Home cooked: How lockdown helped me learn to love cooking as a new dad

The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was a real-life horror movie. 

One day I’m on stage, reading to hundreds of people, cracking jokes, having those weird unauthorized pics taken of me — you know, the ones where they catch your face all-twisted mid-laugh. We celebrated everything we could, bouncing from fancy restaurant to the filthiest dive bars we could find every week. Life was grand. 

And then the world shut down, and in an instant, we couldn’t go anywhere. Our coworkers became strangers as we flipped to Zoom. There were no more events, no bar-hopping and all fine dining came to a halt unless they figured out takeout. We were responsible for feeding ourselves. Yikes, because like most people know, I hated home-cooked meals, mainly because I hate doing dishes. 

My wife has always been a great cook. She can whip up a couple of mean pasta dishes, barbeque chicken and broil a hell of a steak. She’s made great Jamaican curry, jerk dishes and a serious gumbo. Wifey has dinner and lunch mastered. As far as me, I’m the breakfast guy. I can hook up an egg: scrambled, folded, veggie omelet, bagel sandwich, waffles, pancakes and all that. So, we weren’t entering the pandemic as kitchen pedestrians.

However, the lockdown turned us into culinary legends, at least in our opinion. 

My plain scrambles and folded eggs transformed into shrimp and lobster omelets with mushrooms, shaved parmesan and a spinach garnish. My wife found so many different ways to cook Chilean sea bass and crab cakes, and mastered the art of making sub shop-style cheese steaks. She also became a weekend grill-master in her own right by making enough lamb chops, steaks and chicken wings for huge Sunday feasts and was our lunch for most of the week. 

We also had fun experimenting with different blended cocktails made with fresh fruits and put our own spin on classic dishes like shrimp and grits and summer pasta salads.

Sure, we missed sitting at a corner table in one of our favorite restaurants in the middle of a great conversation over half-empty wine glasses when a server interrupts us and says, “The chef sent this out, especially for you.” But we stuck to the rules — no dining out, no hanging out, no going outside. 

We had a newborn baby at home and were dedicated to not getting sick. We scrubbed the groceries with Lysol weekly, washed our hands 2,000 times a day, and in the spite of the tragedy happening in the world, we become closer as a couple, but more importantly, as a family.

And it worked — because not only did we avoid COVID until well after the vaccine came out, but felt the healthiest we have ever been and saved a ton of money. 

Now, for most Americans, the early days of the pandemic lockdown seem like something that happened ages ago. We are back at restaurants, back overspending and celebrating after events. Everybody’s back in the world, but I’ll be lying if said I didn’t miss all of those gourmet dishes my wife and I created, in addition to the extra time we created for each other. No, I don’t want another pandemic, but I do wish we could find a way to recreate that feeling.