When life gets hard, there’s something to be said for going back to the basics. Just breathe in and imagine homemade bread fresh out of the oven, beef stew simmering on the stove, and scrambled eggs sizzling in a skillet. They’re comfort foods, and they’re called that for a reason.
When the stay-at-home orders came in March, people dusted off old Kitchen Aid mixers, crowd-sourced for out-of-stock ingredients and fed their sourdough starters. Now that it’s March 261st (just kidding, we know it’s probably November) and life is rolling back to some kind of normal, why are so many of us still kneading dough at the countertop?
“For a while, we had all the time in the world,” says Shereen Pavlides, the Voorhees resident whose “Cooking with Shereen” TikTok videos blew up during the shutdown. “When restaurants closed down and people started making their own food, it became a source of comfort. It was about emotions more than hunger.”
People now see that cooking from scratch is not that hard and doesn’t take up as much time as they thought back in the days before things slowed down, she says.
“There’s something so empowering about being in the kitchen and creating something with your own hands,” says Pavlides, noting that there’s nothing that soothes the soul quite like a home-cooked meal.
