Hello, dear reader. You may notice I am behind on my cooking blogs. Here is why.

I went home for break, and now I’m at home for the rest of the semester due to the pandemic. At first, I thought being stuck at home with a fully-stocked kitchen might be a good cooking development. The opposite has proven true, however. For one thing, my parents’ house does not have a microwave, and our oven broke just last month. This limits me to boiling and frying things, at least for now. Also, because we are social distancing (and grocery stores are perpetually out of stock, especially when it comes to staples like eggs and flour) I can’t easily get ingredients I do not have on hand from when we last went grocery shopping over two weeks ago.

Also, the question of “who is going to eat it” is still an issue as ever. I definitely ate sweet potato mush with almost every meal for a couple of weeks in my dorm, but if I cook something gross and force my family to partake in it I’ll feel bad for wasting resources and making the already frustrated people around me unhappy. Also, if cooking things my family will eat is a concern now, practically all desserts are out, since they have quit sugar. As a vegetarian, I have no idea how to cook the many animal-based recipes in my arsenal, many of which involve rare or illegal animals or parts of animals I couldn’t obtain anyway.

So that narrows me down to vegetarian, non-dessert, no-bake, no-microwave (ideally tastes okay cold), small-yield-producing, non-alcoholic historical recipes that contain a relatively simple ingredient list and do not overly rely on staples like flour and eggs.

I’m working on putting together a list of doable recipes for the future weeks of my blogs. Maybe not every blog will follow the formula of the blogs I made in the past. Going out, buying ingredients, and staying up until atrocious hours with friends cooking terrible ancient foods and writing about it was really fun, but it was also a lot of work. (I pulled an all-nighter in a kitchen across campus from my dorm cooking the root vegetables and doing work before my last day of classes before break. I’m tired.) My blogs this semester have historically gone way, way over wordcount, with lots of pictures and fun features. I’ve enjoyed it a lot, but it’s also been exhausting. In the coming weeks I might have to vary the old formula a little. I might start using contemporary adaptations of recipes that were prominent in more recent history, instead of trying to approximate on recipes from the ancient world. I might profile a particular ingredient or method of cooking. I’ll write something or other, and hopefully cook something, too.

Because I still feel like I need to cook something and I still have a few small crusts of bread left from before the oven broke, I’ll cover one simple recipe from the Great Depression this week: a peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich.

It sounds repulsive. But, historically, it’s a favorite sandwich of many older people in the South, who relied on these two inexpensive ingredients to get through the great depression.

So this week I’m just going to put some peanut butter and mayonnaise on a bit of bread and rate the results. (Do I really have to demonstrate the process for this one?)

All I could find are some tiny dry scraps of black bread from a week or so ago. It’s probably better than using a larger slice of bread. Oh, and the peanut butter is expired.

Live, Laugh, Love? More like Die, Cry, Goodbye.
Ever stop in the middle of something and wonder how you got there? That’s what this feels like.

Thoughts: hmm. This is bad! Very bad. No stars. I do not recommend the peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich. Tune in next week for more poor culinary choices!