Cooking Through a Pandemic

I moved from Toronto Canada to San Francisco California in August 2019. Seven months before the Covid-19 Pandemic. Loneliness was a great motivator for me to find ways to connect with people. One of the most important person I needed to stay in contact with was my mom. We both love to cook and love to share food with others — we decided to cook together every two weeks over Facetime. We tried all kinds of unfamiliar recipes making lots of mistakes along the way. Anytime we did make a mistake (like buying half & half cream instead of whipping cream because the colors are all different in the US) we would chant "This is How We Learn".

My mom turned 80 this summer and for her birthday I made her a cookbook of all the recipes we made together.

I am so pleased with how it turned out. I used Gelli printed textures for the imagery cutting them out in illustrator and collaging them into pictures of ingredients.

The intro page starts the book off with a poem. One of the first questions we asked each other before getting started on a recipe was "what are you drinking?" The last page shows screen grabs of us dining together. That's me in the inset corner picture.

It was really fun to layout a whole book. Now that I am teaching full time there are not as many opportunities to get my hands deep into a design project.

Creating fun chapter intros and including Easter eggs in terms of our overall assessments of recipes and screen grabs of our conversations in prep of a cooking day was really fun to think about and create.

The pandemic is technically over but mom and I loved this activity so much we are continuing to cook together every other week, drinking wine, and making mistakes.