Cabin Fever with Aruna D'Souza
I am a writer who is happiest working at my desk, alone, in my house in western Massachusetts, but has to take regular trips to New York City and further afield in order to know what to write about. Before March it felt like I was traveling all the time, always on planes, always in hotels. I was burned out. For me, beyond the inevitable anxiety that came from worrying for my health and the health of those I love (and those who I don’t even know), quarantine has been a kind of blessing—a forced time out. I gave Zoom talks without the hassle of getting from my little corner of the world to wherever my audience was, I read and thought, and I worked with my hands—something that I’m not able to do as much as I’d like.
Ragout of White Beans. Image courtesy of Aruna D’Souza, Kitchen Flânerie.
When we all contemplated our lives under quarantine, so many of us panicked about how we would feed ourselves. We didn’t just hoard toilet paper—we hoarded food, too. It was a primal fear, wasn’t it? I see that now in retrospect. At the request of my friends, I revived my food blog, which I wrote in earnest from 2012 to about 2015, at a point in my life where, having realized that I no longer wanted to be an academic, I was thinking about how to find new forms of living and being. I was rebuilding. Perhaps that’s why it seemed such a natural thing to do again now.
Chinese Sweet Corn Soup. Image courtesy of Aruna D’Souza, Kitchen Flânerie.
At first I posted pictures of my meals, things I concocted from what I had on hand. Of course, I have always stocked my pantry with every imaginable thing, so what I had on hand was a pretty infinite number of ingredients. But cooking forced me to think about how to make do, how to be flexible. We may not always have what we want, but we have what we need.
Ingredients for Chinese Sweet Corn Soup. Image courtesy of Aruna D’Souza, Kitchen Flânerie.
Eventually I jumped on the sourdough bread bandwagon like everyone else. I am pretty good at most things I endeavor, which may tell you more about my risk aversion than my skill. Not with sourdough, though. I failed and I failed and I failed. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. It was at once much too scientific and much too provisional and improvisational than suited me. I resisted the bread bro culture that has emerged in the last few years, wanting instead to recover the wisdom of old European grandmothers. But without a European grandmother to rely on, that was no easy task.
Sourdough Bread. Image courtesy of Aruna D’Souza, Kitchen Flânerie.
Making a successful loaf of bread—something I only achieved, for the first time, last night—was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I managed to pull off this feat the same day protesters in Bristol pulled down the statue of a notorious slaver, and the same day that a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis city council has vowed to disband their police force. It felt like a day in which we all achieved the impossible. Now I know we can do it, I’m going to keep going.
If you would like to learn about the trials and tribulations of Aruna’s Sourdough Saga, read more on Kitchen Flânerie.
