Chefs and authors help us cook in quarantine

If you find yourself struggling to find interesting ideas for making meals from your pantry supplies, you are not alone. The cavalry is on the way, however: a handful of well-known chefs, cookbook authors and food writers are here to help. They have started streaming free cooking demonstrations and lessons from their own home kitchens.

Maggie Beer’s career has already landed her in the cooking hall of fame, so she wouldn’t have to embrace social media to prove her mettle. Yet she just launched a new Instagram video series featuring her making simple dishes from her own kitchen. The focus is on inexpensive dishes featuring produce from her garden, frozen items, and shelf-stable pantry goods. She says of one of the videos: “My garden is full of tomatoes, so I did a tomato salad with stale bread – sourdough of course – that I crisped in the pan with some olive oil, and added cucumber,” says Beer.

Michael Symon hosts a daily show on Facebook via the Food Network. Like Beer, his meals rely heavily on pantry staples and they can be made in around 30 minutes. Symon offers suggestions for substitutes and also pays keen attention to nutrition in his videos. “To me, food is one of life’s greatest comforts,” he told Cleveland Scene. “Cooking and feeding people always makes me feel better and, I think, it will also make everyone else feel a little more normal and better, too.”

J. Kenji López-Alt has jumped onto this bandwagon too. He has his own YouTube channel, and has posted several videos from his restaurant Wursthall as well as his home kitchen. Recent recipes from the Serious Eats alum include late-night quesadillas and a three-ingredient macaroni and cheese (it’s my go-to mac & cheese recipe). The videos from his home kitchen are shot from the point of view of the cook – he puts a GoPro-style camera on top of his head.

These videos are wonderful for their content, but in the case of Maggie’s and Kenji’s shows, they provide a glimpse of how a pro cooks in her or his own kitchen. It’s refreshing to see that they don’t have perfect kitchens (okay, Maggie’s is close to perfect). There’s clutter, there is no script, the production quality is virtually nonexistent, yet you can see the love of food that basically oozes from the pores of people who truly enjoy cooking and eating. Settle in with your favorite adult beverage, sit back, and savor these videos. If you know about others doing the same thing, please let us know in the comments!