Cooking Through COVID:
The story of a family recipe
Every family has a famed recipe. Mine is Liza’s Granola. It has just the right amount of sweetness and a surprising subtle salty aftertaste. It’s crunchy but never chunky. It’s earthy and nutty and seedy. At family reunions, my several aunts arrive with their heaping bags of the stuff. Each is slightly different, tinkered with over the years, by its respective chefs. We spend the weekend speaking with our mouths full, “Are these chopped pecans?” “Did you substitute molasses for brown sugar?” Sharing granola is the inherited love language of every woman in my family. It is mine.
Like every good urban millennial, I have reinvented myself many times. I have dallied in short-lived careers as a comic book maker, a florist, a cocktail waitress, a customer support specialist, a tech marketer, and for about six months, a granola chef. I cooked my mom’s version™ of Liza’s Granola in such quantity that it required ordering the oats farm direct. My roommates attempted to conceal concerned faces as I manically took over the kitchen, the pantry, the laundry nook and the living room, with boxes of spices, sugar and nuts. Sesame seeds stole away into every un-vacuumable nook and cranny of our shared space. Even the bedroom at the end of the hall soon smelled like a Yankee Candle factory. There was an ever-moving birthmark of caramelized brown sugar gripping the hairs of my forearm. Meals were replaced with batch after batch of taste-tests necessary for quality control. I cooked granola until I could do it with my eyes closed, late into the night, for nights and nights.
My venture was not entirely misguided. My friends loved the stuff. One even designed funky granola jar labels and I named my soon-to-be-Forbes-touted business Granola Empire. It felt like an honest take on how much granola had taken over my life. My friends attended my so-called launch party, hosted in my kitchen and sent me lengthy, glowing, truly literary reviews of my experiments with coconut, cinnamon, and sugar-free flavors. I had graduated into a true Lucas family granola-maker—high enough on my own supply that I was ready to venture into creating my own signature style.
I’ll spare you the details and tell you that the business failed. There was the hard realization that I couldn’t sell the stuff beyond my circle of friends, and that each kind soul was only willing to house a few jars of the stuff per week. Also, the economies of scale weren’t working; I was spending more on making, packaging and shipping each granola jar than I could straight-faced sell one for.
Right now, a global pandemic rages on outside my apartment window. While it feels unreal, impossible, we have all come to grips with the fact that it’s neither. At this point, we have all spent so much time within the bounds of our living spaces that we’re well-versed in its every deficiency, each loose cabinet pull and wall scuff. We also have learned deep appreciation for its comfiest couch section and sunniest place to eat. We’ve cleaned everything; we’ve reorganized every drawer. The last place to face my restless fingers is the cabinet above my fridge, the one too high to reach without a stool. Inside it sit patient rows of label-pre-affixed jars, holdovers from my former empire. My short-lived dream of taking the world by oat-and-sugar storm subsided but my love language remains intact. I am armed with spatula and uniformed in apron, ready to fight back the only way I know how.
Many loved ones will soon receive this little bit of love, shipped in not cost-effective packaging. I ask that it’s with big hearts that they accept it; it’s what I have to give right now.
Published May 2021, in The Planted Trees