Many of us have been cooking a lot more since we started sheltering-in-place, and I’m certainly no exception. Here is a quick roundup of a few of the meals I’ve made, some of which are new to me and some that aren’t.

I’ve very slowly gathered the ingredients needed for pasta carbonara, and with a recent lucky break allowing us to find a time slot for grocery delivery (it’s not easy), and for us to find eggs in stock at the time, I decided now was the time, before I ran out of one of my other ingredients. I like to use the method featured in this Bon Appetit video, because the sauce is cooked through completely off the heat by the residual heat from the pasta, so I am always confident that I won’t scramble my eggs.

Found chuck roast on sale a few weeks ago, so I froze it and waited for the right moment to strike to make a bœuf bourguignon-style stew, with a nice heap of mashed potatoes. I haven’t used a Dutch oven many times before, and it really showed when I burned myself on the metal knob through my oven mitt and a folded-up dishtowel. Yikes. Note to self: get a more heat-resistant oven mitt. (If you have any recommendations, please let me know!)

Tomato egg drop soup is one of my favorites, but I had never thought to add noodles until I saw this recipe on TheWoksOfLife (my go-to recipe blog for Chinese recipes), so it was a nice and very filling meal early on during the ordeal of my husband’s fever.

Fresh produce was tricky because I wanted to ration it, as it got scarce fast, but of course I didn’t want it going bad either. When I had some romaine lettuce and struggling spinach, I decided to put together this salad. I loved it so much I made it again a few days later. It’s good that I did because I wasn’t really getting much nutrition otherwise, primarily eating to maintain calories so that I could focus on taking care of my husband.

HAHAHA sorry I still laugh when I think about how I had these grand plans of doing a Whole30 upon my return from my friend’s bachelorette party, and then we were sheltered-in-place. If I knew what I knew now, I would’ve gotten a lot more carbs and beans. That first week was difficult because I was essentially making Whole30-compliant meals for myself and then carbier versions of meals for my husband. Hindsight…

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What have you been cooking during quarantine?

What recipes are you looking forward to making? A lot of people are making bread but I have never possessed yeast and it seems unlikely I will anytime soon! I’m also just not that interested in having my own sourdough starter. I have a long list of recipes I’d like to make eventually, but I’m not sure how many of them I’ll achieve in quarantine.