Google “Covid 19 cooking from home” and this is what you’ll get: 786,000,000 results in 1.06 seconds.
Clearly, there’s a lot of us out there seeking inspiration these days. 😬🍷🍷😬
This pandemic has definitely changed all of our eating habits. Long commutes home from work are, for the most part, gone (which were great excuses to just “grab something to go” for dinner!). Lunches out are also toast, and fine dining is finito.
Yes. This has hit the bar and restaurant industry HARD. As we wrote about a few months back, Canadian Chamber of Commerce forecasts that sixty percent of Canada’s restaurants could close this year due to the economic effects of 🦠🦠 Covid-19 🦠🦠!!
But, as is often the case, when something ebbs, something else flows!
In this case, a rise in home cooking.
Home Cooking FTW!!
Meal kit company Hello Fresh surveyed Canadians over the summer about their current culinary habits, and it seems if Covid 19 gave us anything GOOD, it’s a renewed appreciation for food: where it comes from, how its prepared, what it costs, and how much is wasted.
Here’s a snapshot of their results:
🍆 Sixty percent have changed their eating habits since “stay at home” life began.
🥩 More than half feel they will continue cooking more from home, post-pandemic.
🥦 Meats and vegetables are outpacing carbs and sweet foods, but 45 percent admitted snacking is up (No sh*t, Sherlock! 🤣)
🍅 More people are list-making before grocery shopping.
🥙 And people are more open to trying new recipes with what they have on-hand at home, rather than venturing back to the grocery store.
The Curative Power of Cooking
So, if you’ve been struggling to whip up healthy meals, night after night (after EFFING NIGHT!)? 😤😭😬 Lacking inspiration? Intimidated by your kitchen?Then Claire Tansey is someone you should get to know! A literal 🌶🍲🍆 food guru 🥦🍅🥩 her cookbooks take the hassle out of haute cuisine, and empower people to cook at home, and lead happier, healthier lives. 🍽🍷🍽
We talked to her this week on the 4 AM Report, and touched on book publishing during a pandemic, meal prep as meditation, and how to turn cooking from a pain in the a** to pure pleasure! 🥰
Here’s an appetizer, as it were, a small taste of what we talked about. Get ready to start chef’ing! 👩🍳👨🍳
Small Business Owners, Meet Sleeplessness
“I’m a mom to an eight-year-old. He rarely keeps me up at night! But what keeps me up at night is I’m a small business owner, I self-published my second book, and I’m doing a book tour from the comfort of my bedroom!! I wrote the book, developed and created the recipes, before the pandemic. And at that time, it felt like a book that was really timely. Because it’s all dinner, 90 new recipes for dinner – the type of recipe that people responded the most enthusiastically to, from my first book, Uncomplicated, which came out in 2018. I thought, ‘Yes, it’s important, people don’t have too much time, people need dinner.’ I think dinner is about the most important change you can make to your lifestyle, to make you happier and healthier. And then the pandemic hits. And luckily, that was about the exact time that I was putting the real words into the spreadsheet regarding my marketing plan. I’d always had this kind of vague idea that I wouldn’t do a similar marketing plan as my first book. But it was in March, when we were actually starting to put flesh on the bones of that marketing plan. And, of course, as with everything in the pandemic, it has felt like you can really only plan two weeks in advance. So, it’s just been a moving target. I mean, in March, did we think that by September that we would still be essentially locked down? Now we are forced into cooking, three meals a day, no relief. And so now it’s not just something nice and fun and enjoyable you can do at the end of the day, you’ve got to do it or else you don’t eat.”
Virtual Cooking Book Club
“I can tell you that throughout my entire career, whether I’m doing a segment on City Line, or recording videos for Chatelaine, when I was the food director there, without a doubt it’s that moment when people actually watch you cooking! They go, ‘Oh, it really isn’t complicated!’ You know, they can read the book from cover to cover. But when they see me do it, when they actually see me make a dish from four ingredients in total – it’s kitchen magic, the light bulb, the proverbial light bulb really does go on. So, it’s that experience, that engagement, that connection, that I really tried to figure out [during the pandemic]. It was truly a question of figuring out how to – everybody’s favorite word – pivot. To pivot to virtual, and to still be able to look in people’s eyes and watch their hands as they’re chopping. And for them to be able to watch my hands as I’m chopping. And I mean, I’ve done TV for a million years. I’ve done every kind of like, big production, small production, I’ve done it all. And I knew that the very first thing I was going to have to do was upgrade my video and streaming game. Because we’ve all heard the interviews on the radio, we’ve all been on those zoom calls where the connection is bad, the lighting is bad, you can’t quite see exactly what the person is doing. I knew I needed to upgrade that in order to be able to offer a virtual cooking club that people can join in. It’s every other Tuesday, we’re cooking through the book. I also do private book club parties, and even big, corporate, like team celebration events. And that all is run through virtual platforms, which is extraordinary. It’s extraordinary, we can do it. It’s extraordinary that everybody is now used to it. It’s a real new, fun challenge for me to essentially teach my same tips and tricks and recipes and share my same message. But you know, from the comfort of my sweatpants and my slippers.”
The Joy of Cooking
“For a lot of people, especially people who have families, people who have kids to cook for at home, it has felt very exhausting. It is a real slog. People are leaning on any kind of shortcut that they can find – for better or for worse. So, whether that’s takeout or whether that’s meal kits, but the best part for me is that people are actually discovering that they CAN cook. It’s like, you didn’t know you could ride a bike until you had to ride a bike. People are discovering that they can cook. For many years, as a food teacher, as a culinary teacher, as a food writer, I have heard from people, ‘Oh, I can’t cook.’ And I’ve always thought to myself, ‘I think you probably can!’ They just have to learn that they really can cook. And this is thrilling to me because honestly, cooking for yourself is one of the great skills of life, and it also can be one of the great joys of life. If you just allow yourself to enjoy it.”
Just…you know…don’t get on that scale! 😂🤣😂 Have a listen to the entire podcast, if you can.
You can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!
Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem during this Covid-19 economic uncertainty, or if you have a guest idea on the topic, let us know. Drop us a line at C+P Digital.
And as always, sweet dreams…well, hopefully!
