Short Breaks Are for Hot Chocolate, Long Breaks Are for Salads, Weekends Are for Baking

I received my acceptance letter for a PhD program in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Toronto in March 2020, right when universities began shifting to online learning. University of Toronto is more than 9,000 kilometers away from my hometown in Egypt, and the rapidly evolving pandemic made it difficult to envision when or how I would begin my studies. I thus made the decision to defer my program start date to January 2021. The virus grew monstrously and deferring again made no sense, so I began my PhD in January. I stayed in my home country, Egypt, while the program took place in Canada. I was six or seven hours away, depending on the season. My life as a graduate student studying from home at the other end of the world required an irregular eating schedule, an overflowing pantry, and a consistent baking and cooking routine with my mother. I snacked, gulped, and baked my way through that virtual year of studies. As I reflect on my gastronomic inventory, I see the reflection of my mother, with whom I prepared and shared food during this lonely and challenging first year of graduate school.Due to some administrative scheduling errors, I had three consecutive classes every Wednesday during my first term. These began at 4 pm Cairo time and ended at 2 am, which is 10 am and 8 pm Toronto time. A dear friend took two of these classes with me and midway through our second class every Wednesday, our faces on Zoom would look fatigued, nodding mechanically to everything said in class. One day, he messaged me: “I am wondering, what do you eat between classes? Do you even have time to eat on your endless Wednesdays?” I casually responded that I tried to use every single class break efficiently: pee, eat, repeat.Surviving eight consecutive hours of classes online—and with a six-hour time difference—required a spellbound kitchen and a restorative baking and cooking schedule. More importantly, it required a mastermind who directed the kitchen, and me to make the best use of every minute of break during or between classes. This mastermind was my mother. As I cried over not being able to travel to Toronto, she promised she would make it work and would support me in every way possible. Our shared labor in the kitchen, during class breaks and weekends, is what allowed me to survive and savor the first year of my doctoral program, one mug, snack, and meal at a time.In the beginning of the semester, we set a fixed Wednesday schedule together. During short breaks, I had snacks. During longer breaks between classes, I had meals and salads. After classes ended on Wednesday, I ran to sleep. On Thursday, I woke up, and we baked a dessert to celebrate the weekend—in Egypt, weekends are Fridays and Saturdays.Wednesdays went as follows: During a ten-minute break at around 5:30 pm, I rushed quickly to set up my Turkish coffee on the stove on very low heat as mama joined for a quick chat ’til it was time to pour the coffee, perform my sunset prayer, sip the coffee and eat a homemade date-and-chocolate bar that my mother and I prepared biweekly, and rush mid-bite back to Zoom. When the first class ended at 6:30 pm, I ran to the kitchen to put together a salad: lettuce, arugula, tomatoes, carrots, mozzarella cheese, chickpeas, and a lemon-tahini sauce. Mama would stand at the counter, handing me some lettuce or chopping some arugula as I fixed the sauce and caught up with her on classes and everything else.During a generous fifteen-minute break midway through my second class, I hurried to the kitchen again. This was my favorite break: shorter breaks were for hot chocolate, mama and I agreed. My mother’s hot chocolate is exceptionally thick and decadent, exactly what I needed to push through a continuous flood of Zooms. She brought out the milk from the fridge as I opened the pantry’s drawer to pull out the dark unsweetened cocoa powder (empty jars of which we no longer count), honey, and cornstarch. She boiled a little water to mix with the cocoa powder, while I mixed the cornstarch gently with the cold water. She believes that cocoa powder dissolves better in boiling water, whereas cornstarch dissolves better in tap water, so I followed her commands. We met at the stove, where she lovingly asked me if the class was going well. I told her I thought it was going okay. She poured the water and cocoa powder in a little saucepan that we had bought just for these midclass hot chocolates, and I added the water and cornstarch, now no longer lumpy. I also added the honey, as much as it took to sweeten Zoom bitterness, as she continued to whisk. In just a few minutes, we poured the thickly warm and heart-warming mixture into our mugs, and then I rushed off to Zoom and she returned to her bedroom.Thursdays were for baking, in celebration of the end of yet another week of endless Zoom classes. Because of our mutual love for baking and insatiable desire for desserts, our home pantry never ran out of chocolates, butters, creams, nut butters, graham crackers, chocolate wafer cookies, flours, oils, sugars, and candied fruits. Every week, my mother and I planned early on what we would bake, so we could wake up on Thursday and spend as little time as possible setting up our mise en place. Our Thursday baking adventures ranged from a homemade Reese’s bar to a giant Nutella cookie skillet, a peach “dump,” or my mother’s favorite basic coffee cake. As we whisked eggs, cream, and melted butter, my mother and I would chat about what I had read that week, what she had watched the night before on TV, or just the latest pop culture scandal that everyone was talking about. Each Thursday I looked forward to the smell of a caramelizing cake in the oven, a melting chocolate pot on the stove, or my mother’s warm hands cutting a silky smooth chocolate bar.This is how I survived my first year of graduate school amidst the uncertainty of a pandemic, in another corner of the world.Days elapsed, and I finally made it to Toronto in December 2021. Upon leaving Cairo, my mother bought me a spatula exactly like the one we used every Thursday. Once I arrived in Toronto, I bought a small, aqua-colored blender to resemble the colors of the walls of my bedroom in Cairo. It took only a few days for me to realize that it was not just the spatula and the color of my bedroom walls that I needed to recreate cozy Thursdays and survivable Zoom Wednesdays with my mother. Her warm company was missing. I sorely missed the familiarity of Thursday family baking and our weekend kitchen chats. I no longer woke up on Thursdays to smoothly assemble a mise en place.Until my mother again prepares my meals with her loving fingers, my renditions of Wednesdays and Thursdays continue to fall short of satiating my cravings. It was my mother’s company and our kitchen chats that made desserts delectable. But until we are back together, the memories and pictures of our Thursdays must suffice. As I write this in January 2022, I still log on to my Zoom classes reminiscing about our hot chocolate breaks and Thursday bakes

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