Introduction

When we celebrated the new year of 2020, we did not expect a worldwide pandemic to arrive at our front door in just two short months. Here in the Quad Cities, we adjusted our everyday errands and daily activities to protect ourselves from the COVID-19 virus. These adaptations to our daily lives included quarantining our families, completing schooling online, limiting grocery trips and non-essential errands, and choosing either delivery or curbside meal pick-up.

One of the larger impacts was the closing of restaurant dine-in seating. By necessity, many Quad Citians sharpened or rediscovered their kitchen skills. People found new hobbies, such as learning how to bake bread, or finding recipes to use up pantry staples. Suddenly, being stuck at home wasn’t such a bad thing. Our community cooked and baked their days away, producing wonderful dishes to be passed down for generations to come. The Quad City area is home to a variety of home chefs and bakers, and the COVID-19 quarantine gave families the time to spend together, learn new recipes, and hone their cooking skills.

This historically-significant pandemic has our community working together to keep one another safe. Quad City public libraries responded by bringing programming and digital services into the homes of their patrons to supply the entertainment and education they needed for their families. To mark this historic time, the Rock Island Public Library teamed up with other public libraries to create this Quad City Quarantine Cookbook. The contents are filled with submitted recipes from library patrons all over the Quad Cities, showing us the recipes families made and loved during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We’d like to thank you all for participating in this project. We hope it brings your families something delicious to look forward to.

Rock Island Public Library