When Cooking for Others Keeps You Sane: The Wooden Spoon Initiative, an idea for a community cooking project when social distancing gets you down
Stuffed Jumbo Shells with Caramelized Onions and Leeks, Goat Cheese and Savoy Cabbage
Photo by Michael Piazza / Styled by Catrine Kelty
You know who you are. The people who see a rainy or snowy weekend and think, “Good. What will I make today?” as they buzz through the ingredients and the possibilities in their pantries and refrigerators.
Baking? Roasting? A long slow stew? In this time of love, Covid-19 and social distancing, we, the People of the Wooden Spoon, need something to do. Something to cook. And someone to cook it for.
I have some ideas.
First and most important, take care of you and yours. While cooking might be easy for you, there are people in your world for whom cooking is a chore or shopping an impossibility. Reach out to your neighbors—the ill, older or overwhelmed. Offer to drop off easy to re-heat meals on a regular basis.
This sounds easy but it does require some social delicacy. My next-door neighbor, who is a very functional and fit 92, only reluctantly agreed to be the beneficiary of my cooking largesse. She is not “in need,” she explained to me. But on the other hand, she thinks I’m a really good cook.
So, I added her to my little list.
I started dropping off meals for my daughter and her young, housebound family. I package the food, wrap it well and leave it at the door. Wave at the grandkids. (It is a very weird time.)
Or, you could simply and happily make meals for your other avid cooking friends. Trade them around. I cook for your house on Wednesday. You cook for mine on Thursday. A virtual bake-off inside of a small circle of friends.
Taking this a step further, I’m thinking a little bigger: a plan for the home cooks in my town to organize meals for seniors and others who need healthy food.
Of course, we are assuming that you—and all of us—will take reasonable food safety and food handling precautions when sharing food with others. Washed hands. Proper refrigeration if there’s a long lag time between preparation and delivery. And while we love re-useable wrappings, during this period we should use food wrap that is easily discarded. And if you need more concrete food safety and food handling instructions, visit J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s extremely helpful Serious Eats blog post: Food Safety and Coronavirus: A Comprehensive Guide.
Now that our hands are clean and we know how to handle food for others, here’s the basic idea that you can replicate in your own community:
Neighbor-to-Neighbor Drop Off Meals
Each of us will make 3 extra meals a week, each meal able to feed a household of 4–6.
Create a Facebook page to recruit both the cooks and the recipients. Work through the local food pantry and the Senior Center, if you can.
Our working idea: Three days a week, those who willingly cook will each make a family style meal for 4–6 according to a shared menu. For example: a pasta casserole on Monday, meatloaf Wednesday, chicken dish Friday. Nothing too edgy. Well-done comfort food.
Our assumption: a drop-off every other day will be about right. Cookies and simple desserts would be welcome too!
Each home-cook will drop off the packaged meals by noon at the local senior center and we will develop an afternoon drop-off and delivery schedule. (A good job for the non-cooks is the delivery run.) Neighbors will receive a text or a call to let them know when their delivery has been made. No face-to-face contact.
Over the next few days and weeks, our group hopes to expand the number of cooks and the number of households we can handle. With feedback, we’ll expand the menu and streamline the logistics. It’s a work in process. But it’s a good start. And an important start.
These next few months will be a siege for all of us. We are anxious and homebound. But cooking for others will keep us sane and connected to a world bigger than our own kitchens and freezers.
Feel free to email me with questions, with helpful advice, with recipes and tips! We’d love the help.
(And if you’d like the recipe for those delicious Stuffed Jumbo Shells with Caramelized Onions and Leeks, Goat Cheese and Savoy Cabbage pictured above, click here>>)
