Family Cooking in the Time of Covid-19

Rhode Islanders Lean In to Daily Food Preparation

For Allison Perrelli of East Greenwich, the coronavirus crisis has been a time of stress and exhaustion. Allison is a nurse at Rhode Island Hospital, where all health care was focused on coronavirus patients. She had to learn, quickly, how to use a ventilator. She worried about contracting the disease and infecting her husband and daughter.

“When I come home, I want to leave it all behind,” she says. “My husband can barely get a word out of me.” But her daughter Julia, furloughed from the University of Tampa, stepped up to fill the culinary gap. The family eats a mainly vegetarian diet, but Julia loves to bake, “so my sweet tooth has kicked in.”

There is usually a pot of kale soup on the stove and Ali’s husband, Tom, makes dishes like pasta puttanesca and shrimp Mozambique over linguini.

But she also misses eating out—a lot. “We run the dishwasher every day. It’s all getting to be a grind.”

For Brenda Szeliga, the shutdown’s silver lining was a break in her long daily commute to Boston where she works as a personal assistant. She turned to her passion—growing vegetables in her Warwick garden and cooking for herself, her 90-year-old father and grown son.

Brenda comes from a food-centric family.

She particularly likes Southern food—she was soaking Sea Island peas for a Gullah red pea and rice dish when we spoke by phone. She is adding a beehive to her 12,000-square-foot backyard farm and has her eye on an outdoor oven. Chickens? Yes, eventually.

Brenda brings home-cooked meals to her dad, but was reluctant to go grocery shopping during the shutdown. That’s how she discovered WhatsGood, an app-driven delivery service that features food from local farms and producers. It was love at first taste. “The quality is much higher and I want to support the little guys. The big markets will get through this.”

So, once a week, she orders a box filled with seasonal bounty from WhatsGood as well as a few sweet treats.

“It’s like a surprise when I open the box. Everything is usable.” Brenda didn’t know what to do with the ramps she had ordered. Related to leeks, ramps are a wild onion available in spring. “I found a recipe and cooked them with eggs and spinach. It was very, very good.”

“Now I get Wright’s Dairy delivered right to my door. What Rhode Islander doesn’t like Wright’s Dairy?” she says of the farm in North Smithfield.

Lois Kelly discovered WhatsGood in March and became an instant fan. Because her husband has Parkinson’s disease, she is reluctant to shop in markets and wants to support local businesses. The Cumberland resident is a fairly new home cook and preparing three meals a day has been a challenge. But like Brenda, Lois finds everything in her weekly WhatsGood box to be of superb quality. Fish comes from Tony’s Seafood in Seekonk, microgreens from Sprout Organics, baked rugelach from Just Like Nana’s, cold-pressed juices from Fully Rooted, Bolt Coffee and “amazing bread” from Newport’s Provencal Bakery.

Lois says the cost for this exceptional quality food “is very fair. Everything I make is about quick cooking, but if you use quality ingredients, you don’t have to make elaborate recipes.” And she’s lost weight because she can’t be tempted to toss supermarket snacks into her shopping cart. Nevertheless, she looks forward to dining in her favorite restaurants again, including Persimmon and Chez Pascal.

Serena Higgerson just graduated (virtually) from the College of William and Mary with a degree in sociology; she had returned home to Newport in March when colleges around the country were closing their doors to in-person learning.

Before her senior year disruption, Serena shared an apartment at school and cooked up big batches of food to save time. “It was a little repetitive,” she admits. While waiting for life to start up again, she shares kitchen duty with her sister Sophie and their parents—each takes a turn preparing dinner and the menu changes every day. Cooking is a family hobby, says Serena, and now she has time for more complex cooking projects. She took on the challenge of sourdough bread and made her own starter—all with success!

The endless months of shutdown have been a bit overwhelming for Jennifer Suellentrop of East Greenwich. As a full-time lawyer and the mother of two girls, preparing meals was not high on her list of must-dos. She and her husband, Chris, organized their daughters’ distance schooling, overseeing five or six assignments on different apps every day. “It’s sort of rough.” But Nina, 9, and Alice, 7, have been her secret weapons in getting meals on the table. Baking is their afternoon “enrichment” and Nina makes a beautifully braided challah; Alice tried her hand at chocolate babka. They use recipes from American Girl cookbooks and “they’ve really expanded their baking repertoire,” says Jennifer. They also bring her coffee in the morning—a treat—and Chris grills outdoors as the weather permits.

Jennifer is making more casseroles, using fresh vegetables and digging out those lost products from the back of the pantry. “Our vegetable intake has gone up, but so has the amount of sweets we eat.” Even with her daughters’ help, Jennifer admits she’s getting tired of the mental labor of meal planning.

Jennifer is not alone in pining for a good meal out—or several, plus opting in for takeout from rebounding restaurants that offer curbside pickup. But with no vaccine yet in sight and a harmful virus still circulating in our midst, home cooking surely isn’t going anywhere.

The upside to doing all those dishes and managing the daily food prep? Discovering locally grown foods, tackling complex baking projects, exploring new flavors, the kids taking charge in the kitchen and the resounding value of good home cooking.