Khorram talks to Eater about writing food scenes, the concept of the “cultural iceberg,” and tea — and reads an excerpt from his YA novel, Darius the Great Is Not Okay

In Adib Khorram’s novel Darius the Great Is Not Okay, protagonist Darius Kellner, a self-described “Fractional Persian,” visits Iran with his mother, father, and younger sister. There, he comes to terms with his identity and his place in his family, he strikes a new friendship with Sohrab, and he eats a whole lot of food. Darius also loves tea — it’s a ritual that calms him, and one he can share with his dad, with whom he doesn’t necessarily see eye to eye.

Like Darius, Khorram loves food and tea too, which is why it plays such a large role in his first novel, as well as the sequel, Darius the Great Deserves Better, which comes out on August 25 and is currently available for pre-order. In the new book, there’s plenty of food scenes — “food plays a big role because as always, I was hungry when I was writing,” says Khorram, and he teases that, yes, there’s plenty of Iranian food, tea, and even breakfast for dinner. (Khorram also has a children’s book, Seven Special Somethings, coming out next spring, all about Nowruz.)

During Eater Book Club, Khorram shared that he likes Harney & Sons and Steven Smith Teamaker as tea brands, and for Iranian tea, he suggests a mix of Assam and Earl Grey, or looking for Iranian tea blends. He recommends people who want to cook Persian food for the first time start with the cookbook New Food of Life by Najmieh Batmanglij. His favorite local bookstores are Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas, and the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas.

Below, find an excerpt from Darius the Great Is Not Okay, which Khorram read live for Eater Book Club on Instagram Live with host Sonia Chopra on Thursday, April 2, as part of the Eater @ Home virtual event series.

I gave the horseshoe knocker three quick raps. Mahvash Rezaei answered. There was a smear of white powder across her forehead, and some had gotten into her eyebrows, too, but she smiled when she saw me—that same squinting smile she had passed down to her son.

“Alláh-u-Abhá, Darioush!”

“Um.”

I always felt weird, if someone said “Alláh-u-Abhá” to me, because I wasn’t sure if I should say it back—if I was even allowed to—since I wasn’t Bahá’í and I didn’t believe in God.

The Picard didn’t count.

“Come in!”

I pulled my Vans off and set them in the corner next to Sohrab’s slender shoes.

There was a wooden partition separating the entryway from the rest of the house, with shelves covered in pictures and candles and phone chargers. The rugs were white and green with gold accents, and they didn’t have little tassels on them like Mamou’s. The house felt cozy, like a Hobbit-hole.

The air was heavy with the scent of baking bread. Real, homemade bread, not the mass-produced Subway kind.

“Have you eaten? You want anything?”

“I’m okay. I had breakfast.”

“Are you sure?” She steered me toward the kitchen. “It’s no trouble.”

“I’m sure. I thought I should come visit, since it’s the day after Nowruz.”

I felt very Persian.

“You are so sweet.”

Darius Kellner. Sweet.

I liked that Sohrab’s mom thought that about me.

I really did.

“You are sure you don’t want anything?”

“I’m okay. I had qottab before I came.”

“Your grandma makes the best qottab.”

Technically, I had not tasted all the possibilities, but I agreed with Mahvash Rezaei in principle.

“She sent some with me,” I said, holding out the plastic container I’d brought.

Mahvash Rezaei’s eyes bugged out, and I was reminded of a Klingon warrior. Her personality was too big and mercurial to be contained in a frail human body.

“Thank you! Thank your grandma for me!”

Khanum Rezaei set the qottab aside and went back to the counter by her oven. It was dusted with flour, which explained the mysterious white powder on her face.

Her sink was overflowing with whole romaine lettuce leaves, bathing under the running water. I wondered if it was for the bread. I didn’t know of any Iranian recipes that involved baking romaine lettuce into bread, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any.

“Um.”

“It’s Sohrab’s favorite,” Khanum Rezaei said, nodding toward the sink. “He and his dad love it.”

Sohrab’s dad.

I felt so bad for him.

Also, I felt confused, because I didn’t know anyone whose favorite food was romaine lettuce.

Sohrab Rezaei contained multitudes.

“Can you take it outside for me?” Mrs. Rezaei scooped the leaves into a colander, banged it on the sink a few times, and handed it to me. “Put it on the table. I’ll go get Sohrab.”

The Rezaeis’ garden was very different from Babou’s. There were no fruit trees, no planters of jasmine, only long rows of hyacinths and a collection of huge pots filled with different herbs. The largest was right next to the kitchen—it was nearly two feet across and three feet high—and it was being assimilated by fresh mint.

Mint is the Borg of herbs. If you let it, it will take over each and every patch of ground it encounters, adding the soil’s biological and technological distinctiveness to its own.

There was a charcoal grill in the middle of the garden, the big round kind that looked like a miniature red Starbase. The only table was a Ping-Pong table, close to the door where I stood holding the dripping romaine leaves.

“Khanum Rezaei?”

There was no answer.

Was the Ping-Pong table the one I was supposed to put the romaine on?

Did Iranians say Ping-Pong, or did they say table tennis?

We didn’t cover the history of Ping-Pong/table tennis in Iran during our Net Sports Unit in physical education, which now seemed like a ridiculous oversight.

Khanum Rezaei popped up behind me. I almost dropped the lettuce in fright.

“I forgot this,” she said, squeezing behind me and flapping a giant white-and-blue tablecloth over the Ping-Pong table. It tented up over the little posts for the net. “You can spread the leaves out to dry some.”

“Okay.” I did what she asked, spreading the leaves out so they overlapped as little as possible. The water seeped into the tablecloth, turning it translucent.

“Darioush!”

Sohrab grabbed me around the shoulders from behind and swayed me back and forth.

My neck tingled.

“Oh. Hi.”

He was wearing plaid pajama pants so huge, he could have fit his entire body down one leg. They were cinched around his waist with a drawstring. I could tell because he had tucked his green polo shirt into his pants.

As soon as Sohrab saw the lettuce, he let me go and ran back inside, talking to his mom in Farsi at warp 9.

I had become invisible.

As I watched Sohrab through the doorway, he seemed younger somehow, swimming in his pajama pants with his shirt tucked in.

I knew without him saying it that he was missing his dad.

I felt terrible for him.

And I felt terrible feeling sorry for myself. Another Nowruz had come and gone for Sohrab without his father, and I was worried about feeling invisible.

But then Sohrab looked back at me as I watched him from the doorway, and his eyes squinted up again. His smile was a supernova.

“Darioush, you like sekanjabin?”

“What?”

“Sekanjabin. You’ve had it?”

“No,” I said. “What is it?

He pulled a short, wide-mouthed jar out of the fridge, said something quick to his mom, and came back outside. “It’s mint syrup. Here.” He unscrewed the jar, shook the water off a piece of lettuce, and dipped it in the sauce.

If his face was a supernova before, it became an accretion disc—one of the brightest objects in the universe—as soon as he tasted his lettuce.

I loved that Sohrab could be transported like that.

I took a tiny leaf and tried the sauce. It was sweet and minty, but there was something sour too.

“Vinegar?”

“Yes. Babou always adds a little.”

“Babou made this?”

“Yes. You never had it?”

“No. I never heard of it before.”

How did I not know my grandfather made sekanjabin?

How did I not know how delicious sekanjabin was?

“He is famous for it. My dad . . . He always grew extra mint, for Babou to use when he made it.” He gestured out to the garden. “You saw our mint?”

“Yeah.”

“Now it grows too much. Babou hasn’t made it for a while.”

“Oh.”

Sohrab dipped another leaf and then passed me the jar.

It was perfect.

“Thank you for coming over, Darioush.”

“It’s tradition to visit your friends the day after Nowruz.” I took another leaf to dip. “Right?”

Sohrab squeezed my shoulder as he inhaled another piece of lettuce. He nodded and chewed and swallowed and then squinted right at me.

“Right.”

After I helped Sohrab polish off every piece of lettuce on the table—two whole heads—he ran to get dressed, while I watched Khanum Rezaei make her bread. She pounded out the dough with her floured palms, then sprinkled a mixture of dried herbs and spices on top.

“Do you like this bread, Darioush-jan? Noon-e barbari?”

“Um. Yeah. Mom gets it from the Persian bakery sometimes.”

“You don’t make it at home?”

“Not really.”

“I’ll make some for you. You can put it in the freezer and take it home with you.”

“Maman!” Sohrab had reappeared in the doorway, dressed in real pants and a white polo shirt. He said something to his mom in Farsi, something about dinner, but it was too quick. “Come on, Darioush. Let’s go.”

“Um. Thank you,” I said to his mom. I followed Sohrab to the door and laced up my Vans.

There was something he wanted to show me.

Excerpted from Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram, (c) Penguin Young Readers.

Buy Darius the Great Is Not Okay: Penguin Random House | Amazon | Bookshop

Pre-order Darius the Great Deserves Better: Penguin Random House | Amazon | Bookshop

Winemakers are pivoting to sell directly to consumers, but selling bottles now is just one of their concerns

“Nobody is ordering wine,” says Joe Swick. His eponymous label, Swick Wines, is based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, and sources grapes from both Oregon and Washington. Swick is represented by the influential natural wine importer and distributor Jenny and Francois Selections, and his wines — often with ludicrous, memetic names like “WYD? U UP?” and “P. Chill” — are sought after for natural wine restaurant lists and in bottle shops across the country. Or at least they were before coronavirus. “I’d say 80 percent of my wine is sold in restaurants and bars,” Swick says, “and my distributors — especially in places like Seattle, which was hit hard early — are starting to cancel orders.”

“We send wine to 14 states, and now seven of those orders we were expecting to send out are on hold,” says Emily Towe, co-founder at J. Brix Wines of Escondido, California. J. Brix is a family winery: a husband-and-wife duo handling everything themselves, from winemaking to marketing to exhibition, with kids and the family dog listed on the about page. “It’s been a kind of whiplash, for sure.”

Winemaking is an industry and art form that measures itself in months and years, not days. Yet in the first few weeks of government measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 in America, winemakers are beginning to worry. Small, independent winemakers that make only a few thousand or hundred cases per year are asking themselves if orders will be filled, whether distributors will be able to move their product, and how they’ll fit into a drastically changed restaurant and bottle shop landscape. As they fear an irreparable breakdown of the system that gets them paid, many are turning to direct-to-consumer sales — but selling the bottles they have now is just the first hurdle.

Fall out from the novel coronavirus poses longer-term challenges for winemakers as they make decisions in the here and now. Lost orders don’t just represent a loss of income; they affect every facet of the winemaker’s decision-making process in the months to come. Financial uncertainty breeds conservatism, and for winemakers, a disrupted wine market in spring, stemming from a pandemic with no discernible end in sight, begs serious questions about what to do come fall.

“We have a deadline in the wine industry, and that’s harvest,” says Adam Vourvoulis, of Los Angeles indie wine brand Vin de California. “If you don’t have your shit together by harvest, that means another whole year of waiting for product to sell.” His situation is especially tenuous: Vourvoulis and his business partner, Kate Vourvoulis (another husband-and-wife duo), are in the middle of building a new winery and tasting room in Pasadena. “We’re like, ‘Fuck, are we going to be able to get his winery ready to go by harvest?’ Permitting and all that stuff from the city can take months,” says Adam, “and if they’re on pause, there’s a big asterisk for that.”

Many winemakers are hesitant to fill existing grape contracts or sign prospective grape contracts at vineyards in their region. Without invoice fulfillment from distributors or enough direct sales to make up the difference, small winemakers may lack the cash flow needed to buy grapes for this fall’s harvest. “My New York distributor was like, ‘Obviously, don’t ship here,’ which makes sense because everything is shut down,” says Martha Stoumen, a well-regarded indie winemaker in California with national distribution. “But wineries are on a cycle where you don’t get to flex your production with the market, because you’re only making wine once per year: at harvest. That’s what you sell to support your business and family, but also to be able to buy grapes from farmers. There’s a kind of yo-yo of economic states, and it makes it really hard to understand what’s going to happen down the road from this.”

Ordinarily these winemakers would be spending the spring traveling to wine fairs to promote their wines, meeting with distributors, hosting tastings with wine buyers at bottle shops and bars, and wooing restaurant sommeliers. Those trips aren’t happening anymore. The cancellation of international wine fairs like RAW London and Third Coast Soif in Chicago have had an especially pronounced impact on winemakers, who often combine travel to fairs like these with additional travel to adjacent markets. “A lot of these cancellations were three to four days before the events,” says Swick. “After London, I had a sales trip scheduled in Copenhagen and then to another place in Europe, and I like to prepay hotel rates to lock in the best possible deal.” Swick estimates he’s out $4,000 in nonrefundable travel costs along with lost sales. “The financial impact on me has been significant.”

With distribution chains disrupted, all winemakers can do now is shift focus to direct-to-consumer sales, which offer a potential lifeline for these businesses; indeed, direct sales are booming, just when wineries need them most. “Direct sales in the last two weeks has definitely increased exponentially,” says Towe of J. Brix Wines. “It’s gone up three to four times from normal.”

Winemakers who have made prior investment in direct-to-consumer sales over the past few years are now relatively well positioned. Krista Scruggs, founder and winemaker at Vermont’s ZAFA Wines and co-founder of Co Cellars, a collaborative tasting room with Shacksbury Cider, says that 98 percent of her wine sales in 2019 were direct-to-consumer. “This is the foundation of my business structure,” she says. “Financially that’s been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.” In 2020 she’ll launch a delivery wine club called Counter Spell, focused on selling her new 2019 wines.

Scruggs isn’t alone in depending on wine clubs, which ask customers to sign up for regular wine shipments, to move the latest vintage. “Our spring releases will be totally absorbed by our wine club,” says Andy Young, an Oregon-based winemaker and founder at St. Reginald Parish and sub-label the Marigny. “But it’s a double-edged sword: we’re recouping from direct to consumer, but at the same time the people we normally sell our wine to are suffering. What happens to the wine shops? The restaurants? The ecosystem is eroding, and to me that’s terrifying.”

Direct-to-consumer sales aren’t a catchall solution for indie winemakers. Interstate commerce laws regarding wine sales require expensive and slow-moving permits and licenses. “If a winery doesn’t already have this in place, it’s really hard to just turn that on and ship outside of your home state,” says Stoumen.

And while relationships with wine distributors make it possible for independent winemakers to sell their product across the country, direct-to-consumer sales are often limited to in-the-know locals. “If I have a customer who wants to buy my wine in Maine, I have to have a specific license for Maine, and charge them taxes according to that state,” says Swick. “It’s a huge commitment.” However, as liquor laws open up to support restaurants that have closed dining rooms because of COVID-19, some winemakers are left hoping for a similar relaxing of the tolls on direct-to-consumer sales. “The big hurdle is compliance,” Swick says. “I need to be able to get my wines to customers, and direct-to-consumer is the only way to do it.”

For indie winemakers in America, life is already a strange pairing of the joys of creative winemaking and travel with the frequently ugly realities of small-business ownership. It leaves them precariously positioned for what comes next — safe, perhaps, from the first wave of the financial disaster, but with an uncertain outlook. “Everyone is thankful to have work, and I will plan on taking on more work myself doing order fulfillment and sales,” says Stoumen. “But I’m hoping that as more people learn there are wineries selling online, those who have the funds to buy wine right now will start switching their behavior [to direct-to-consumer sales]. This would increase our runway — and that’s our one big hope right now.”

Jordan Michelman is a freelance food and wine journalist in Portland, Oregon, and the co-founder of Sprudge and Sprudge Wine.

Get organized

Plus, Whole Foods employees will get temperature checks at work, and more news to start your day

Hope your home cooking plan includes buffalo wings

You may have difficulty finding yeast and toilet paper right now, but one item it’ll be easy to stock up on is chicken wings — and that’s because March Madness is canceled. Suppliers now have a surplus of chicken wings to deal with, which otherwise would have gone to bars and Buffalo Wild Wings locations across the country. As National Chicken Council spokesperson Tom Super told VICE, “The Super Bowl is the largest single sporting event for wing consumption, but March Madness is stretched over 2-3 weeks, so wing consumption would be more over that time.”

Super says about 70% of wings are sold in bulk to be eaten in restaurants, so manufacturers are now finding it difficult to package them in a retail-friendly, single family fashion. However, UPI reports that prices have dropped to $1.25 a pound wholesale, which may be all the motivation consumers need.

And in other news...

• Amazon and Whole Foods employees have been protesting and walking out over dangerous conditions and inadequate benefits, including stores and facilities that were ordered to remain open even after an employee tested positive for COVID-19. Now, the companies will begins screening employees for illness symptoms before they begin work. [NJ.com]
• Asheville, NC chef Katie Button took to Instagram to name the specific landlords and property management groups who aren’t working with her on rent reduction or leniency. [Instagram]
• The maker of Peeps is suspending its operations, but not to worry, shipments already went out for this Easter. [FBN]
• Trader Joe’s has fought unionization, but employees critical of its response to the new coronavirus keep organizing. [NY Times]
• Eggs are very popular right now. [Modern Farmer]
• Fish is also mostly bought in restaurants, so the nation’s fishermen are worried. [The Counter]
• EU is expected to approve edible insects, if that’s your thing. [The Guardian]

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

How to get started on your cooking journey, from frying eggs and saucing pasta to roasting chickens and making soup

So you’re really, really into food. You also have no idea how to cook it. I get it, I’ve been there. There are more of us than you might think: Younger Americans grew up in a system awash in convenience foods, while our parents were working longer and harder and had less and less time to cook. Then, when we became adults, time and money were scarcer still, and restaurants became the places we gathered with our friends.

When I taught myself to cook at home, I immediately discovered most recipes aren’t written for anxious beginners. Instead, they assume the cook is already competent and looking to level up or add another dish to their repertoire. The rewards and demands of social media virality have only supercharged recipes’ emphasis on novelty and visual beauty. As someone who now knows how to cook, I love reading about a hack for cooking short ribs or a surprising use for my rice cooker. But back when I barely knew how to boil water, recipes telling me which tweak or technique yielded ideal results made turning on the oven feel high stakes. All that emphasis on aspiration and perfection made it way too hard to get started.

I’ve been cooking at home for a decade now, and to be honest, I’m still pretty basic. I sometimes feel embarrassed that I haven’t moved on from roasting chickens and simmering beans, but right now, basic-ness isn’t a crutch — it’s useful. With that spirit in mind, I’ve put together a series of recipes, and notes on recipes, that get really, really basic. Think of it as a roadmap to kitchen competence, a few pages from the grammar manual of home cooking from the dialect I speak.

The most important thing about learning how to cook is to resist perfectionism, and redefine what a home cooked meal is. That was true before we were sheltering in place and limiting our grocery outings to the bare minimum, and now it’s essential. Chicken thighs roasted with salt and olive oil, alongside some root vegetables cooked in the same pan? Highlight of the week. Rice and an egg and maybe some kimchi from the back of your fridge? Delicious. Cheesy pasta? Hell yes. Beans on tortillas or over some toasted stale bread? Dinner once a week for me.

How to Read (and Pick) a Recipe

Every guide like this starts out with the same advice: Read the recipe all the way to the end before you start cooking anything. That’s because even if it feels like kind of a cop move to read and follow the recipe, actually doing so removes much of the stress you might associate with cooking — which often happens when the pan is searing hot and you realize you need soy sauce right that second. Read the ingredients list too! It tells a story, and all-too-often hides some of the prep, like chopping onions or grating cheese or even entire sub recipes (maybe skip anything with sub recipes). If there’s a term you don’t understand, Google it. Almost every mysterious recipe term has been clearly defined online now.

Do your best as a beginner to follow the recipe, but also give yourself permission to deviate if the current situation means you don’t have an ingredient or piece of equipment on hand. Every recipe not written during World War II or in spring 2020 assumes a certain American bourgeois abundance. There’s been a run on garlic? Your tomato sauce will lack some pleasure, but it will still be tomato sauce. Only a few things will utterly wreck a non-baked-good: burning it, undercooking it, over-salting it, or, in certain cases, depriving it of moisture. Under-salting will make things taste flat and disappointing, but you can still eat them. Oil plus salt plus fire is as basic as cooking gets, and if you have those things and something you can cook, you have a meal.

The internet is chock full of free recipes and advice, but the cooking internet stuffers from misinformation as much as any other. A good rule of thumb is to use recipes from publications with test kitchens and bloggers who have proven the test of time, though you may have to pay for those recipes. A few publications have also made serious investments in teaching the fundamentals (though all of them mix in somewhat fussier recipes with the true basics): the New York Times’ How to Cook; the Washington Post’s round-up of recipes and techniques; the LA Times’ ongoing recipe series How to Boil Water; Bon Appetit’s Basically vertical; and Serious Eats’ coronavirus cooking guide. (Your local paper really could use those subscriptions right now if it has a cooking section.)

If you’ve got the money, order a cookbook or two or ten. You don’t have Salt Fat Acid Heat? Buy or borrow Salt Fat Acid Heat. No cookbook explains better the whys and hows of cooking, and the fundamentals of technique, while being refreshingly empowering. Thanks to that book, I (mostly) salt my food appropriately, and in friends’ eyes I became a 50 percent better cook.

When to Cook

Assume it will take you sixty to ninety minutes to prepare and clean up after any meal that’s not scrambled eggs. I don’t care if the recipe says thirty minutes. You’re new to this, and some of us are just slower in the kitchen. Play some music, catch up on a podcast, and, if you’re not sheltering solo, make a roommate or loved one help. If you don’t want to spend an hour cooking, choose a recipe that takes a long time but requires little from you, like baked potatoes or a pot of beans, so you can get other things done.

Equally important is knowing when not to cook. More than half my social distancing meals are not meals I’ve cooked, but repurposing of leftovers I cooked previously. I wouldn’t try to cook three meals a day from scratch right now (or… ever?). Trick yourself into thinking something is a different meal by plopping an egg on it or putting it in a tortilla instead of over rice.

Assemble Your Tools and Stock Your Pantry

Need a definitive guide to stocking your pantry and refrigerator for a week or two of cooking from home? Eater has that for you right here.

Not sure where to buy groceries right now? Restaurants are turning into markets, and lots of farms are offering CSA boxes. Fresh produce and meat and eggs from small producers taste more like themselves and make simple meals tastier, and if you can afford to support small producers right now it’s a great way to help the entire food system.

And as far as tools go, head over here for some products that make your kitchen an easier place to cook.

What to Cook

Roast Vegetables

You know what you can do with any type of vegetable you wouldn’t eat raw, and some that you would? Toss it with olive oil and salt, drop it on a sheet pan, and roast it. The only important thing is not to crowd what you’re roasting, so every piece gets nice and crispy. I like to roast at 425. Don’t want to chop? Roast a potato or sweet potato whole.

• The Kitchn: Emma Christensen’s “How to Roast Any Vegetable”
• New York Times: Melissa Clark’s “Roasted Vegetables”
• Lucky Peach: Peter Meehan’s “Roasted Sweet Potatoes”

Stir Fry

Vegetables that don’t make sense for the oven, and even a few that do, are also great cooked super hot in a pan or wok. There’s all sorts of ways to saute, and stir-frying is one of the best for achieving flavor, both in terms of hitting the food with tons of heat and making the pan sauce part of the dish. This is also a simple way to use up ground meat and leftover rice (fried rice!).

• LA Times: Genevieve Ko’s “The Easiest Way to Stir-Fry Vegetables”
• Serious Eats: J. Kenji López-Alt’s “Wok Skills 101”
• The Woks of Life: How to Make Stir-Fry the Right Way

Greens

You will never be disappointed to have a batch of cooked greens in the fridge. “Greens” is a broad category, ranging from chard to kale to dandelion to bok choi; they can be added to every type of meal for a shot of color and pleasant bitterness. There’s a few basic ways to cook them:

• For leafy greens, Lukas Volger’s recipe for braised greens from his new book Start Simple is great and versatile.
• If your pantry is a bit better stocked, try the Grandbaby Cakes recipes for collard and mustard greens.
• This LA Times story on greens mania from 1986 (!) has a variety of braising options (time to bring back creamed kale?).
• World’s Best Braised Cabbage from Taste is not lying.
• If you don’t have time to cook the greens, try Toni-Tipton Martin’s recipe for wilting them.

Eggs

If you put an egg over roast vegetables or cooked greens, or drop it into soup, or plop it on top of rice, it becomes dinner. The two easiest ways to make the egg are to fry it up all crispy, or boil it until its yolk is still slightly soft. Cannelle et Vanille has an olive oil fried egg recipe from 2014, which likely helped kick off the trend. It’s a good one. The LA Times has two ways of looking at the ubiquitous jammy egg; Bon Appetit’s recipe calls for an ice water bath, which is super useful for quick peeling.

Rice

I rely on a rice maker; they can be pretty cheap and are usually easy to buy at grocery stores — at the moment I’m sure it’s much less predictable. If you can’t get a rice maker or don’t want one, it’s very possible to make rice on the stovetop. Also, rice in its creamy porridge form is another great platform for a meal or turning leftovers into a meal.

• NY Times: Tejal Rao’s “How to Make Rice”
• Tasty: “How to Cook Perfect Rice Every Time” [Video]
• Serious Eats: Shao Z’s “How to Make the Silkiest, Most Comforting Congee”
• Just One Cookbook: Nami Hirasawa Chen’s “Japanese Rice Porridge (Okayu)”

Beans

Cooking dried beans is maddeningly simple. The recipe can be as minimal as: Put the beans in a pot, glug a generous glug of fat on top, cover with water, add salt, and simmer for an hour or two. There’s a lot of tinkering and competing wisdom and differing culinary traditions behind this simple recipe, and it’s worth reading up. Warning: not all these recipes agree with each other. Pick one that works for you. Or keep cycling between them and cross referencing, because that’s what I do. I’m sure having a clay pot is great; I promise you don’t need one. Canned beans are always worth having around, and easy to doctor up.

• Washington Post: Joe Yonan’s “Beans are good for the planet, for you and for your dinner table. Here’s how to cook them right.”
• Rancho Gordo: “Cooking Basic Beans in the Rancho Gordo Manner”
• NY Times: Tejal Rao’s “Cannellini-Bean Pasta with Beurre Blanc”
• Isabel Eats: Isabel Orozco-Moore’s “Easy Refied Beans”

Roast Chicken

Beautifully burnished birds have become fetish objects on restaurant menus, and wrangling a whole four- or five-pound carcass might feel like more trouble than it’s worth. But don’t let the $70 ‘for two’ chickens of the past fool you; a roast whole chicken is an economical leftovers machine much greater than any sum of chicken parts. There are perfect and less perfect ways to do it, but you don’t need a cast-iron pan or string for trussing or butter under the skin. You just need a chicken, some salt, and a hot, hot oven.

• NY Times: Mark Bittman’s “Simplest Roast Chicken”
• Epicurious: Thomas Keller’s “My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken”
• Taste Cooking: JJ Goode’s “How to Roast a Chicken? The Answers Are Horrifying.”
• Salt Fat Acid Heat: Samin Nosrat’s Buttermilk-Marinated Roast Chicken

Can’t find whole chicken? Bone-in chicken thighs roast up even easier. Bonus: The chicken can be roasted in the same pan as hardier vegetables like potatoes or turnips.

Stock and Soup

Homemade stock is another dish that sounds intimidating but is dead simple and tastes so much better than canned. The only major investment is time. The recipes below call for a few more ingredients or using chicken wings (also great), if you can get them, but basic techniques here will work with whatever you have on hand, including only the picked-over husk of that chicken you roasted. Vegetarian stocks are easy to make with the root vegetables in your fridge or dried mushrooms. Pick up dried kombu, a type of seaweed, and bonito flakes at an Asian grocery store, and you can make dashi.

• The Kitchn: Emma Christensen’s “How to Make Homemade Chicken Stock”
• Smitten Kitchen: Deb Perelman’s “Perfect, Uncluttered Chicken Stock”
• China Sichuan: “Basic Chinese Chicken Stock”
• Just One Cookbook: Nami Hirasawa Chen’s “How to Make Dashi”
• The Kitchn: Emma Christensen’s “How to Make Vegetable Stock”
• 101 Cookbooks: Heidi Swanson’s “10 Minute Instant Pot Mushroom Broth”

Now that you have stock, you have yet another way to use up that leftover chicken, beans, greens, rice, and whatever still needs cooking in your fridge. Clean-out-the-fridge soup is definitely a thing.

Pasta

There are many, many pasta recipes out there. The thing I wish someone had told me about pasta much sooner is how to sauce it. If you ever wondered why dumping some marinara sauce or butter on noodles always felt a little disappointing, it turns out there’s a very simple way to fix it! Toss the noodles hot in the sauce. Check out Serious Eats’ guide to saucing for more details.

Baking

I bought a box of brownie mix on a recent grocery store run, and I think you should too. That said, if you think baking from scratch will cheer you up, here’s a few ways to get started.

• Taste Cooking: Odette Wiliams “A Cake to Snack On (and On and On)”
• King Arthur Flour: “Chilling Cookie Dough”
• Eater: Dayna Evans’ “Everyone’s Making Sourdough Now — Here’s How to Get Started”

Cook Safely

A word on kitchen safety: Much of it is common sense, but it’s good to brush up on. Here are the FDA guidelines, and here’s a good rundown on how to deal with all those sharp objects and open flames. That expert hand washing and disinfecting you’re doing will help you keep your kitchen and food safe, too. There is currently no evidence of foodborne transmission of the novel coronavirus; here’s how to grocery shop safely. If you are afraid of cooking meat, here’s how to conquer those fears.

The GoFundMe, which includes Oprah as a donor, names José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen and Feeding America as its first two beneficiaries

José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen has been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, serving meals to quarantined passengers on cruise ships, feeding healthcare workers, and keeping restaurants in business. Now, WCK, along with Feeding America, are getting some heftier celebrity funding. Leonardo DiCaprio, Laurene Powell Jobs and Apple, and the Ford Foundation launched America’s Food Fund on GoFundMe to address the nation’s food access crisis. The Ford Foundation, DiCaprio, and Jobs started the fundraising with $12 million. Oprah also tweeted about the project, announcing she’s donating $1 million to the cause.

The fund exists to support the work WCK and Feeding America are already doing cooking and distributing meals to those affected by COVID-19. “As we continue to monitor and map food gaps, we will partner with additional organizations and businesses that are helping to meet the need,” says the organization’s GoFundMe. “We recognize this need is great and believe that nobody should be without food.”

Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America, also outlined the looming hunger crisis: “Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 37 million people in this country did not have consistent access to nutritious meals — including 11 million children and 5.5 million seniors. These numbers are quickly rising, and it is critical that we rally together as a nation to support our neighbors during this time of great need.”

Those numbers are already rocketing up. Last month, 10 million people applied for unemployment insurance. There has been massive demand, and thus massive shortages, at food banks across the country, and as the Guardian reports, “one in three people seeking groceries at not-for-profit pantries last month have never previously needed emergency food aid.” America’s Food Fund is clearly a needed project.

However, its existence also highlights just how short the government has fallen in providing relief. Though no one knows for sure how long the pandemic will last, the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order was extended until May 3, and the economic effects could stretch into next year. People will be needing food assistance for months to come, and those stimulus checks will not go far, especially once spread between rent (still without a freeze) and other bills.

Your weekly dispatch from the ‘Add to Cart’ newsletter

This post originally appeared on April 2, 2020, in Add to Cart — the weekly newsletter for people who love shopping (almost) as much as they love eating. Subscribe now.

There may be no kitchen item as delightful as a mug. As noted in the Eater holiday gift guide this past year, you never need another mug, but somehow you’ll always find a way to add one to the rotation. Especially if that addition carries sentimental value — maybe you lifted it from your childhood home or picked it up on a trip. A mug is the ultimate souvenir, an easy-to-justify purchase that you can use forever. And with every use, it will remind you of that vacation you took or that coffee shop you lingered in.

Below, a small selection of coffee shop mugs. Buy one or two, and you’ll be sending a few dollars to a business that could probably use it right now.

Things to buy

• This “pie for breakfast” mug from Bubby’s evokes the nostalgic comforts of the NYC restaurant, which dishes up hearty biscuits, fried chicken, and yes, pie.
• Any New Yorker will appreciate this Cafe Grumpy mug, with its perfect grumpy… mug. (Sorry.)
• With its understated, monochromatic design, you would never know this Crew Collective mug, from the gorgeous cafe in Montreal, is from a specific cafe.
• These textured, handmade mugs from Ruby Coffee in Wisconsin are a delight to hold.
• Even if you’ve never been to Deadstock Coffee in Portland, it’s hard to disagree with this “Coffee Should Be Dope” mug.
• This travel mug from Spiller Park in Atlanta, with its summer camp vibes, embodies the playfulness of the cafe.
• This Cafe du Monde mug from New Orleans lives at my parents’ house, harking back to the family trip we took there when I was 4 years old. The design is ageless.

Things to know

• Wherever there is a crisis, chef-turned-humanitarian José Andrés seems to show up. Hence the José Andrés Saint Candle that turned up on Etsy this week, which promptly sold out. Kelly Carnes, the Etsy seller, said she’s donating all the profits to Andrés’s relief organization, World Central Kitchen.
• Many restaurant groups have set up fundraising for their staffs, inviting direct donations. Jean-Georges is raising money, in part, with gorgeous porcelain: Ceramic studio Source and Tradition is selling a collection of elegantly pinched gold-rimmed tableware, with 50 percent of all sales going directly to the Jean-Georges Restaurants Employee Relief Fund.
• A bolder piece of merch to support the restaurant industry: “Bought This T-Shirt and Stayed the Fuck Home” shirts, an initiative with over 30 partner restaurants in which 100 percent of profits are donated to the restaurants, which in turn will give 25 percent of that to their out-of-work staffers.

To survive uncertain times, small farms are pivoting to online orders to serve their local communities and compete with big box grocers like Amazon and Walmart

This story originally appeared on Civil Eats.

“We are so busy this may not be my most lucid moment,” Amy McCann says when she picks up the phone, which hasn’t stopped ringing in days. McCann is the CEO of the Eugene, Oregon-based Local Food Marketplace, a software platform that farmers and other local food aggregators across the country use to reach customers online.

In a normal year, McCann said, her team takes on about 50 new sellers offering everything from produce to dairy and jam. Due to an onslaught of demand, however, they’ve added 20 new users in just the last week.

In a very short time, COVID-19 has virtually upended the food system. And for farmers who sell directly into local markets, it has made the in-person sales they depend on — usually facilitated at farmers’ markets, restaurants, schools, and other communal places — especially unsteady.

As peak harvest season approaches, growers have been scrambling to move their sales online, where orders can be fulfilled without face-to-face interaction, either for through traditional community supported agriculture (CSA) boxes or other creative models. At the same time, groups that support local food economies have also been working to direct consumers to these new systems so that they can continue to buy local food from home.

In Seattle, where farmers’ markets have been shut down, Seattle Neighborhood Farmers’ Markets compiled a list of its market vendors’ “alternative sales options,” and has been highlighting them on Instagram. In Chicago, Green City Market created a guide to farmers offering online ordering with pick-up or delivery. And in the Mid-Atlantic, Future Harvest put together a map of more than 500 farmers and markets selling local food that received over 15,000 views in just a few days.

With social distancing guidelines now extended through at least the end of April, it’s clear that a great deal of food will be purchased online for the foreseeable future. A survey released this week found that more than 30 percent of US households had purchased groceries online in the past month. That was more than double the number that had reported doing so in August 2019, and 43 percent said they’d likely continue to purchase groceries online after the crisis ends.

While markets for small, sustainable, and local producers have been taking shape online for over a decade, many have struggled to compete in the past.

But this moment presents a powerful opportunity for individual producers and local food aggregators to scale up their online presence. While competing with massive companies like Costco and Walmart is a daunting challenge, worker strikes at Amazon and Instacart may also inspire some socially conscious shoppers to support independent producers.

Farmers will also have to tackle many obstacles as they attempt to redesign entire business models right before harvest season, improvise home deliveries, and figure out how to ensure shoppers using food assistance benefits can access online ordering. But that’s not stopping a range of people and groups from jumping in—and expanding their efforts—in the evolving local food landscape.

Previously a Rocky Road for Local Foods Online

Before the pandemic, online grocery sales in the U.S. were projected to double between 2017 and 2021. But while the practice had picking up steam year over year, the vast majority of Americans still bought their food in stores. That was even more true with local food, especially since many people who prioritize shopping local often valued personal relationships with farmers and gathering as a community at markets or through CSA distributions. But that’s all changing rapidly.

Several “online farmers’ market” platforms have come and gone over the past decade, and many companies that have survived in the space—like Good Eggs and Farmigo—have struggled or had to pivot to stay afloat. “Those were mostly tech companies that thought you could solve the [logistics] problem with technology alone,” McCann said.

Good Eggs, an online marketplace for small farms that had raised almost $53 million in venture capital, shut down operations in three out of four cities and laid off 140 employees in 2013, with co-founder Rob Spiro citing the fact that the company grew too fast “before fully figuring out the challenges of building an entirely new food supply chain.” It homed in on one city, San Francisco, and has been operating successfully there, although it now stocks specialty foods beyond what’s available from local producers, like fruit shipped from Mexico and gluten-free pizzas made in Colorado.

According to the company, Good Eggs has been experiencing two to four times more demand since the coronavirus outbreak (and there are rumors of shoppers logging on after midnight to place orders as soon as new items are added to the site). The company is working to expand to meet demand: coincidentally, in mid-February, it opened a new Oakland fulfillment center that significantly expands its capacity, and it is also hiring new employees. But it’s unclear whether the company intends to take on any new farms.

“Our customers have always looked to us as a source of local food from small producers, and we feel that responsibility now more than ever,” CEO Bentley Hally said in an emailed statement. “We are doing everything we can to support our producers during these uncertain times.”

Farmigo, which started selling software for CSAs and other local farm sales, had raised about $26 million to expand its operations by 2016. But the online farmers’ market it built did not succeed; it shut that part of the business down, claiming that the logistics of distribution were much more difficult than the team had anticipated. It has continued selling software to farmers and leaving those logistics to them, and its CSA platform is remains popular among farmers.

Farmigo did not respond to our efforts to reach them for comment. But as the company’s arc illustrates, many farms and local food communities that have moved their sales online are managing their businesses and distribution themselves, rather than relying on other companies that sell their food for them.

Grassroots Organizing, Online

In Tallahassee, Florida, for example, four women started the Red Hills Small Farm Alliance about eight years ago to connect local farms to buyers in their community. The virtual market, which runs on Local Food Marketplace’s software, grew slowly and steadily, said interim director Cari Roth, and it now offers food from about 75 producers to around 500 members. (Shoppers pay $20 annually for a membership and then pay a la carte for purchases.)

Although it’s online, its operations resemble an in-person market; the shop is open during a select window—8:00 a.m. on Sunday to 8:00 a.m. on Wednesday. Farmers receive orders and then bring their food to one of the Alliance’s distribution centers, where staff members and volunteers package the food from various producers into individual customer orders. Shoppers can choose to pick their food up or get it delivered for an extra charge.

Shoppers can opt to get a CSA share from one farm, or they can mix it up. “The beauty is that I can also order a bunch of carrots, a bunch of beets, mushrooms from another place, and scones from a bakery,” says Roth. “It’s like going to a real farmers’ market, but with even more variety.”

Red Hills had been growing its business long before the coronavirus emerged, but things took off even more in recent weeks. Roth said they picked up 174 new members in one week in March. More than 440 orders came in that same week, compared to an average of about 300.

And they’re not alone. In Maryland, Chesapeake Farm to Table operates with a similar model but was previously focused on aggregating food from small farms for restaurant sales. Now, its business collecting orders from individual community members and delivering to their homes has taken off. In Seattle, farm-to-table bakery Salmonberry Goods has been hustling to aggregate more food from small Washington farms to sell through its new online shop for weekly delivery.

“We’re really hoping that now that people are figuring out how easy it is to eat local, that they’ll stick with us,” says Roth.

Virtual CSAs

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, farmers across the country have also been reporting an increase in interest in CSA memberships. Since CSAs guarantee a weekly supply of produce (and sometimes other foods), they seem perfectly suited to a time when Americans are fearful of further disruptions to grocery supply chains. Signing up for a CSA that can be picked up or delivered can also mean saving a trip to a crowded supermarket.

Many small diversified vegetable operations, were already offering online purchasing before using platforms like Farmigo, but those that weren’t are now driven to do so.

Hearty Roots Farm in the Hudson Valley offers CSA memberships to residents of New York City and counties north, the area that is now the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. Before the pandemic, farmer Lindsey Lusher Shute was also hard at work on developing GrownBy, a new CSA software platform that she and other farmers were planning on using in a beta phase before adding other growers later on. Now, they’re opening it up more broadly right away to help the many farmers reaching out to quickly change their business model and move everything online to stay afloat.

Shute says one thing that sets GrownBy apart is that its built by farmers, for farmers—which means everyone involved in the development has a deep understanding of how marketing and sales channels typically work offline, making it easier to figure out how to move them online effectively.

Lusher Shute—who was a founder and long time director of the National Young Farmers Coalition—says her priority is the needs of direct market growers, not the profits of the software company, and that eventually, the plan is to evolve into a national cooperative, giving users the chance to share ownership in the technology. First, though, they simply have to make sure GrownBy is effectively making online sales happen.

“It needs to pull its weight on the farm and be seen as a valuable and critical piece of infrastructure,” she said. “We’re aiming to help farmers achieve efficiencies and a level of sales that they couldn’t on their own.” She also wants farmers to control their own data and to have software that is flexible enough that it can accommodate the variety that exists between operations.

One important flexiblity built into the software allows farms that accept food assistance benefits like SNAP and WIC dollars to offer an offline payment option, so they can recognize EBT (electronic benefits transfer, the payment system used for benefits) as a form of payment and then process that payment seperately.

And while she imagined farms would facilitate CSA share pick-ups, for instance, she just added a farm outside Albuquerque that, in the face of COVID-19, decided to offer home delivery, and was able to facilitate that aspect using GrownBy.

Indeed, farms across the country have been announcing home delivery of both CSA shares and a la carte food orders. Red Hills always had a delivery option but customers rarely chose to pay the upcharge. Now, it has gotten hugely popular.

“We’ve added drivers to accommodate it,” Roth said. On a COVID-19 call facilitated by Future Harvest for small farms in the Mid-Atlantic, several farmers discussed how to work with online orders and delivery protocols. Moon Valley Farm, which had trucks that normally ran restaurant routes in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., sitting idle, saw delivering CSA shares and a la carte vegetable orders as a way to replace lost purchases and keep drivers employed.

In many locations, however, home delivery presents real business challenges. “It’s really complicated and really expensive,” said Wen-Jay Ying, who has been barely sleeping while working to keep her company, Local Roots NYC, operating. Her goal is to continue giving New York City residents access to fresh, local food while buying from the small, independent farms nearby, which have lost significant restaurant business.

Local Roots has always used an online ordering system, but once members purchase shares, most head to local pick-up sites once a week to collect them. Most of those sites—cafes, restaurants, and bars—are mainly shuttered, and maintaining social distance at pick-ups in small spaces also became difficult. Ying has been able to keep two pick-up sites operating, but many customers chose to switch to home delivery.

So, she’s been hustling to hire workers to pack produce into boxes and do the actual deliveries, which can be time-consuming and complicated in a congested city where many people live in apartment buildings. “We’ve spent every waking hour for the past five days figuring out how to use a delivery routing software and organizing people based on these different routes,” she said, estimating that the cost per delivery for the farmer or aggregator can be as high as $15 per customer, a steep price when compared to Instacart and others like it.

And getting the food to customers after orders are placed is not the only challenge farmers face when looking to sell online. In rural areas, internet access is not a given, pointed out Hannah Dankbar, the Local Food program manager at North Carolina State’s Cooperative Extension. “In North Carolina, we don’t have broadband consistently across the state,” she said.

Farmers also may lack technical expertise, and they’re now hungry for knowledge related to online sales. In response to the pandemic, a colleague in Dankbar’s department set up two webinars on getting farm products online and more than 300 people tuned in to each one.

“Coronavirus has made the need for tech clear to many more farmers,” Shute said. And while many local food enthusiasts value the chance to mingle with community members and get to know growers at a farmers’ market, the efficiency expectation around groceries is only likely to increase as more people get used to a box of fresh vegetables from Amazon showing up at their doorstep within 24 hours.

“Some of those services sort of look like ‘local’ produce or higher quality produce,” she said. But they’re much less likely to support small-scale family producers.

“I’m concerned that if we don’t engage in this digital marketplace in a real way, we’re going to be left behind. Hopefully, the farmers’ market [will go back to being] a place people will congregate. But at the same time we have to be thinking ahead and moving the field forward.”

The best-case scenario, says Dankbar, is that buying fresh-from-the-farm food online will be “a trend that’s accelerated because of the virus.” If that happens, she’s optimistic that it could give local foods a permanent space in the larger online shopping arena. “The community building associated with local food—I don’t think those are going to go away,” she says.

What sets “Triple-G” apart is Guy Fieri, who reminds you to stay positive while doing the best you can

Waiting on line to go to the grocery store earlier this week felt like preparing for battle. The store was only allowing 50 people in at a time, including employees, so prospective shoppers waited patiently, estimating a six-foot distance between us, until we were beckoned inside. We weren’t timed, but it was implied we were to get in and get out as fast as possible. My partner and I had made a list, so we thought this would be easy. But once in, we were confronted with the fact that a bunch of stuff we wanted was nowhere to be found. There was no yeast, no corn tortillas, and no whole chickens. The sausages we like were gone, and the only kind of cottage cheese was double-cream. None of this was an emergency — we still walked away with food — but it was a reminder that sometimes we had to keep on our toes and improvise.

And it made watching Guy’s Grocery Games later that night pretty compelling.

Guy’s Grocery Games on Food Network is basically Supermarket Sweep meets Chopped. Chef contestants are given a directive — make a popular regional food using one ingredient from each aisle, or make something using only frozen foods —and have half an hour to both “shop” and cook. Chefs have to work with things like frozen spinach when they haven’t budgeted for fresh, and must thicken soups with baby food or ground rice cakes if there’s no flour. But unlike Chopped, where chefs can blame a limited pantry and a basket of ingredients designed to fuck them over, the contestants on Grocery Games choose what they’re working with. Sure, under better circumstances they would have done something differently, but they had to figure out how to make do.

This isn’t exactly a unique way for a cooking competition show to work. Basically any chef-based reality TV tests them by asking them to improvise with ridiculous rules. We all know that these chefs, in their own kitchen with their own ingredients, could make a hundred incredible things. That’s not the point here. These are not ideal conditions. The point is to prove that you can feed people well when you have limits.

It’s not just that watching people race around a grocery store, flinging whatever they can find into their carts, feels slightly more like a documentary in a time when nobody can find canned beans anymore. It may have started that way, but I found my thought patterns from the grocery store replicated on screen. Without corn tortillas, I realized we still had enough atta flour to make roti for some taco-esque dishes we wanted to cook. We could use baby carrots to flavor stock. We chopped second-day roast chicken, tossed it with basmati, gravy and half a bag of frozen peas, and called it “French fried rice,” and honestly it was good. As the days go on, my partner and I are getting used to making substitutions and inventing new things, because weeks (or months) of pasta with tomato sauce would test our sanity.

Part of the draw is Guy’s Grocery Games gives me some good ideas. I could totally bread chicken with the dregs of a potato chip bag, and I keep forgetting that anything is soup if you puree it enough. But what sets “Triple-G” apart is Guy himself. On Chopped, Ted Allen is funny but aloof. On Top Chef, Tom Colicchio is terrifying. The judges on Guy’s Grocery Games may have the same critiques as on any competition show, but Guy Fieri is just there to make friends. He shoots the shit, he roasts the chefs a little, but as always, he’s having a blast.

When you’re stuck at home and trying to make new, interesting, and foremost edible things every night, unbridled enthusiasm is the kind of energy you want. I don’t need to be upset that I couldn’t make something the right way. I need to be thrilled that I’m making something at all, that day after day I’m feeding myself, and that often it’s actually satisfying. I don’t want Tom Colicchio in my head telling me I shouldn’t even be attempting risotto if I don’t have the proper fresh herbs. I want Guy Fieri’s voice saying “damn, go for it!” and slapping me on the back in encouragement.

I’m relatively privileged when it comes to existing in this crisis. I have work, and it’s work I can do from home. I have a spouse to keep me company, no pre-existing health conditions, and a grocery store two blocks from my apartment. The hardest things I face (besides the looming fear that everyone I love will die) are boredom and the guilt that I’m not doing enough with my “free” time. But cooking is enough, even when it’s not ideal, even when it’s done under weird conditions. Use peanut butter instead of tahini. Use ketchup when you run out of tomato paste. Guy Fieri will be there to cheer you on.

We’ve never been cooking more, but ingredients are getting harder and harder to come by

Judging by Google searches, bean sales, and every other photo on your Instagram feed, folks are cooking a lot right now, stuck at home while social distancing. That includes lots of bread making (has sourdough ever been so popular??) and baking (as Eater’s Jenny G. Zhang put it, “Just scroll through Instagram or do a quick Twitter search for “anxiety baking” or “stress baking”).

And yet in some ways, it’s tougher than ever to actually cook. Many grocery stores are closed, items are selling out, and the extent to which we can physically shop depends on how much we can leave our houses or get delivered.

Which is why, at our latest Eater Talk on “isolation cooking,” part of our Eater @ Home event series in which we bring Eater editors and food world voices together, the conversation turned to MacGyver cooking. As Meghan McCarron, Eater special correspondent, put it, “It’s literally socially responsible to do MacGyver cooking right now.”

Lesley Suter, travel editor: “The first couple weeks, it was pretty easy to just cook what I felt like or what I had a craving for, because I had all the stuff... But now I’m starting to run out. Like, I’m rationing eggs — like, I currently have three eggs in my refrigerator, so if I need to make something I need to, like, dredge, I’m not going to make it.

I feel like now is when the cooking is gonna start getting more strategic, and maybe even more fun... The wheels are currently falling off, as we speak.”

Matthew Kang, Eater LA editor: “I very regularly one to three cans of tomato sauce whenever I go to the market and experiment with dried pasta. Lately, I’ve been trying to make what I call ‘cheater marinara,’ where I add in chopped anchovies, fish sauce, and soy sauce as these umami bombs, and then make a very basic pasta that you can eat fresh and then keeps really well in your fridge. Simple pasta is always my go-to when I have nothing else.”

Lesley: “I’ve been saving all the nubs of the bread I have had, either stuff that I’ve made or not. And then I made something that needed panko, so I had breadcrumbs, which I did not have in my fridge, to make the meatloaf I made yesterday. I always just had a thing in panko in my cupboard, and I didn’t. So that was sort of a hack.”

Jenny G. Zhang, staff writer: “Now more than ever is the time to substitute, make alterations, basically embrace ‘no recipe’ cooking, or riffs off of recipes. Stuff like stews and soups I’ve been able to stretch a little bit further by bulking it up. If a soup calls for just carrots and chickpeas, maybe I’ll add some potato or sweet potatoes in there and then it can last for another extra meal or two. If I have tomatoes that are going bad, I’ll throw those in the soup first instead of using my tomato paste or my canned tomatoes.”

Matthew: “One of the things that I started making in the last month was a Korean dish called jangjorim... You take a random cut of beef and boil it in a large amount of water with some vegetables, and then you pull it out and sort of let it marinate in soy and mirin and maybe some other things, and let it sit there for a while. Then you can let it cool and keep the meat in your fridge. Just take out slivers whenever you need — chop it and eat it with rice or porridge or anything.

And when you boil it in that water, the resulting broth is super flavorful. So I’ll reserve that broth, you get a soup out of it, and then you also get this banchan [with the beef] you can use over and over again.”

Meghan McCarron, special correspondent: “I actually just had a radish that was going bad in my fridge. So I mandolined this watermelon radish, poured some rice vinegar and a little sugar and salt on it, and now I’ve just been eating it with random things. Those quick pickles definitely help stretch your fridge.”

Matthew: “It’s sort of this puzzle of: what is in my fridge, what can I do with it, and how can I maximize. It’s like my favorite challenge.”

Watch the full Eater Talk below and check out upcoming virtual events:

As dining rooms close in response to COVID-19, rare wine sales provide a much-needed revenue source for restaurants — and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for collectors

As soon as the staff at Manresa learned that they would not be able to keep their dining room open, wine director Jim Rollston knew that their small but premium wine inventory could bring a quick injection of cash to help keep a few people employed. While Manresa’s kitchen transitioned into a takeout operation, and its management refunded a month’s worth of Tock reservations to diners, Rollston started plucking higher-priced bottles from the cellar and offering them to wealthy Manresa regulars who had expressed interest in collecting rare wines.

“Our pricing was way below the market price, intentionally, because I wanted people to see that and swoop in, which they did,” says Rollston. Among the bottles he sold were several “unicorns,” like the rare Keller G-Max. In the open market or on a restaurant’s wine list, the German dry riesling might sell for $1,500-$2,000. A collector snapped it up from Manresa for $800.

Word of Manresa’s wine sale spread quickly among collector groups throughout the region, and within the first week, the restaurant had raised over $40,000 from rare wine sales made to wealthy collectors, some of whom work in tech. One patron, who Rollston says was primarily interested in Manresa’s “trophy bottles,” spent $20,000 singlehandedly. “I probably left some dollars on the table,” adds Rollston, “but things are changing really quickly right now.”

In New Orleans, cocktail bar Cure is auctioning off its most highly allocated spirits via Instagram. In Washington, D.C., Jack Rose Dining Saloon is liquidating much of its whiskey library, which was the most extensive in the country. Countless restaurants and bars are scrambling to transform into retail operations to sell off their wine lists. And at fine dining restaurants, cellars full of scarce, “once-in-a-lifetime” bottles represent big investments that operators now need to recoup as quickly as possible.

Selling one of the world’s most coveted rieslings for nearly half-price is just one of the ways in which restaurant operators, faced with catastrophic conditions and inadequate federal support, are desperately trying to survive.

“Selling wine, whether as add-ons for food pick up like we are doing at the Alinea Group, or directly to consumers, makes a ton of sense right now,” says Nick Kokonas, CEO of Tock and co-owner of the Alinea Group. “The wine and liquor cellars are long-term investments… the best part is that these are not perishable goods, and we already have them on site.”

But even as they sell sought-after wines for a steal, these restaurants are met with challenges in offloading their most prized bottles. “There are always buyers, and there are always people who are willing and able to take advantage of a situation like this,” says Jordan Salcito, director of wine special projects at Momofuku and the founder of the canned wine beverage Ramona. “The problem is, no one that I know is thinking about buying right now.” She speculates that wealthy collectors may likely be preoccupied with a historically volatile stock market, and may not be keen on making big investments. “But, if you are one of those people who does enjoy wine, and who has some extra cash, it’s a smart move to buy some of these.”

While Rollston tapped potential buyers directly, Zach Pelka is pursuing a different avenue for liquidating some of his assets at the New York and San Francisco locations of the Champagne bar, the Riddler, where he is CFO. “Obviously when all this shit hit the fan, we were trying to identify the normal cost-cutting methods, but also how we could sustain and put ourselves into hibernation mode until, hopefully, the world returns to normal,” Pelka explains.

With over 150 bottles of Champagne on the list at each location, including rare bottles, the bars carry a significant amount of inventory that could potentially bring a much-needed infusion of cash. Pelka says pivoting to a retail operation wouldn’t make sense — he was reluctant to put his staff at risk of exposure to customers. Plus, he adds, ”there’s not a huge amount of everyday consumers who are going out and purchasing expensive bottles of Champagne as the economy collapses around them.”

Instead, Pelka initiated a conversation with wine auction house Acker, which he says is purchasing wine from restaurants at cost, plus markup. “You’re basically making money on the product, and offloading it, and then they’re turning around and having auctions to their greater member base,” says Pelka. “It’s incredible that they’re doing that.” (A spokesperson for Acker declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Other auction houses, like Zachys, are collaborating with fine dining restaurants to help them liquidate their cellars. “We look at restaurants coming to us to sell as colleagues during an unprecedented and difficult time,” says Zachys president Jeff Zacharia. “We can help because we can sell massive amounts of high-end wine very quickly.” (Rollston says he started hearing from wine auction houses last week, but he’d already sold through most of his list by the time they approached him.)

Regardless of the avenue through which they’re sold, each bottle represents a careful risk calculation — and, in some sense, a gamble. Most of these wines are incredibly difficult to acquire, and wine directors like Rollston are now met with the challenge of assessing how much of their inventory to liquidate now, versus sell to guests (presumably for more money) when they do eventually reopen their dining rooms. “A lot of those wines we’ll never be able to purchase again because they’re so rare or so expensive in the open market,” says Rollston. “We had to balance the current need to generate revenue with the hope that we will reopen, and guard some nice wines for the future.”

Rollston is also keenly aware that such a model isn’t sustainable for ongoing cash inflow: once these bottles are gone, they’re gone. Manresa will likely not have another wine sale for a very long time, if ever. “We still have so many amazing wines we’ll be able to have in the dining room when we reopen,” he says. “But it was really difficult to have certain wines walk out the door.”

Around the country, a lot of those wines are walking out the doors of fine dining restaurants. The result, according to Pelka, is something like a fire sale for expensive, once-in-a-lifetime wines. “I couldn’t think of a set of circumstances that could provide such a flood of unbelievable product into the market at one time,” says Pelka. “Whenever markets collapse, there’s a lot of great deals. Every restaurant in New York and San Francisco has huge amounts of inventory they’re trying to liquidate, so there’s definitely a lot of incredible product out on the market at unbelievable prices for someone who’s looking to buy right now.”

Largely, they’re pleading with landlords for rent forgiveness or deferment