Covid 19: Making the Best of a Bad Situation

Dateline early spring, North America. Life went from the normalcy of movie theaters, bars, restaurants, concerts, and all other manner of public gathering, to a sudden mass shutdown of the economy. Seemingly overnight there was an instant shortage of sanitation supplies and personal protective equipment. Students were sent home from school to adults suddenly in the role of teacher and principal in addition to basic parenting.

While so many people have focused on the negatives during the Coronavirus lock-down, there have been a few huge opportunities for those willing to look for the silver lining in the clouds.

• The opportunity to reconnect with disconnected members of ones’ immediate family
• The opportunity to discover the magic of home-cooking; the joy of producing something scrumptious from raw basic ingredients.

For kitchen novices with no discernable cooking skills, there are a few great sources, the first of which is YouTube. There are seemingly no end to fantastic cooking tutorials. Italian chef Gennaro Contaldo teaches the basics of making a fantastic Pasta Dough and home chef “Faith’s Oven” shows the basics of a FANTASTIC Alfredo Sauce. Everyone from Gordon Ramsey to Emeril Lagasse, Thomas Keller to Wolfgang Puck. You can learn gourmet cooking in the comfort of your own home with the help of some great videos and a pause button. And for the student interested in stepping the skills up a level, an all access subscription to Masterclass.com takes the pupil to a previously unseen depth of culinary studies.

The fruit of ones’ labors is the reward in and of itself. However for those family members needing to reconnect during an economic and societal upheaval, there is no better place to start than the dinner table, no better way to get there than through the stove-top.