Issue #11 of our special series about cooking in the coronavirus era. THE WAY WE'RE COOKING NOW  Dear Epi reader,
Parents like me know the feeling: Sometimes, for an hour or two, it seems like balancing working-from-home with keeping-kids-busy-at-home might be getting easier. But then—nope, it’s definitely getting worse. Especially around dinnertime.
The internet—Epicurious included!—has taken this moment to launch what feels like a shiny new cooking competition. Share the bubbly crumb of your homemade burger buns, post the ways you’re tarting up your gently-simmered heirloom beans. But let’s get real: Smushing a long workday into half as many hours means, for many of us, that there is no time for elaborate cooking now, except by the 31-minute grace of Cosmic Kids Moana-themed yoga.
And so I am reminding myself, and you: back away from the constant scroll. Dinner is not a competition.
But more than ever, dinner does need a plan. And it’s best to get organized in an earlier, calmer moment (before 6 p.m. or whenever it is that your child’s lower lip usually starts to tremble). That’s where our Cooking Through It initiative comes in. The first round of the ten-day, hyperflexible meal plan wraps up tonight, but we’ve just debuted the second set of substitution-friendly recipes, which we’ll all start cooking through on Monday.
Take a look before you plan your next big grocery haul, adapting the recipes to what you’ve already got and what your family likes to eat. Ultimately, what you put on the plan isn’t all that important; what’s important is that you have a plan at all.
Yours in parental solidarity,  |
