Soul food

WEEK 45

The uncountable moments that my wife and I spend together cooking and eating with our friends are among those I treasure most in life. Moments that have formed a core part of who we are as a unit. It’s the familiar rhythm – setting the date, planning, shopping, preparing, enjoying, not wanting to say good-night – that we’ve so dearly missed during lockdown.

Here we are, on the eve of The Second Month, longing for the very tiniest easing of restrictions. Even having one person join us at the table would be an elixir for the soul. Yet the governors and mayors keep moving the goal post, and there is no clear end in sight.

What comes next is a happy story.

As she often does, necessity led the way to a really cool idea. Enter six friends with many and varied talents, including in the kitchen. Combine that with a jonesing for togetherness, and out popped a plan for a virtual dinner party.

Over group text, the plot unfolded:

What if … we all cook the same menu? On the culinary front, our group of couples — I&J, R&G, E&J – specializes in, among other things, encased meats, fresh pasta and baked goods. All the major food groups.

What if … we each “bring” an ingredient? Irena makes her own sausage links and happened to have extra hog casings on hand (because who doesn’t during a pandemic?). R&G know their way around durum wheat semolina flour and offered up hand-shaped cavatelli. E, who owns a cookie shop, envisioned a ginger apple tart for dessert.

Behold the first-ever quarantine potluck.

As our video dinner date drew closer – with texts of food-porn prep along the way – I got giddy thinking about the in-person transfer of goods. Per the San Francisco mandate, food delivery is an essential service and, therefore, a legitimate reason for us to leave our homes. Not to mention a chance to see our friends, even if from a distance.

“The Drop,” as we called it, took on great import. R&G selected an empty parking lot behind a shuttered school and texted us the coordinates and a meet-up time.

R&G arrived early, costumed in full pandemic attire – jumpsuits, face masks, hats, goggles and heavy boots – and chalked out safe zones on the asphalt, six feet apart, for us to each deposit our food packages.

Despite the seriousness of the endeavor and our respect for social distancing, we couldn’t stop laughing – especially imagining the next person stumbling upon the clues from our food crime scene.

Later that evening, freshly showered and coiffed, we hopped on our three-way video call. Like always, we started with cocktails, in this case gin & tonics, using Irena’s homemade tonic syrup, which she’d put in the care packages along with the links. I felt a familiar warmth and togetherness as we raised our glasses and looked each other in the eyes to say cheers, despite sitting so many miles apart.

About an hour later, we carried our laptops into our respective kitchens, unpacked our ingredients, and started cooking together.

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We had decided to make the I&J signature “swine and wine”: pork sausage sautéed in a cast iron pan, then tossed in pasta along with chopped fresh Roma tomatoes and basil, which are stewed lightly in balsamic vinegar. R&G talked us through the cook timing for the cavatelli.

We all fired up our burners at the same time and got to it. You could even hear the links sizzling through the speakers.

No doubt this was a simple meal to prepare, yet cooking simultaneously in three different homes, across nine burners, with different temperatures and pans, required a lot of focus. And we’re an experienced bunch!

We mostly nailed it on timing, brought our dishes to our respective tables – along with video cameras – and got down to the business of eating.

Dining together is familiar territory for us. Our group of six has done this a lot. But talk about an other-worldly experience to look at the screen, seeing our friends at their tables miles away, yet all tasting the same bites. There was no shortage of collective oohs and aahs and yums.

A while later, we cleared the dishes and came back to the table to enjoy (i.e., devour) E’s ginger and apple tart with fresh bourbon-infused cream, each pouring liqueurs to go along with.

Like any good dinner party, the conversation dipped in and out of any number of topics, from movies and shows to sex and drugs to personally revealing stories. We had the right arc of seriousness, fully acknowledging our privilege to be healthy in a safe community, with the means to come together like this. There was much laughter, too. Everyone glowed.

More than FOUR HOURS after we first logged on, we blew each other kisses and said our good-nights. The whole thing was masterful and magnificent. A beautiful counterbalance to the reality of our days.