Cooking Alone

2020 will undoubtedly go down in many people's lives as the strangest year that they have ever lived through. The year started with uncontrollable bush fires in Australia and we quickly escalated from one horror to another as a global pandemic emerged.

COVID-19 meant that we were all forced to spend a lot more time at home and people had to find different ways to adapt and cope with the huge change to daily life. Some people found it easy, and some people found it incredibly difficult.
I consider myself lucky to fall into the relatively easy group. I live with friends so still had that element of socialisation on a daily basis, and I am an inherintly lazy person. I am perfectly happy spending days inside doing a whole lot of nothing. But even for me, there is only so much Netflix I can watch so I had to put my energies into other projects.

To me the obvious thing to do was focus on cooking projects, and to branch out a little bit. And I did! I charactarise lockdown by the various extravagent meals I have made over hours and hours in the kitchen.

My first experiments revolved around different cuisines - the Dishoom inspired Indian feast, the Mexican carnitas night, a love affair with cooking pasta...the list goes on!

But what I have realised is that I am a social cook. I like cooking for people (and that's not just becuase I only cook like I'm trying to feed an army). My housemates have been the lucky (or unlucky) recipients of most of my cooking, but it's just not the same as cooking for a big mixed group of friends, or strangers. I managed to partially overcome this need to cook for people in various ways. Extra food was bundled up and offered to friends in little cooking bundles, and visitors were fairly often sent home with a little gifts of fresh noodles.

But then, very slowly, things started to change. We were allowed to eat out, we were allowed to have guests in our homes again; and just like that cooking for others was back. I quickly decided to lock some guests in while everyone was still relatively planless, and even though I had to keep it small, Laowai Supper Club is very much back!