While the world is gripping on the pandemic fear, a large population of people are adapting to an indoor world at this time. This leads to a vital question, what are Instagrammers upto?
The ones who could never stop posting personal details of their whereabouts as and when it occurred. The ones whose task was to glamorize and publicize their pseudo perfect lives and desire constant approval and appreciation. Well, what are you guys doing now?
I believe that almost all of them have turned into home-cooks!
So this is what has happened. With a complete lockdown in place, no one is able to venture out or rather escape into a setting that either has a picturesque background or excellent lighting. Everything indoors is apparently either boring or common. It’s not worth clicking and sharing. I mean, no matter how many filters you apply, your room that you had always considered to be shoddy is not going to glamorize. So what is that one place in your house where you can try to create something (something edible to be precise). That’s right, your kitchen! So why not head there and make something Instagrammable (is that even a word?).
I am not talking about chefs or proficient home cooks who are wizards and witches of their kitchen space. Here, the focus is on the ones who have adopted this new hobby because they are unable to find anything Insta-worthy (I am sure, that’s a word). They search for recipes that are usually colourful and drool-worthy, unknowingly complemented with a lot of calories which sadly you should avoid during a lockdown (the irony: now that you are at home, your food cravings are at an all time high). The search goes on until you realize that you don’t have all the necessary ingredients and guess what, there’s an additional effort to procure food ingredients at this time. Hence, the focus shifts to recipes that are doable with the available raw materials. So what do they make? Coffee!
Now hey, it’s not just coffee, it’s Dalgona coffee! A type of coffee that people used to find only in coffee shops and not many cared about until they found out that it could be made at home. That’s just a small population, there are millions who didn’t even know what it was! I saw a picture of it for the first time and I swear I thought it’s ice cream dunked in a glass of milk. It was in fact coffee powder whipped intensely with sugar and milk to form a light floating mass on top of a glass of milk. “Whipping sounds fun,” everyone wondered and they imagined it to serve as some interesting content on social media. In the first week of April, dalgona coffee makers took the internet by storm and just like that everyone was drinking coffee. What was I doing? I was looking at those pictures and going, “Wow that’s a pretty glass.”
There are some who re-invent classic dishes to make it look fancy and (un)appealing. Jazz it up by throwing some irrelevant hashtags and voila! They have an Instagram post. Then there are some who think that customizing a dish to fit the fitness factor would sound cool, because hey, it’s ‘healthy’ and it’s ‘Instagram’! Ding ding ding. It’s a winning combination. Push in some greens to anything and everything. Even if it’s fatty and unhealthy, if it’s got a leaf, you nailed it. You have a ‘healthy’ dish to keep you through this lockdown (more like a dish to keep you busy in the toilet during this lockdown).
While it’s noteworthy that they are picking up new skills during this time (wishing it lasts post lockdown too), I hope this new breed of home cooks can cook some not so fancy food too, say some dal and chawal. Alright, you can put a leaf on it too!
