravioli, the novelty kind of wears off after you make a few. Let me tell you, after the 5th one, the quality of the ravioli declined faster than my parent’s child-raising skills after I moved out of the house (have you met my brother?). Using a third recipe, I made a mushroom cream sauce, put it on the ravioli, and all was good. Our first night of family dinner was a success. The ravioli tasted good, the group was in good spirits, and the 5 of us settled in for the long haul.

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 Day 7 - Tuesday, March 17th: Soft Pretzels (& Sourdough Part 1)

You know all those tweets that talk about how people’s quarantine personality is sourdough? Well, I wanted that to be me. Unfortunately, making sourdough is a long and complicated process - it actually takes about 3 days from start to finish if you don’t have a starter.

On Sunday, I had mentioned to Sav's Aunt how I wanted to create sourdough. She asked me if I was

serious. “Of course!” This felt like that scene in High School Musical when Kelsi started shooting directions at Troy and Gabriela after they sang together but Troy still hadn't processed what was going on (skip to 3:07 for reference). Sav's aunt mentioned feeding the starter, then something called a levain, which sounded awfully biblical, specific intervals of time, important temperatures, grams of different types of flour, and baskets for proofing that looked exactly how I imagined Moses floating down the Nile in ancient Egypt. Although, to be fair, my image of that comes straight from the Prince of Egypt.

Now, on the first day of the process, all you really need to do is feed the sourdough. What does that mean? I don't really know. What I do know is that we fed the starter that we got from Sav’s aunt and put it next to the heater to rise overnight (yes, we used a starter. Sorry that I didn’t sit there for a fortnight waiting for my dough to pick up the yeast in the air). While I now would have been satisfied with my work, my ambitious beginning-of-quarantine self felt I needed a different finished product to show my dwindling number of social media followers. That is why, from a great recommendation by my friend Tali, I made soft pretzels.

Now, making soft pretzels seemed easy enough. I found a recipe that included boiling, and based on the number of pretzels I have eaten in my life, that made sense to me. So I made the dough, followed the recipe, and shaped them. One by one, as I dropped the pretzels in the water, they began to unravel, soon looking less like a pretzel and more like the unraveled large intestine that you see in the Walking Dead when the walkers (zombies) rip open the insides of your favorite character. This is where I really need to apologize. To all my friends that have posted pictures of pretzels on social media in the last few weeks, I judged you hardcore for how ugly your pretzels looked. I am clearly a judgmental butt. *Putting foot in mouth*

Thankfully, I had a couple that turned out not so bad, so social media thinks I killed it. They also tasted quite good. Though, unsurprisingly, I made far too many, and they very much do not hold well. At least the house smelled good for a few hours.

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Day 8 - Wednesday, March 18th: Crumpets (& Sourdough Part 2)

So here's the thing; if you want to test your relationship, try to co-manage the creation of a sourdough loaf. It involves trust, coordination, communication, and patience. It felt like the classic situation where I was in home ec and the teacher gave me and my partner a bag of flour that we had to name and take care of together. We had to feed it, make sure it was warm enough, and make sure to get a babysitter if we were going to step out for a minute. (I have been informed that no one actually has home ec anymore, and they don't really do the co-parenting a food item thing, but my sheltered private school self likes to believe that all the television I have watched has given me a good sense of what the outside world is like, so I'm going to keep this reference as is).

The morning started with making the levain, which involved me going to the computer and reading off the directions we were supposed to follow. Then, after a very specific number of hours, the two of us returned to turn the levain into dough.

When we got to the kitchen, Sav pulled up the recipe for the bread, and stopped, looking quite perplexed.

"Wait, didn't you say 80 grams of Rye, 30 of white, and 40 of wheat?" (numbers made up due to the fact I'm too lazy to look them up).

"Yeah... Why?"

"This recipe doesn't have those numbers anywhere."

*I look at the screen*

"Oh. that's because that isn't the recipe I used."

"What recipe did you use?"

"Idk. Whatever was on the screen."

Sav, frustrated, realized that I had used whatever sourdough recipe I found on my computer, not the one that we had discussed. I’m clearly not very good at listening. Oops. Well, if baking is science, then I like to consider sourdough to be like Orgo 1 - difficult, time consuming, and great at weeding out those people that just shouldn’t be there (or so I'm told, I've never actually taken it). Nonetheless, we were determined to make the sourdough (and our relationship) work.

After you make the dough, you're supposed to do some weird folding thing with the dough every 30 minutes for like 5 hours. Given the fact that I have a full time job, and Sav currently attends 3 yoga classes a day, we had to make sure to evenly harbor the sourdough responsibility. For the next many hours, every 30 minutes, one of us would take the dough, do some elaborate folding, and reset the timer.

In the mid afternoon, however, I was on a call with coworkers I couldn’t get out of (read: happy hour) but it was fine, I assumed, Sav would take care of it. Unfortunately, she had gone for a walk with her mother and assumed I was going to take care of it. We clearly are not ready for parenthood, as our sourdough baby went an hour and a half without a diaper change. Oops. Probably could have communicated better. Thankfully, our baby survived, and we put them in the Moses-basket to sit overnight.

Fast forward through that argument, Sav requested we make crumpets using the discard. First question: what is the discard? It’s kind of like if you made an entire vegetable stock to use for a chicken pot pie. You take what you need for the pie and you have extras, so you use that extra stock to make that mushroom barley soup you always wanted. Second question: what is a crumpet? Who even knows. I never really knew what a crumpet was until Sav requested it, and even once she did, I was convinced we were just making english muffins. The internet is adamant they are not the same, but I am unconvinced.

Regardless, I put the discard with some other baking-type ingredients and voila, I had crumpets. I think. Idk. They kind of just looked like weird pancakes. I wasn't even really sure how to eat it. I ended up putting it on a plate, put a bunch of maple syrup on it, and added a bit of butter on top. (Not because I actually eat my pancakes with a large slab of butter, but that is how Aunt Jemima serves it, so it felt right.) Let me tell you, it was not good. Maybe because it was very raw, or maybe because I apparently was eating it wrong. But I don't like crumpets. Also, seeing the roommates cut the crumpets in half really just confirmed that crumpets are english muffins. I should just retitle this section "Bad english muffins."

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Day 9 - Thursday, March 19th: Sourdough Part 3 and Jam

Today was supposed to be the simple day, as all we had to do was bake the sourdough and move on. But remember, this was me in my first week, excited to take on the quarantine world by storm. I honestly roll my eyes when I think about how overeager I was. So young and dough-eyed. Anyway, step one was making the sourdough. As I learned from my first bread making experience (refer to week 1), I needed to use some sort of pot to trap the steam and make a beautiful crust. Thankfully, Sav had a dutch oven (which is an actual cooking appliance, not the act of forcing someone to lay under the covers in your flatulence). I turned the oven to 450 and put the dutch oven inside of the American oven to preheat. Within 20 minutes, however, the entire house smelled like that time in college when my roommate accidentally left a plastic fork in an aluminum pan that he put in the oven.

I was perplexed. This big expensive item was definitely meant to be in the oven, so why was it melting? After 10 minutes looking for other options of ways to cook this bread, I decided to venture into new territory and look up the answer (this is a joke, as I spend way too many hours on google and wikipedia looking up completely useless information. Did you know that the first patent for heating up peanuts and turning them into a butter-like substance was in 1884 by a man named Marcellus Edson?) Anyway, I looked up the specific brand and model of the dutch oven, and what do you know, the dutch oven is meant to be in the oven at high temperatures. Turns out, the bad smell was from a whole brussel sprout that had rolled off a pan earlier in the week and was currently undergoing the cremation process. (As I write this, I am being reminded that I was, in fact, the only person in this house who has cooked brussel sprouts recently, so it is clearly my fault). Regardless, I put the bread back in and let it cook.

Meanwhile, it was time for me to make jelly. Or jam. Or some kind of fruit product that was spreadable. I'm

still not clear what it was that I was trying to make, I just wanted something for my bread. Apparently, one of the important components of making jelly / jam / shmear is that you need pectin, which is a product that comes from fruit to make the jelly thicker. While you can buy pectin at the store, I did not have easy access to the store (#COVID19). While you can also make it yourself using the peels of fruits, such as lemons, I did not have easy access to that much patience (#MyLife). So, I decided to just take some lemons and put the peels directly in the jelly and let it cook. A while later, I went back to my concoction, excited to have developed an easier way to infuse pectin into jelly, and, for some crazy reason, it did not work. I. Was. Shocked.

Disappointed, I decided to leave the jelly on low, hoping that, with a bit more time, it would thicken. I probably shouldn't have done that. An hour later, I came back, and most of the jelly had really boiled down. On the plus side: I had Jelly! On the negative side: I burnt the bottom of this pot so bad it looked like I had a new cast iron pot (do those exist?).

But, it was all worth it. Let me tell you, there is nothing more satisfying than eating bread that took you more than 24 hours to make (other than being able to go outside, seeing your friends and family, not having to worry that you’re going to kill every old person you pass on the street, not losing all your money in the tanking of the stock market, or not losing your job.) Also, I fulfilled my sourdough (and instagram) dreams and was able to take this picture:

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Day 10 - Friday, March 20th: Dumplings and Hot & Sour soup

So, as it turns out, my brother's 0 percent chance of going home to Atlanta had turned to 100%. He had arrived back in Atlanta Wednesday evening. Now the question was whether I was going to go back or not. In Atlanta, I would have had to be quarantined in the basement with my brother for 1-2 weeks, with no real access to the kitchen. Maybe it was that living in the basement with my brother would provide less personal space than at a urinal trough at a football game, maybe it was because my relationship had survived the sourdough, or maybe it was that my parents just didn’t want me. Or maybe the combination of all three, but, regardless, it was not my time to hop on a plane to Atlanta. (I think it is important here to clarify that, at this time, there was still travel, and the social attitudes towards travel were not as strong as they are now.)

Now that I was settling in for the weekend, it was time to make Shabbat dinner. Dumplings seemed fun and elaborate, and hot & sour soup was my favorite. As the final act of my first full week, I made the dumpling dough from scratch and assembled them beautifully. (I have to admit, I cheated a bit since Sav actually made the filling). Let me tell you, these dumplings looked pretty good on the plate in the early afternoon. Like, who even cares how they tasted because damn they took a pretty picture. I covered them in plastic wrap, to be cooked later, and moved to the soup.

That morning, to get the necessary mushrooms, we had gone to the local market. It became very clear during this outing how much of a disaster I am with the whole “don’t touch things” situation. I never noticed before, but I touch everything I walk by. I touch walls, and shelves, and trees. I touch railings and random doors (not the knobs, just the doors). I also touch my face. Immediately after I came home, I showered (for the first time in a while), burned all my clothes, and announced to the house that I should never be allowed in public again (I want to clarify, though, I'm very good at washing my hands. I know the proper technique to make sure to reach every crevice, and I sing myself some Chelsea Cutler every time so I know I have been washing them for long enough.) Then, I created the soup, which turned out more like mushroom broth than anything else given how many mushrooms I put in.

While the dumplings looked beautiful earlier in the day, I probably should have greased the plate or something, because it was not easy getting these dumplings into the steamer. As I tried to pick them up, they would completely fall apart, slowly resembling that last bit of a burrito which is more overly damp tortilla than anything else, and since it just sits in your palm with the sauces dripping through your fingers, you’ve just come to terms with the fact that anyone watching you eat will probably be disgusted. Though ugly to eat, the flavor of the dumplings turned out beautifully.

While I had survived my initial week full of energy, excitement, and accomplishment, I must be up front about the fact that it did not last long. The following week was quite brutal. It’s like after that morning work-out you did, you feel great for a while, but by the time it gets to the afternoon, your energy is so depleted that you end up falling asleep on public transportation on your way home and waking up only to realize you slept past your stop and ended up 30 minutes away at the airport. (Does that happen only to me? Oh well. Welcome to my life).