Hello friends, and welcome to my Cooking during COVID-19 WordPress blog!

My name’s Stephen Garfield; I’ve been cooking professionally for fourteen years, bouncing around the Pacific Northwest as I continue my journey of learning, both within the kitchen and without. On the brink of graduating with a focus on food studies, I’ve found myself, in my final quarter at Evergreen, simultaneously and suddenly unemployed–but also facing a massive learning opportunity.

How can I turn this challenging time into an experience I can add to my growing utility belt?

On this site I’ll be posting the various cooking projects I’m working on “Chef Teaching Assistant” for the Comparative Eurasian Foodways: Immigrant Experience program. Each week’s chosen recipes correspond to certain themes the students of the program are tackling in their ongoing Food/Eating Memoirs.

I will be putting on remote “Food Labs” wherein I make a recipe or two (or three!) each week out of Anna Francese Gass’s Heirloom Kitchen: Heritage Recipes and Family Stories from the Tables of Immigrant Women. It’s a beautiful, informative, fantastic cookbook, and I highly recommend getting a hold of it and engaging with these women’s experiences. You can find more information about the book, the process of making it, and Gass at the Heirloom Kitchen website.

Through these labs, I hope to inspire some thoughtful engagement with students’ food-making and food-consuming practices, placing them in geographical and historical contexts.