By: Vanessa Hsieh
Staying at home all day can be a bit boring at times. Since most places are closed, the only option is to remain home. Sure, you can get some fresh air outside, but it is important to stay close to home and practice social distancing. With that being said, finding something fun to do at home can be quite challenging. Board games with family, exercising, and binge-watching shows can be repetitive sometimes, so what else can we do? How about learning to cook?
Cooking and baking can be fun and can take your mind off of things, especially making new recipes. Ordering delivery from restaurants can be risky, so cooking is the way to go to ensure added safety and protection from potential infection. If you don’t have recipes at home, new recipes can be easily found online. For example, Tasty, Food Network, and YouTube recipes are some sources that have many recipes that you can easily follow. Some easy foods that you can make during quarantine are pasta, cookies, sandwiches, pancakes, chicken, and a lot more. You can also try and improve your cooking skills by attempting to cook something a bit more challenging, like steak.
If you want a delicious dessert, chocolate chip cookies are really easy to prepare and make for starter cooks. You just need a few simple ingredients, such as flour, baking soda, salt, butter, granulated sugar, light brown sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, and, of course, chocolate chips! You can follow a recipe for chocolate chip cookies from almost any source, such as a website or a cookbook that you might have at home. You can always add on to the recipe to make it more unique and tastier.
If you want a delicious dinner to go with your cookie dessert, how about spaghetti! All you need is spaghetti, salt, pepper, olive oil, and garlic cloves, but that is just the bare minimum. Adding vegetables, poultry, seafood, beef, basil leaves, parsley, cheese, chili flakes, tomatoes, and other things can take your Italian dish to the next level. Mac and Cheese is also delicious to eat and easy to make, and you only need macaroni, milk or butter, and shredded cheddar cheese. You can even heat it up in a mug in the microwave for a quick snack. If you want something even easier, tuna salad sandwiches are an extremely uncomplicated lunch to make. Other ideas for meals are tacos and wraps, both of which are super easy to make and enjoy. If you want a recipe that allows you to spend more time with your family, you can work on making pizza or homemade bread together.
Since not many adults need to go to work, make the most of your time by getting to know them better or bond with them through cooking! The whole family can work together and spend some quality time with each other, which is very much needed. Our normal lives are usually fast-paced and technology-filled which make us distant from one another, so this time could be used as a way to benefit our relationships. You should try to cook something new during this quarantine because cooking brings people together, and you might even love it and develop a new hobby!
Photo courtesy of Getty images.
