Antoni Porowski is Helping Us Get Through This Time With a Quarantine Cooking Series

We’re only a few days into self-isolation but figuring out what to eat is already becoming a challenge, due to restaurants closing down (as they should!), grocery aisles being cleaned out, and just a few shelf-stable ingredients in our pantries to play around with. Well, Antoni Porowski is coming to the rescue from his own self-isolation hub in Texas, where he and the rest of the Fab Five were supposed to be filming the new season of Queer Eye but seem to all be practising social distancing at the moment.

On Monday, Porowski uploaded a cooking lesson on Instagram which became the first episode of his Quar Eye: Cooking Lessons in Quarantine series. For Day 1, he wanted to assemble a huevos rancheros (“because when you’re in Texas that’s what you do”) but discovered that most grocery shelves were empty. “I know that’s something that everybody’s experiencing,” he said, and pivoted to a slightly different meal instead: a “Keep Calm-lette” aka an omelette made in isolation, served with an avocado/black bean salsa put together from “whatever was left at the grocery store.”

On day 2 of his quarantine he delivered a new episode, cooking a dinner of zoodles with meat sauce. He initially wanted to make a tuna salad but as there was no canned tuna or romaine at the grocery store, he had to assemble a meal with whatever ingredients he was able to scrounge from the store (a skill we’ll all have to develop in the coming weeks). “Zoodles are a ridiculous word but a delicious thing to eat. A simple af meat sauce w loads of spinach make it a full meal,” he wrote on Instagram.

While we all adjust to our new circumstances, at least we’re getting cooking guidance and inspiration from our favourite food guy, who as usual, serves up a side of wise words as well: “We’re stuck at home, but we might as well still be able to prepare good food, that’s good for us, and that makes us feel good. We need things that make us feel good, even in pandemics like these.”