Coming out of lockdown: A round up of food-related things over the past year
A short ramble on things I have tried/learned
Hi friends! Hope you are all enjoying the first week of freedom (in England at least). The weather has been lovely in London, perfect for alfresco dining — or in fact alfresco anything.
This past week, as normality swiftly resumed, I have been reflecting on the past year of intermittent lockdowns. In hindsight, one of the positive things that came out of COVID was the opportunity to slow down in life and explore new things as habitual activities were forced to halt.
Thus, I thought this would be a good time to summarise the things I have tried and learnt in the kitchen over the past year. This is also a relatively short newsletter (for a quick read so you can get back out in the sun).
Baking challenges
Baking must be one of the most popular hobbies today thanks to the pandemic.
I baked a fair amount before COVID, but never really had the time to embark upon multi-day baking tasks until lockdown happened. Like everyone else, I have ticked off 99% of the things on my ‘baking bucket list’ during the first lockdown: from various breads to croissants, mille-feuille, choux, and even delivered a couple of birthday cakes to friends who live nearby.
For some of these, while it was fun to learn about the recipe and the process, I have found them to be too time-consuming and stressful to pull off regularly; I will be much happier buying them from bakeries. Things that fall into this category include croissants and sourdough bread, they are just 100 times better from Pophams and The Dusty Knuckle. (Especially croissants, probably going to wait until at least 2025 before I attempt again.)
On the other hand, there are also recipes that I have thoroughly enjoyed making. My favourite things that fall in this category include: Felicity Cloake’s tarte tatin, Nicola Lamb’s self-saucing banana pudding and 3pm oat biscuits, and Ravneet Gill’s chocolate chip cookies and cherry ricotta cake. (I really recommend trying these if you haven’t already.)
Things I now make at home and no longer buy
Plenty of recipes online for these, fully cutomizable, and honestly SO SO easy — no looking back once you learn how to make them (and they are much healthier and cheaper):
homemade granola — the most addictive snack EVER
flavoured toasted nuts — same principle as granola
bean pastes/dips
pickled/fermented vegetables
poached fruit — I really recommend Ed Smith’s recipe for poaching rhubarb
Recreating restaurant favourites
I have also tried recreating some of my favourite restaurant dishes that I have been craving since forever.
To be honest though, I did wait a very long time before actually committing to cooking these, because I thought they would be difficult and I was too scared that my attempts wouldn’t do the original justice.
In the end, I caved. Conclusion: they all turned out to be great fun to make and totally delicious.
Chinese foods
Part of this was driven by the fact that I couldn’t go back to China due to travel restrictions, and cooking foods from home became one of the ways in which I connect with my family.
There are some dishes that I am familiar with as I learned to cook from a relatively young age, but there are also gaps in my cooking because my parents or grandparents have always cooked certain dishes for me. So I took this opportunity to fill some of those gaps.
Maybe you already know this from my previous posts: I have never made dumplings or steamed buns from scratch before COVID. Nor Chinese flaky pastries in fact. Now, after many sessions of practicing and testing, there are blog posts on these right here :)
In addition, I have also started to reflect on the foods that I cook regularly without much thinking to try and condense them into recipes. This includes some of the ‘simple’ stuff that I tell my friends are easy to make, but then when I sit down to write the recipe, I spend hours scratching my head… More of this coming soon!
Shopping for better ingredients
More of a habitual change rather than learning a new skill, but I have been buying less from supermarkets and more from places or suppliers that celebrate better produce and embrace seasonality.
When I used to live in China, I loved strolling through local open-air markets. Before the pandemic, however, shopping at supermarkets was more efficient alongside busy work hours. As work-from-home life emerged, efficiency on this front was no longer necessary.
It started with Natoora deliveries at first, but nowadays I go to the weekly local farmers’ market to buy whatever looks freshest on the stalls. Local delis are also great places to explore during weekdays.
Compared to the standard supermarkets, these places simply offer much more variety of everything — from vegetables to dairy products, from breads to seafoods to various meats. The shopping trip also feels more interactive, personal, and organic: you see the same faces every week, gradually you know some of stall owners by name, sometimes they tell you about recent farm happenings and you chat about the weather — an entirely different experience from the rushed self-checkout at your local Tescos.
Afterword
Once again, thank you for reading until the end :)
Are there things you tried to cook for the first time during the past year? Would you recommend them? What about new habits you have picked up? Drop a comment or DM to let me know!
osso bucco🍖