Medium Rare

Our Favorite Stories About the Catharsis of Cooking in the Era of Coronavirus

Tales from the Medium universe about stocking up on the essentials while maintaining our sanity

Each week on Medium Rare, I’ll be sharing stories you might have missed that are definitely worth a second look. Got a suggestion for a piece we should feature? Pop it in the responses below!

• Convenience stores are playing a heroic role these days in holding us all together. As Hanif Abdurraqib wrote in a loving ode several years ago, the corner store is a beloved bedrock of underserved communities: “It represents a place where everyone with a need can have that need met.”
• It’s less practical these days to go on a grocery run for that one random recipe ingredient missing from your pantry. But Mark Bittman is here to rescue any meal with his master list of interchangeable ingredients.
• It is the dawn of a new era of leftovers, where we all are inclined to actually eat our days-old food rather than let it rot in the fridge. Perhaps there’s a silver lining to this crisis. Can we finally avoid the food-waste shame of what Jon Fischer calls the five stages of Tupperware grief?
• For any parents out there dealing with…