OK, here we go.

Maybe I’m jealous of my husband’s ability to write about his crazy family, or maybe I just crave more things on my plate than I actually need (insert “buffet of life” reference here). But I randomly joined this Athens Quarantine Canteen facebook group and it’s got me thinking, maybe a project could come out of this.

This group, it turns out, is a constant stream of yum created by random people around Athens. I mean, I always enjoyed cooking—it felt good to make something that required multiple steps and was sourced with certain choice ingredients—but I never thought about how many people felt the same way. Well, wait, what am I saying—there’s a reason why magazines like Bon Apetit and websites like Epicurious sustain themselves!

So, I guess what I’m saying is, I never took my cooking too seriously. I always considered myself a decent cook, ready to try new things and pulling them off pretty well. But to see a constant stream of photos from other people, right here in the city where I live, cooking such amazing things too? It made me feel like this cooking thing was really a thing—people were really getting into it! And we’re all doing it together!

Which brings me back to the project. What if someone collected recipes for all these beautiful dishes, compiled them into a little cookbook, like those fun spiral-bound church cookbooks from the 1980s, and sold it as a fundraiser? And maybe it benefitted people in the service industry who have lost income during this time?

I mean, it’s worth a shot, right? So, here goes. I’ll do my best to collect recipes as I go along; if I can’t find a suitable recipe, I’ll improvise. I can’t guarantee everything will be tested, but hopefully the recipes make sense and they represent the variety and creativity that’s expressed among the home cooks in the Facebook group. Let’s see what we come up with!