Pandemic cooking gets weird

When lockdowns were first implemented and restaurants had to close their doors, millions of people had to quickly pivot to becoming full-time cooks for their families. At first many of us embraced this paradigm shift, pouring our anxiety-laced energy into making breads and tackling meals we otherwise might not have made. After some time had passed, however, things started to get a little…weird. Whether due to cooking burnout or lack of ingredient availability, we started putting together meals that were creative and often a little strange. The Guardian asked its readers to tell them about the weirdest meals they made in lockdown.

The result of a “momentary lapse in concentration” led Fred Wilson to put peanut butter on his beans on toast. Wilson, a restaurant manager, said that while he would not put this on his menu, it was a decent meal, noting that the combination had a “satay-like” quality. A craving for pizza drove Derek Taylor to deploy desperate measures. The result sounds like the results when someone leaves a one-star rating for a recipe but admits they completely changed the ingredients. Taylor didn’t have any flour so used almond meal in the crust, he had no pizza sauce so he substituted canned tomato soup, and he used an unconventional cheese for the topping. Of the result, Taylor claims “It was not as bad as you would expect.” Perhaps, but it was probably bad enough.

Some readers played with unusual ingredient combinations that they enjoyed, including smoked fish and dried fruit or kettle chips, apple slices and lime pickle. I have not been nearly as creative as these folks were, although we do have meals that I call ‘grazing’, where I grab the leftovers from three or four meals that were not large enough on their own. Thus I would end up eating half a bowl each of two different kinds of soup with a small lump of mashed potatoes on the side. What is the strangest thing you have made in quarantine?