I’ve been serving a lot of bagged/premade Caesar salad over the past few months. It’s so easy! And delicious! And 75% of the family will eat it without complaint! (The other 25% will happily eat the croutons and the parmesan!) I’ve started to fear that my children are going to have pandemic trauma around Caesar salad. Twenty years from now, someone will set one down in front of them and they’ll shudder as flashbacks from this long, hot, lonely summer attack their psyches. Maybe they’ll demur, citing an allergy. Maybe they’ll take a no-thank-you bite and push the rest away.
The potential for salad-induced trauma occurred to me after a recent conversation with my 11-year-old daughter. As I was preparing to serve a king-sized Caesar salad from Costco with dinner, she said, “Caesar salad again?! You seem to have run out of ideas for dinner. Maybe you should subscribe to Blue Apron or something for a few weeks.”
Well, I never. (Also, our first Blue Apron delivery arrives tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.)
If the meal kits fail, I’m seeing a lot of cottage food enterprises popping up in my area. The other day, I got an email out of the blue from a lady who’s offering “school lunches” for kids at home. A young couple in my neighborhood have started offering heat-and-eat Thai fusion meals on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Another guy had been working as a bartender, but with bars shut down here in Austin, started offering pulled-pork sandwiches on our neighborhood group for $5 a pop when he lost his jobs back in July. A couple of weeks ago, he graduated to offering full-blown comfort-food entrees under the moniker of The Best Little Pop-Up in Texas.
While many of us were baking sourdough, planting victory gardens, and eating our feelings, others were starting food businesses so that they could feed their families. I’m not going to look it up now, but I bet there’s a long history of folks turning to feeding other folks during times of crisis in order to keep food on their own tables.
But what I find even more interesting are the teenagers out there who have started their own food businesses during the pandemic. For example, a kid who attends my son’s high school launched Samurice, an onigiri pop-up, in July. He makes all the molded rice snacks himself, then delivers them by bike to people’s houses or to one of the restaurants his parents own in Central Austin.
I ordered one of each of Kenta’s onigiri over the weekend and they were excellent! The rice was fresh and sticky and the fillings, while conservative, added well-developed pops of flavor (I really liked the combination of the sour plum (ume) and lightly sweet rice). While this kid has a leg up in the culinary world with parents who run multiple successful restaurants, I find it strangely comforting to hear about kids who are taking the oceans of unstructured time they’ve been plopped into thanks to this pandemic and dipping their toes into entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and empowerment. It gives me hope that maybe we’re not on a bullet train to Idiocracy.
Look, I’m not here to judge how people use their time during this summer of nothing. I’m certainly not haranguing my teen to get out there and be industrious; if his way of coping is to sleep, eat, and holler at his friends on the PlayStation, so be it. We’re all doing the best that we can from one day to the next. But during this time of grief and loss and uncertainty, I’m so heartened to see these kids rolling with the punches and creating delicious things we can stuff into our faces while we stress eat.
Related reading:
This is our season of coaching our children through disappointment (WaPo)
These Austin High School Students Launched Their Own Food Delivery Companies (Eater Austin)