Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic

With restaurants, hotels and schools closed, many of the nation’s largest farms are destroying millions of pounds of fresh goods that they can no longer sell.
By DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY and MICHAEL CORKERY

The Farm-to-Table Connection Comes Undone

A direct pipeline to chefs that took decades to build has been cut off by the coronavirus, leaving small farmers and ranchers with food they can’t sell.
By KIM SEVERSON

How Native Americans Are Fighting a Food Crisis

As the coronavirus limits access to food, many are relying on customs, like seed saving and canning, that helped their forebears survive hard times.
By PRIYA KRISHNA

Food Workers Say C.D.C. Guidelines Put Them at Greater Risk for Infection

The agency now says “critical infrastructure workers” who may have been exposed to the coronavirus can stay on the job under certain conditions, instead of isolating.
By DAVID WALDSTEIN

A Plan to Reconnect a Town in Quarantine: 10,000 Onions

The pandemic separated my family from our neighbors. Could a network of backyard gardens bring us together?
By C. J. CHIVERS

U.S. Food Supply Chain Is Strained as Virus Spreads

Disruptions are expected in the production and distribution of products like pork, and localized shortages could occur.
By MICHAEL CORKERY and DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY

At the Sourdough Library, With Some Very Old Mothers

Some starters never die, they just get filed away here.

Mr. De Smedt is the curator of the world’s only sourdough library. Located in the flyspeck village of St. Vith, 87 miles southeast of Brussels, the library houses the world’s most extensive collection of sourdough starters, those bubbling beige globs of bacteria and wild yeast — known as “mothers” — that bakers mix into dough to produce flavorful loaves with interestingly shaped holes.

By FRANZ LIDZ

SCRATCH

The Virus Closed Her Bakery. Now She’s Working Nonstop.

By JULIA ROTHMAN and SHAINA FEINBERG

Missing an Ingredient? Here Are Substitutions You Can Use Instead

If you have a well-stocked pantry, you can make almost any dish work.
By Alexa Weibel

Our Best Recipes and Tips for Quarantine Cooking

Here is a regularly updated list of our latest articles — and some older resources — to help you find what you need.
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

FROM THE PANTRY

A Salad for When You’re Out of Lettuce

This starchy grain bowl makes use of those sturdy vegetables in your fridge.
By MELISSA CLARK

How to Cook Now

Feed your family, or just yourself. We have recipes for whatever situation you’re in.
By SAM SIFTON

he Food Expiration Dates You Should Actually Follow

The first thing you should know? The dates, as we know them, have nothing to do with safety. J. Kenji López-Alt explains.
By J. Kenji López-Alt

11 of Our Best Weekend Reads

The enduring appeal of Weird Al. Processed foods are making a pandemic comeback. In praise of quarantine clapping. Dua Lipa. Sandra Lee. And more.
By KALY SOTO

FRONT BURNER

Maida Heatter’s Baking Recipes Remixed

These books, focused on cookies and chocolate, would make a good Mother’s Day gift.
By FLORENCE FABRICANT

How to Make the Most of Those Cans of Sardines

Alison Roman’s advice to eat these especially delicious little fishes: Add lots of herbs and something oniony, a little fat and tons of lemon.
By Alison Roman

Enrique Olvera’s Satisfying, Adaptable Vegetable Soup

The chef shares his recipe for a hearty broth-based dish, inspired by the version his grandmother used to make.
By MERRELL HAMBLETON

Enrique Olvera and His Culinary Heirs Have Changed How and What We Eat

The influential chef has reconceived Mexican cuisine, both in his own country and beyond.

Quick, Easy and So Satisfying

A creamy lemon pasta, garlic soup with spinach, a turmeric chicken ready for substitutions: Make meals that comfort.
By JULIA MOSKIN

FROM THE PANTRY

Coconut Macaroons, Two Easy Ways

Make a candylike version with all coconut and an egg white, or use a whole egg and almond flour for a more cakelike result.
By MELISSA CLARK

A GOOD APPETITE

You Don’t Need All-Purpose Flour for This Poundcake

Rice flour and coconut oil make this treat silky and compellingly gentle.
By Melissa Clark

When Life Gives You Lemons, Make 19th-Century Lemon Cake

To stay connected with visitors under stay-at-home orders, the New-York Historical Society is curating a digital collection of archival recipes.

The New-York Historical Society will post a recipe a week from a collection of 19th-century manuscript cookbooks. The first recipe is for lemon cake.
By Amelia Nierenberg

For American Wine Producers, Fear, Uncertainty and Hope

The pandemic has caused drastic cuts in business, forced painful decisions and inspired creative solutions. Still, another vintage is on its way.
By Eric Asimov

Irena Chalmers, 84, Is Dead; Writer Anticipated a Food Revolution

She wrote her first cookbook, “Fondue Cook-In,” to help sell pots. She went on to discover chefs who would become well-known cooking authorities.

She sometimes took a contrarian view of trends. “I think insisting on having a free-range chicken,” she often said, “is like having a free-range boyfriend. You never know where he’s been.”

By KIM SEVERSON

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month’s desires;
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
William Empson (1906-1984)

Marriage Story
NYT Critic’s Pick R Comedy, Drama, Romance Directed by Noah Baumbach
Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson self-consciously uncouple in Noah Baumbach’s tender, stinging tale of divorce.
By A.O. SCOTT

My last day at work was Tuesday, March 15, 2016. I’m still in a bit of a holding pattern, spending a great deal of time getting quite little done. I still have not unpacked the things I brought home from my desk at work, although the lemon cookies seem to be vanishing, and I don’t think it’s mice getting into them.

1.0. Medical Insurance. The great wasteland of America where Republicans think you can so easily shop for on your own so they have created a maze that would do a Minotaur proud. You must choose A, you may choose, B, or C, and possible D, but if you choose B, you’re locked out of C, and if you didn’t do it yesterday, we’re gonna fine you.

2.0. 401k. Move the old company 401k account over to the regular accounts. Even my index fund strategy has not been doing great against the vicissitudes o’ the market this year.

3.0. House projects. I have two started and one more I hope to add.

3.1. Gas fireplace liner goes in on Friday, or so it’s scheduled. Someone hates the wood fire, and, in truth, the damned wood fireplace smokes like the chimney was bricked up or partially obstructed. While before the winter storm warning for the southern part of the state would have been nice, I won’t cry too hard if it does not get much use this spring.

3.2. I’m having the stair handrail extended down to the first step. It’s not going to match the upper run of balusters or the handrail for that matter, and the staining is going to be up to me, but it should be close enough. It’s switching to over-the-post at the bottom and the newel post will be considerable different than the other two. (They have told me they can’t use the elaborate volute I’d dreamed of with it’s circled wagon of balusters at the bottom that I’ve been jonesing for.) The 1907 red oak balusters taper from the middle to each end, and I could not find them, although they could be custom made — in three sizes of course and four sets of three sizes for the short run of the steps. So, the balusters I asked them to get only taper to the top.

3.3. When the weather improves a wee bit, pick up something to run a new handrail up to the upstairs upstairs. There’s a piece hiding in the upstairs upstairs that ustta be there, just a plain pine handrail, but I didn’t like it, and if I remember right, it was poorly attached to the wall. Anyway, it has been up there since shortly after I moved into the house. I’m so used to using the narrow stairs, that they don’t bother me, although other people seem not to have the same feeling about them. I’d looked at some fancy handrail brackets, but would like to do something just with wood. Pigs ear would be nice, but seems unheard of this side o’ the pond. I think I’d like to do something more rectangular and boardy, if that makes any sense.

3.4. I have long dreamed about replacing the upstairs upstairs door with a set of double doors. When the current door is open, it partially obstructs my office door. I’ve gone out several times on the internet to price two double doors, and generally come close to fainting when I looked at the estimated price. Of course, I’ve always had five panel doors quoted, which would match the plethora of other doors on the second floor. Before I left for the Caribbean, I checked at Menards, who used not to be able to get doors as small as I needed, and asked them to price a single panel doors with the goal of using wood to divide the single panel up into five panels on each side of each door, which is something that I think I can do. (Ain’t no way I’m going to make two five panel doors.) Menards called me when I was on the island, and, while I swear I wrote down the quote, I can’t find it, and neither can they, but it was much more, err, reasonable than the other quotes. (Just lacking four panels on each door.) So, that may be worth attempting. I’ve a friend who’s a handyman and can help cutting the hinges and the mortise work.

I bought a set of small LED lights from Amazon, the tiny kind on clear-coated copper wire. They come in a small round container rolled around a large toilet paper roll, which holds the transformer and cord. I took them out of the box once or twice, looked at them, and then set them in one of the geological epochs on my desk. Come Halloween, I rescued them and went downstairs with some vague thought about wrapping them around the stair spindles, whereupon somebody was quite dismissive, until thoughts of a season which shall not be named until after Thanksgiving occurred. Then somebody took over, unrolled the lights and headed up to the top of the stair with the end of the string of lights. Now the only outlet anywhere along the main stairway is at the bottom, so I didn’t think starting at the top with the other end of the lights was really a great idea.

After a rather overlong discussion of what might work, and we started wrapping the spindles (from the bottom) which ended up with us re-wrapping the wire on an actual toilet paper roll to facilitate passing it through the spindles. After a few spindles were wrapped, it became obvious that there was more spindles than wire to wrap them in, and the process was reversed and a weaving process was started that brought the lights up and down the stair way about four times. A couple of rubber bands have been added to provide stability to the end-points (the spindles are smooth symmetrically turned wood, fatter in the middle than the ends).

I added a timer to the transformer for the coming months of darkness.

I see that my home town credit union is using the Euro-style chip cards to replace my Visa card. My last card had a bill from an unfamiliar merchant in China. Now it is entirely possible that I ordered something on eBay or Amazon from a merchant in China, but probably not at a woman’s specialty store in Shanghai, especially since the bill was not enuff for a boi-toy.

I can recognize my great grandmother, Julia Sanderson, and one or two of my great uncles (I think). Granted, it’s a bad print on a piece of paper. I think I met four of my great grandparents, Julia, my father’s father’s mother, Grandpa Carlson, my father’s mother’s father, and both of my mother’s mother’s parents, although that may be a miss-remembering. I’m digging through a box of photos from my aunt using my new scanner; the old one, of course, died when I tried to start scanning the pictures in the box.

WordPress updated itself and took out the theme I was using. Or, the theme I was using took out itself.

I gotta new printer yesterday, and it’s bigger than a breadbox. Quite a bit bigger. I also got a bunch of the biggest paper it handles, which I think is 13 X 19″ I figure I can print one or two blizzard scenes before I run out of ink.

We had some weather come through Our Fair Cities last night around midnight. It’s been raining a bit lately, and the first thing Minnesota trees like to do after it’s raining and a good flat wind comes through is fall over. And so they did, although some claim it was the lightening that done it. Since I had offered to help cut up trees that one day at the Hennepin County History Museum, I knew that my chainsaw had oil, my reciprocating saw had a wicked pruning blade in it, and I’d found an extra 50′ of extension cord hiding in the basement. In short, I was ready to cut trees — well, except, of course, that I could really stand to put a new chain in the chainsaw, but we don’t hafta go there. I made a couple o’ offers, only one of which was excepted, for which I am quite grateful, and off I went to adjust the chain on the chainsaw, and load it all up in the trunk of my Baby^tm car so I could drive the two blocks to help chop up a tree that had not only knocked a fence down, but that had the temerity to fall on a garage!

When I got there with my chainsaw and my reciprocating saw, and my two extension cords, my friends’ neighbor was attempting to cut up a mulberry tree that had collapsed on top of the garage roof and just about filled up their yard. He’d ran out and bought a Ryobi saw, in that nice fluorescent green that they use, and he was manfully chopping off branches with a little bitty multi-purpose blade designed for cutting through anything, like iron pipe or wood with lottsa nails in it, but that would take a month o’ Sundays to chop off much of that mulberry tree with a four inch blade.

My reciprocating saw, which I bought from Sears on a Slickdeals price alert, also came with a small multi-purpose blade, but when I knew I was gonna cut me some trees down at the museum, I ran to Menards to find something with teeth — and long. Ain’t nothing makes a man feel gooder than a wicked toothed saw blade that’s long too. Well, OK, it also cuts through green wood real slick, although the first nail you hit would probably strip half a dozen o’ those wicked teeth off the blade, but until you hit that first nail, it’s like going into town on Saturday night. So anyway, we cut wood. In the full sun. On a hot day. In a back yard where this damned mulberry tree just fell over on account of it being wet, rotten, and hit by a flat wall o’ wind. (I think I used my chainsaw only once, to cut through a really thick branch.)

After about an hour of cutting wood in the hot sun in the back yard, I think I started to notice it was warm. One of the first clues was the sweat that started dripping into my eyes. Working as I do under an air vent in an air-conditioned office (for some values of air-conditioned — ittsa green building, which is really funny when you think about it ’cause ain’t none of it painted green nor green carpeted either — and for goodness sake, let’s not start talking about the toilets.) So anyway, we drank some refreshments, and I kinda hid under the umbrella for the last half hour of the tree cutting, but by then it was pretty much chopped up and off the roof, except for the big trunk which is laying across the yard. When I left, I left the long blade with the wicked teeth.

Who knew you could wear a hole in a crown? One of mine fell off when I was flossing over the weekend, and I carefully put it in a baggie. I called the dentist on Monday morning, and picked up an appointment later that day. I left work early and arrived at the dentist office a full half-hour or more before my appointment time. It was a cursed time to drive. If I waited much longer at work, the drive time would expand; but if I left early the drive time would contract. So, I left early and sat in the dentist office reading a Smithsonian and a Wesley Chu on my phone. When I got in to see the dentist, she tried the crown to see if it still fit — yes; then they mentioned that it was the tooth without the root canal land they’d want to start numbing it. Wot? No dab o’ glue and I’m off? A bit later after a cotton swab and a shot or two, after the crown was glued again, she drilled and filled the hole in the crown. All in all, it was not worse than being attacked by killer clowns, but less fun than just having the crown glued back on.