For Calmer Cooking in the Coronavirus Era, Press Print

The coronavirus outbreak has rattled our daily lives, and things seem to change minute by minute. But there’s one constant: we have to eat. How do we cook among the chaos? What recipes do we lean on? How can we use cooking to stay calm? That’s what we’re exploring in this series, The Way We’re Cooking Now.

This is a weird admission from a guy who runs a recipe website, but after ten hours of Slacking and Zooming and running my thumb down the front of my phone again, and again, and again...I just can’t. Can’t look at a screen any longer, that is. So cooking from a website (like this one!) or an app (like ours!) is out of the question. Instead, I need to cook from a recipe on paper.

Oh, I could just stay away from recipes completely, of course. I could wing a no-recipe soup or a no-recipe casserole. But I don’t feel like going it alone at the moment. I crave a leader, want some direction. Please, kind cookbook author, just tell me what to do.

A small upside to cooking in this very moment is that we’re in Peak Spring Cookbook season, and I have a stack of cookbooks I have been waiting to dive into until a time just like this (well, maybe not just like this). There’s the new Melissa Clark book (Dinner In French), the new Bryant Terry (Vegetable Kingdom), and that book all about beans that I wish I had been smart enough to write (Joe Yonan’s Cool Beans). I prop these books up on my counter using a cookbook stand (yes, I’m that guy, and I highly recommend that you become that guy, too), and I submit to the words on the page.

No news alerts pop up. No well-meaning-but-still-kind-of-stressful text messages from friends break through. And though Slack is doing a great job at world domination, as of this writing they have not yet figured out how to send a push notification to the printed page.

I know, I know, you’re shook that I’m telling you to cook anywhere but from epicurious.com. I warned you I’d be doing that! But actually, I’m not really telling you not to cook recipes from the internet; I’m just telling you, you’re going to feel a lot more calm if you to press “print” before you do.

We cooked our way through the season's upcoming cookbooks—here’s what you need to know about them

Originally Appeared on Epicurious