RAWALPINDI: Pakistanis love to eat out, but as restaurants across the country have had to close in the face of the ongoing virus crisis, they are now taking accelerated cooking courses to have their three square meals a day.

While in other countries on coronavirus lockdown, food delivery companies have significantly scaled up services, health measures introduced in Pakistan put many of them on halt.

As in Punjab and Sindh provinces, popular apps such as Eat Mubarak and Food Panda have been temporarily suspended, food delivery has been replaced by recipe sharing through no-touch social media channels.

Irum Zahra of the Human Development Foundation has been sharing her remixes on pancakes from traditional to chocolate and fruit infused, “I barely had time to make tea at home before because of my work and now I am cooking three meals a day, so every morning I do pancake variations with what I have in the kitchen.”

“I have restarted cooking lessons with my mom,” Neha Ravail Khaliq, who works for the World Bank, told Arab News over Instagram. Not only has it been good for bonding, she said, but for the first time in a long time she has been able to prioritize health in her meals.

“In a way it’s good, it’s forced me to have things I haven’t in ages like green smoothies and turmeric tea. But also to indulge, we made tagliatelle with Bolognese the other day!”

To some cooking comes as therapy. Current fear and anxiety about the pandemic can be overwhelming. Making meals helps reduce stress.

For Hira Azmat of the British Council in Lahore, cooking reinforces her coping mechanism through the stress of the pandemic altering daily life and making the future uncertain. She told Arab News that initially all the cooking she has done was a “creative outlet, something useful to do for the family.” But now it is something else.

Singer and songwriter Saba Jaswal has also turned cooking. She found baking greatly eases some of the tension. “There’s all this time to self-discover now and I’ve always thought baking and cooking were calming but never had the time, it’s turning out pretty good for the mind and those taste buds if not the waist!”