Cooking and Covid-19: Chopping, Chard, Crackers and Cocktails

For many people, fears of covid-19 have given ground to frustration. Perhaps it’s not knowing when your office or school will reopen; or should you quarantine from your adult children; or when will the unemployment funds arrive. I am among the lucky ones: uninfected, housed, Internet-connected and not alone. The weather is warm, the sky is clear and cornflower blue. And it’s still hard.

March 26, Thursday

12:30 p.m. on Thursdays is a high point of my stay-home week. Diana Winston’s half-hour meditation moved from the Hammer Museum auditorium to Zoom. One of the nation’s best-known meditation teachers, she directs mindfulness education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. I learned about Diana when, as a reporter for the L.A. Times, I wrote some stories about meditation.

My equanimity is pretty fragile these days, and meditation helps (that and a bowl of toasted coconut almond chip ice cream from McConnell’s). But today, even in meditation, we had a reminder of the fragility of the world. A Zoom bomber interrupted Diana, yelling out childish questions about genitals (we have come a long way from Prince Albert in a can), as hundreds of listeners prepared for “being here, now,” as they say in meditation circles. Even Diana was a little frazzled.

And this has what to do with food? BCV (before coronavirus), I came home from stressful days, dropped my bags and got to work chopping — one of my meditative practices. A salad that…