Note: Round Three of Cooking Through It will begin April 27th. See the full meal plan below.

There are no upsides to a global pandemic, but there are side effects. Right now, our hands are cleaner than ever. We’re getting lots (lots) of quality time with our partners, roommates, and kids. And we’re cooking more. And by more, I mean constantly.

As somebody who believes that cooking is triply-beneficial—good for the body, mind, and wallet—I think all of this cooking is a good thing. But even I’ve found myself staring into my refrigerator, void of inspiration and unexcited about another bowl of beans. And I know I’m not the only one. Now more than ever, I know that when I’m in the kitchen, entire cities—entire countries—are also in the kitchen. We’re isolated, but we’re all cooking, and experiencing all the things that come with it.

“Cooking together” is a comforting term no matter what the context, but for me it has the most positive connotations when it comes to cooking with a large community. Five years ago I started COOK90, an annual event that encourages the world to cook every meal together for the entire month of January. When I created COOK90 (and wrote the book) out of my own desire to recalibrate my cooking by standing at the stove for 31 days straight, I obviously had no sense of prescience. But now that we’re here, it’s déjà vu. All of the tricks and tools I lean on to get through COOK90 are coming into play now. And that includes leaning on a virtual community of cooks (aka scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through Instagram to see what everybody else is eating for dinner). (And lunch.) (And breakfast.)

In fact, it’s the COOK90 community that inspired Epi’s new initiative, Cooking Through It. It’s a 10-day program that provides inspiration and recipes, and gives us a way to cook together, just like COOK90 does.

It's a meal plan, but different. We know that a plan that calls for a strict and specific grocery list doesn’t make sense for right now, when we’re all trying to grocery shop as infrequently as possible (and don’t know what we’ll find when we actually get to the store).

Cooking Through It is less of a plan and more of a framework for what and how to cook.

So Cooking Through It is less of a plan and more of a framework for what and how to cook. It’s a guide to cooking with what you have, and inspiration for people who don’t know what to cook next. And it’s a community to cook with. We call it Cooking Through It because that’s what all of us are doing. It’s all we can do, really.

Here’s how it works: Below you’ll find a 10-day plan of very flexible recipes. (Experts now recommend that we shop for at least 10 days at a time, to decrease the frequency of our trips to the grocery store, which in effect should decrease grocery store crowding.) For each day there’s an easy “master recipe” to follow, followed by all the ways you can change that recipe to suit what’s in your pantry and fridge.

Of course, a very flexible meal plan calls for a very flexible grocery list, and we have a list for Round 1 here, a list for Round 2 here, and a list for Round 3 here.

This collection of cooking ideas is here for you to use however you like. You can use it as a meal plan and put it on repeat, cooking these ten dishes over again and again for however long this new reality lasts. Or you can cherry-pick whatever you want out of it. But to encourage a little community, the Epicurious editors and I started cooking from this plan on Wednesday, April 1st; we'll start round three of Cooking Through It (see the plan below) on Monday, April 27th. We’ll be showing our cooking on Instagram, at @epicurious and also our individual feeds: @davidtamarkin, @acstockwell, @pithzester, @emnanjohnson, @spena, @tiffyhop, @lejosef, @kendrakendrakendra, @travis.rainey, etc. We’re all sequestered in our individual homes, some of us with our partners, some of us with our cats, some of us with our friends, some of us on our own. But for ten days, at least, we’ll be cooking through this weird, anxious, difficult time. Together.