Beef Wellington is a strange and incredibly labor-intensive dish to prepare—tenderloin wrapped in duxelles wrapped in prosciutto wrapped in puff pastry. When I attempted Gordon Ramsay’s recipe after years of listening to him bellow about the dish on Hell’s Kitchen, I also endeavored to make my own puff pastry (the Bon Appétit recipe, in fact) because surely that was feasible. Puff pastry comes from somewhere, after all.
Turns out, there is a reason so many recipes call for store-bought. Puff pastry is a finicky thing to make—lots of folding and rolling layers of dough and butter with rounds of chilling in between. Every time I took it out of the refrigerator for more folding and rolling, it would come apart, butter oozing through the dough. I consulted Google as to how to remedy this and eventually it all worked out, but it was a trial, indeed.
I have long enjoyed cooking, but during this pandemic, with a great deal of unstructured time on my hands and anxious energy to burn, I have taken to cooking and baking the most elaborate dishes, making every component from scratch, and carefully documenting the experience with my phone’s camera—partly for myself, and partly to post on Instagram, where unsolicited advisers do not hesitate to tell me when something looks ugly or explain how I am “doing it wrong.” I am not alone in all this pandemic kitchen activity. A great many people around the world are managing their stress with culinary labor.
In the before, my fiancée, Debbie, and I mostly ate out at restaurants because we were too busy for anything else. For years I have yearned for the leisure to cook and bake, but my schedule has been too demanding. I live in Los Angeles and New York, where Debbie lives. I travel nearly every week for speaking engagements. I am working on too many projects—a pilot, a pitch for a new television show, a new comic book series, several books, freelance articles. There are a great many deadlines, most of which I watch pass me by as I struggle to catch up (which, likely, I never will). When I did have the time to cook, I didn’t have the energy, and when I had the energy, I didn’t have the time. But now, everything is upended. We are all moored in our homes, afraid of one another and what might befall us if we get too close.
Having all this time to spend in the kitchen is bittersweet. I needed it because I was hurtling toward burnout, but I am still restless with nowhere to go, nowhere to be. I have the same amount of work but less pressure to contort myself to get that work done, and without that pressure, I don’t know how to function. Instead, the days stretch out, seemingly endless, my time my own to do with as I please. We are hunkered down in Los Angeles while our cats, Theo and Lew(cifer), are stuck in New York—being well taken care of by my cousin, but still. We miss them and worry they won’t remember us. When we FaceTime with them, they are largely indifferent, glancing at us on the tiny screen with practiced disdain.
Meals are something tangible toward which I can direct my energies and, unlike current events, mostly manageable challenges. During isolation, I have made pretzels, bagels, cinnamon-raisin bread, scones, croissants, layer cakes, coffee cake, mint chocolate bars, cookies, eclairs, meringues, homemade pizza, tsoureki bread, chicken milanese, chicken tortilla soup, chicken fajitas with homemade tortillas, Mongolian beef, soufflés. I made an entire Passover meal—matzo ball soup with homemade matzo balls, a brisket, a potato kugel, apples and honey—for the first time in my life because my fiancée is Jewish. We sat down in our dining room and she looked over the meal, her eyes shining, and for a moment, life seemed almost normal, faith undeterred by calamity.
Skirt Steak With BA.1. Sauce
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