At the beginning of our “stay-at-home” orders in March, I suggested to my family we start a journal.  I thought it would be important to record our experience.  I decided my journal would be a family recipe book of all the meals we had during quarantine.  A good idea, but who could ever imagine it would last this long! 

The first couple of weeks the recipe book was fun.  It was a win/win.  I love to cook and have a captive audience.  I felt it was exciting to try all the top fads, like baking bread –even an attempt at  5 day sourdough (never really mastered that one); and making everything from comfort food to fancy dinners.  I wanted to make this a special experience for my family pulling out all the stops including china and candles.  Early on, I created elaborate weekly meal plans, including snacks.  I coded all the pantry food, as well as the basement stockpile we scored. (rice, pasta, beans, flour, sugar, oatmeal, can goods, cleaning supplies, and the precious toilet paper.)   The days of running to the store for 1 missing ingredient long gone.  We save the Russian roulette shopping experience for once a week. Figuring out what I was going to cook with what we have on hand was kind of a creative challenge.

Fast forward 8 weeks and things have changed. Food is still the number one thing on my family’s mind. As soon as we finish one meal, the next question is what is on the menu later. But, after making 189 meals for 4 adults so far, the passion has waned. Don’t get me wrong, I still try to pull out all the stops for holidays like Easter and Cinco de Mayo, but for Mother’s Day, there will not be a food entry in my journal.  The gourmet meals have turned into whatever I can pull together quickly.  I also now only take pictures of the ones I think they will really like.  I am running out of new recipes.  If anyone would like to share a special recipe please post it on our site.  I would love to try them.

Here are a couple of our favorites.