Corona Chronicles: A recipe for every occasion

– Opinion –

Tonight marks three full weeks since lockdown and on the bright side we have completed 60% of the five weeks. It also means that we are only two weeks away from “wine shopping” which is way more exciting than if Russell Crowe asked me on a date!

By now many of you are so sick of your own cooking and starting to search elsewhere for new recipes to test on the family. Years ago “recipe chain letters” were a real thing. First you selected a recipe and then you got one of those little square things called stamps that you “spoeged” on and then “plakked” on a little white rectangular piece of paper called an envelope. You wrote an address on the front, popped the recipe inside and took it to a funny place called “the Post Office” to post. Took about three to seven days to reach its destination (which included a personal home delivery by a man on a bicycle) and voila – the recipient had a new, tried-and-trusted recipe to cook.

So now the recipe chain letters have resurfaced, but this time on WhatsApp. In the last week alone I have been included in five different groups! I am truly and deeply honoured to have been included, but considering that each group requires me to forward the message to 20 others, that means I need a hundred friends in total to send it on to! Just saying but that is one huge truckton of friends, so best I start putting out applications to procure some additional victims!

It was at the same time I got these requests that I had finally reached the recipe book shelves stage of my cleaning frenzy. Note that I said “shelves”. It appears that I am unknowingly some kind of “recipe whore” and collect recipe books from the strangest places. From the Empangeni Garden Book club to the Christopher Robin play school – I seem to have them all. I also have a rather large plastic box of seventy ‘eleventy’ million trillion magazine and handwritten recipes and then a recipe folder on my laptop – categorised of course – with another forty million more. I probably have enough recipes to give one to each and every person living in South Africa and still have a few spare to send to Outer Mongolia, the North Pole and Uzbekistan or somewhere! It is so bad that sometimes trying to search for one tried and trusted recipe can necessitate a compass, some dates and cold water (to keep my strength up) and three days of intensive searching!

People let’s be realistic here: I love cooking and trying new recipes, but my family are about as adventurous as a bear in hibernation, which means I can only test them on my bookclub and Stokvel ladies or victims at the occasional dinner party or braai. So basically I have more chance of winning the lottery than ever being able to use all of my carefully cherished collection!

I feel I need a day with a very large black bag (and perchance one of the bottles of my fast dwindling wine collection) and then I need to find my “ruthless panties” and forge straight in. This is the hard part, because even though I may never have cooked some of the many, many, many recipes I own, I still have an emotional bond with each and every one of them.

Missed some of the other Corona Chronicles? Check them out here:

Corona Chronicles: Witty Joburg resident documents past five days of social distancing

Corona Chonicles: A guide to sorting your cupboard when you have an emotional bond with your clothing