Food in the Time of COVID (1)

Imbalance…

…that’s the feeling I can’t escape. Trying to help run a company, trying to support my spouse, trying to help kids with virtual learning, trying to help everyone stay sane, trying not to gain weight…always feels like something needs to be cleaned.

In these days of isolation, our family of four faces a lifestyle radically different from what we’re used to. TO BE CLEAR, I recognize that there is nothing special about what we’re going through, and we have so much more than many others. We are lucky. Our challenges generally lie somewhere between frustration and, in my daughter’s case, occasional despair. She’s a high school senior, active in student government and part of student groups partly responsible for organizing the prom and graduation. A lot of work and teenage anticipation have been trampled by this virus and, as a parent, it’s been tough to watch.

To date we have been a family that collectively loves food, but doesn’t often break bread together. My wife and I often work late and “dinner at the table” is a rarity here. Add to that the routine of school and work, and most breakfasts and lunches didn’t take place at home.

Now we’re eating…every…meal…at…home. This has been a HUGE adjustment with more planning, more shopping, more cooking, and more cleaning. But it’s also meant more eating together, FAR less food waste, and just an overall stronger bond between all of us. That part is really nice.

I miss my friends…eating and drinking with my friends.

Since we moved to Providence, we find ourselves with quite a few Jewish friends. The food benefits have been extraordinary. We go to the best Hanukah party on the planet, with a menu that will be the subject of a future post. We’ve also been invited to several Passover Seder celebrations that were traditional enough to convey the power of the holiday while allowing for some creativity with the menu. Here I learned the symbolism of the six ritual items on the Passover plate and the different regional influences on Jewish food (e.g., Ashkenazi versus Sephardic). I rediscovered brisket and learned the critical difference between matzoh crumbs and matzoh flour.

There are about six to eight families in our core group and some of us started delivering meals (or whiskey) to each other during this period of social distancing…mitzvahs left on the porch for everyone to eat and then talk about over text messaging. Small connections. The photo above is my wife Cathy getting ready to assemble the lasagna trays for our mitzvah.

One of the focal points in great lasagna is making a sauce that’s almost obnoxious in the amount of flavor it delivers. When you taste it out of the pot with a spoon, the flavor punch should be overwhelming. Remember the noodles and the cheese are going to even that out and you have to compensate for that “flattening” with the sauce. The noodles provide structure, the cheese provides fat and texture. The sauce has to deliver on the flavor (with a little help from Parmesan cheese). Part of how I achieve the flavor blast in the sauce is with a VERY healthy dose of diced pancetta. (Yes, most of my Jewish friends eat pork.) In my lasagna sauce, the pancetta becomes part of the standard miripoix of finely diced onions and carrots that get cooked in the beginning of the process. I also use a borderline absurd amount of chopped garlic early in the sauce and season the miripoix with an unsettling amount of black pepper. At the end, I fold in a big dollop of roasted garlic puree, some basil pesto, and add little balsamic vinegar to taste.

Remember the core “S” elements you try to hit with complex dishes—salt (pancetta), sweet (tomato and pesto), sour (balsamic), and spice (black pepper). Other important “S” elements include stink and smoke, we’ll cover those in a future post…and for those of you foodies out there, I haven’t forgotten “bitter” and “umami.” They just don’t start with “s” so it’s not as fun.