Feeding Friends and Family

I love cooking for others. A quote, “You always make more food than could possibly be necessary, so who cares how many people show up for Thanksgiving.” The hardest part of quarantine life has been that I cannot host huge family gatherings or dinner parties. I promise you that when this is all over and it’s safe, I’m going to have one hell of a dinner party or ten. However, I am starting to improvise and find ways to still feed the people I care about safely.

For the first few months of quarantine, I of course dove deep into cooking as a coping mechanism. Unfortunately, this created more food than our little household of three could possibly eat. I resolved this problem by delivering vegan items to my 22-year-old and non-vegan foods to my next door neighbors. We shared a back stairway, so it was easy to leave it for them no-contact style. Then we moved, and for months, I had no one other than the vegan to deliver food to. Luckily, her roommates are not all vegan, so I could also offload a few other items from time to time.

However, I’ve recently expanded by food delivery. I made a couple of really good friends in my neighborhood through virtual contact. Recently, one of them suggested he’d trade for some tarts I had posted on Facebook. I asked if I could interest him and his wife in some other leftovers I made way too much of, and he accepted. I’ve now dropped multiple meals for them and will continue to do so as long as they accept. I also just had to share some stuff with another friend who has been friends with my husband for years but whom I really met just before quarantine, and it’s been a fantastic friendship.

And of course, I still deliver foods to my older girls. We’ve driven up to the suburbs twice this last month to deliver some of my Katie’s favorite foods, and I’m about to make her some more. She’s a foodie like me, and she gets a lot of comfort from some of her mama’s special dishes. And I’ve dropped two complete holiday dinners to Melanie, which you can read all about here and here. I have learned that if I deliver anything that is not frozen in single serving sizes or that requires any additional cooking, she’s probably going to just leave it in her freezer.

I have relatives that live too far away who keep asking me to ship my creations to them. I haven’t quite figured out the logistics there yet, but who knows what the future may hold.