Choco Chip Cookies & Quarantine

Want to try out these chocolate chip cookies for yourself? Here’s the recipe!

One of the first ever recipes I learned to bake were these chocolate chip cookies, they were a quintessential part of my childhood and now my go to stress bake recipe. The original recipe is from a math workbook I did every summer as a child, but has slowly been modified by me over the years depending on the mood I was in. Overall, they are just a great and flexible cookie recipe.

Which leads me to todays topic: quarantine.

By now most of us have incessantly heard this in every form of media, to the point where the topic almost triggers a sigh as a response. This subject is always tricky to approach because we tend to forget the flex of difficulties that everyone was experiencing individually, beyond the whole epidemic crisis, and honestly none of us have had ample time to reflect and recover to the strain we were all put under. Personally, quarantine was life-changing, beside the obvious lack of social interaction and constant living in fear for those first few months, it had a significant impact in the course of everyone’s lives. Being the first batch of high schoolers to experience graduating during the peak of the pandemic was very confusing. Post grad most everyone I knew had the same feeling where we were missing the sense of finality and accomplishment that the grandeur of a ceremony bestows upon you. This paired with immediately jumping into the unknown environment of university completely online, felt extraordinarily alienating. We skipped the whole uni experience you see in movies, where the parents drop their kids off wave goodbye and immediately go into a bustling hall for orientation with booths on an extremally crowded campus. Instead we were greeted with technical difficulties, names on black screens and the awful social interaction of trying to speak at the right time during a zoom conversation.

As we start to trickle back into the habits that existed pre-pandemic its interesting to see how flexible we all are as individuals, and how adaptable individuals are based on the conditions we face.