I’ve spent the last two weeks crashing with friends again in Galway.¹ Things are slowly opening up more — although small but alarming outbreaks have caused some places to shut back down — so I’ve mostly been sticking close to home. Part of that is just being a bit out in the suburbs.² But a lot of it is the overwhelming anxiety of this moment, rolling through six months of quasi-isolation and the impending election in the United States.

Since I been sticking close to home, I’ve been cooking. When I was living in New York I’d fitfully cook; I’d sometimes spend a couple months planning meals and working through recipes, but New York has such amazing restaurants, and so many offer delivery, that it never quite stuck. Plus, I really only enjoy cooking for other people³ so I’d hold elaborate dinner parties every so often and otherwise subsist on deli sandwiches and Italian delivery.⁴

But here, with time to kill and a lot of pent up nervous energy, I’ve been burning through a range of things I’d been meaning to try. Curried Carrot Bisque, French Dip Sandwiches, Lasagne,⁵ Potato Latkes,⁶ Shepherd’s Pie, Pad Thai,⁷ and my personal favorite: Carolina Mustard BBQ. I don’t know why I suddenly developed a burning need to have BBQ, nor why I decided it had to be Carolina Gold,⁸ but I did. And I’ve got a great recipe for seitan, so it was a trivial matter to find a recipe online, whip up a batch of sauce,⁹ and assemble a stack of sandwiches on toasted sourdough. Reader, they were fantastic.

One of the things I’m periodically reminded of, whenever I take up cooking again, is exactly how many kitchen basics — BBQ sauce, marinara, vegetable stock — are both ridiculously easy to make and taste so much better than the commercially prepared alternatives. I know it can be hard and exhausting to cook dinner every day, and you often just want to drag yourself home, boil some spaghetti, and dump a jar of tomato sauce over it. But there has to be a cost to always taking the easy route. Processed food tastes increasingly chemical (so it’s loaded up with sugar and fat to cover it). Portions are designed to be inconvenient so you’ll eat more rather than bother storing leftovers. And we become ever more alienated from what we eat and where it comes from.¹⁰

Maybe that’s inevitable. Cultures are always changing, and I certainly don’t bother making homemade Worcestershire sauce or pico de gallo very often. But I try to at least keep a sense of what shortcuts I’m taking, what tradeoffs I’m choosing as I work through a recipe. And every so often you should put the full effort in, if only to remind yourself what you’re missing, and to decide anew whether it’s worth it or not.

I’m heading off right now on the bus to Kinsale, which by all accounts is a lovely little town on the coast just south of Cork. I’m leaving my friends’ house because, as lovely and gracious as they’ve been, I feel like I’ve imposed far too much upon their hospitality. So I’m on my own for the foreseeable future.

And I honestly have no idea what that future looks like. They extended everyone’s permission to remain in Ireland for another month. I’ll know in three weeks whether I have to leave in October or if I’ve been granted more time yet.¹¹ I see no compelling reason to travel someplace else at the moment, so I’m going to stay until most of the travel restrictions have been lifted¹² or they finally stop extending my right to remain.

But I guess nobody knows what the future looks like, these days. We’re hurtling towards November, in an election that seems critical to the destiny of the United States.¹³ And every week feels like it brings a fresh new outrage or atrocity. I’ve donated money to those places I thought would help, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve got more than the most attenuated influence on what’s going to happen.

And that’s the worst part. I’ve never been good at just waiting for something to happen — or maybe I spent too much of my life doing that, and I’m over it. I need plans to see friends, places to visit, a resumption of the life I had a year ago. But that’s not in the cards. It looks like we’re all trapped, one way or another, until at least 2021. And strap yourself in, because the next few months look like they’re gonna be a bumpy ride.

Next: Derry to Dublin
Prev: Skibbereen to Galway

Footnotes

¹ The same ones I was staying with a month ago

² It’s a solid 30 minute bus ride to get downtown proper, which means if you were thinking of grabbing take out or finding a proper bakery it involves a trip. I do better getting outside when I both have errands to run and no public transportation schedules to plan around.

³ My love language is “What would you like to have for dinner?”

⁴ I was once mercilessly mocked by my brother for referring to the type of cuisine by the nationality alone; saying “Chinese or Indian?” rather than “Chinese food or Indian food?” and to this day I’m not sure if that’s a New-Yorkism. I couldn’t help but notice him doing the same thing years later, although I kept it to myself.

For the record: decent pizza — although not transcendent pizza — travels well. Fresh pasta does not.

⁵ I somehow forgot how heavy a dish lasagne was, and exactly how many leftovers you get.

⁶ I had located matzo when I was in Dublin, and it’s not like potatoes or onions are in short supply in Ireland.

⁷ Well, it was pad-thai-ish, after the udon noodles subbing for rice noodles, the lime juice subbing for tamarind, the lemon zest subbing for lemongrass, and the total absence of bean sprouts. Certainly edible. Tasty even. But a bit off.

⁸ South Carolina has a mustard-vinegar-based BBQ sauce tradition, unlike North Carolina, which sticks mostly to the vinegar.

⁹ English mustard rather than American or Dijon seemed like a reasonable substitution, especially as I like things on the spicy side.

¹⁰ Food carries so many cultural memories and traditions, and the more we outsource parts of our plates to corporations the more we lose that culture.

¹¹ In which case I’d be able to ride out the US election while I’m here

¹² Given the current situation in the United States, and the ongoing difficulties most places have returning to something resembling normality, I’m betting that happens no sooner than the widespread availability of the vaccine

¹³ Not to mention geopolitics as a whole