SEATTLE — When Sarah Monson got laid off from her job as a cook at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she went home and kept on cooking. She and pretty much everyone she knows didn’t know what else to do — the Seattle restaurant industry is a tight-knit one, and her roommates were working in the kitchens of Westward, Salare and Ray’s Cafe. With six years’ experience locally, Monson herself had just started a new job at Maple Leaf butcher shop/restaurant The Shambles when the government-mandated dining-in shutdown was announced on March 16, 2020. No one saw it coming; the place was fully stocked, which was how Monson ended up suddenly unemployed with 10 pounds of pork shoulder.
Pork and cheap beer are two of Monson’s favorite things. When she got home, she decided to cook the former in the latter with limes, onions, lots of garlic and strong spices in plentiful quantity. The preparation involves a high-heat sear that might put fear into nonprofessional cooks’ hearts, sizzling like crazy and smelling like a limey-bright, porky, rich dream; then the meat braises for hours, the scent just getting better and better. One imagines Monson and her three housemates drinking a lot of Rainier in disbelief, then finally descending on their family-meal feast. The next day, feeling leftover, at least there were leftovers.
Monson wrote down her pork-braised-in-Rainier method in the little notebook she always carried at work, a practice she says pretty much every cook she knows follows. To keep it up during her downtime seemed important; she continued jotting down recipes as she and her housemates kept making each other food. “We were cooking a lot,” she says, “pretty much just to pass the time and kind of take our minds off of how uncertain and awful everything in the world was.”
As her Moleskine became a sort of COVID-times journal for her, Monson recalls, “It just kind of dawned on me to see if other cooks … were still cooking at home, and what kinds of things they were concocting during quarantine while we were all stuck.” She thought about the isolation of the situation, especially strange for those used to working in close quarters, in rushes and heat. It was beyond strange, she says, “to have all of your friends — who really feel like your family — lose their jobs at the same time, and feel like we’re going through this together, but we aren’t together.” She decided to reach out to some industry friends with the idea of making a zine-style pamphlet of recipes as “a way to bring the community together and make it feel as if we’re cooking together — even if we aren’t cooking together at the time.”
