April 2020

There were 2 posts published in April 2020.

A month of food

A dutch baby (kind of like a pancake) on a nice plate with a knife and fork

So except for a single slice of pizza, I haven’t eaten anything I didn’t make at home for a month. I’m a decent cook and have a decent pantry. But more to the point, I have a huge tolerance for eating the same thing over and over again. This means batch cooking, even for one, mostly works. But even my usual go-tos got kind of boring, so I’ve been branching out into occasional internet recipes. Here’s some of what I made, though you’ll notice this is as much about getting food as eating it.

  • Healthy Banana Bread – for whatever reason many of the recipes I wind up with are on these super-healthy food blogs where everything else is some kind of kale paste or date smoothie. This bread was good, and improved with some extra coconut. We’ve been able to get flour pretty easily at the local farm stand and I had some gross bananas that needed to give up their space in the freezer.
  • Vegetarian Matzo Ball Soup – the matzoh ball part of this was too foofy (made the recipe off the box) but I wound up with extra eggs (thanks to a lady from facebook who was delivering them) so figured I’d try to make the soup as well. I have saffron, this wound up good.
  • Golden Milk Chia Seed Pudding – sometimes you just want to use some foods up. I have had chia seeds sitting around since forever and I don’t even remember why I got them. This was… okay. I like turmeric as a flavor but it just didn’t turn into anything I’d eat again. Thumbs up texture though.
  • Overnight Oats – there are a million recipes for this and I was fine going off on my own, just wanted to make sure I had the right ratio. I have a large box of of internet-purchased self-stable soy milk that this was good for.
  • Dutch baby (pictured) – these are a great breakfast go-to because you can build them easily into sweet or savory. This one is a turkey sausage and parmesan baby.
  • Sweet Potato, Red Lentil, and Peanut Stew – This was the surprise favorite. A really neat combination of flavors and it’s good over rice or quinoa or basically anything.
  • Cheesey cornbread – this was just mix the box of stuff with some extra cheese. But it’s funny because I ordered the cornbread in the mail. It got delivered to Ronni by mistake. She thought it was for her (somehow) and I had to wrest it from her.
  • Never fail scalloped potatoes – I had won a mandoline at trivia and never tried it. Then I bought five pounds of potatoes from a local farmer (well I bought 25 but gave 20 to the food bank) and needed a PLAN. These were simple and tasted great and froze easily.
  • Late addition: I made this recipe three times, not sure how I forgot it: Chewy Molasses Cookies

We’ve been really lucky in Orange County, COVID hasn’t been overwhelming, and people are great at staying the fuck home. The supermarket, farm stands, farmers and people-with-chickens have created a nice food ecosystem, and we have enough people with enough to be able to help out the people who don’t have enough. Early on I bought some stuff online (soy milk, cornbread, almonds, apricots, too many fritos) and my last cheese delivery came at the beginning of March. So while I really really miss cheeseburgers with friends and porch beers with friends and thai food with friends and the Wayside with Jim, it’s not the food that I’ve been missing. And the food helps me not miss the other stuff quite as much.

two months missed

flowers bending towards a sunlit window

So I’d been kind of waiting until I had a positive “Hey I’m feeling better!” update. I had my head down, doing my thing, being basically okay but a little crabby at having felt kinda lousy since August. And two things happened.

1. COVID-19
2. The medicine my doc gave me for GERD (or something analogous) which I was sure was doing nothing, suddenly started working.

Number one sucks, incredibly, for so many. And yet number two means I’ve been without random scary mystery pains for nearly a month now and, wow, it’s really helped my outlook. I’m not any more out of work than I was before, and I’m possibly a little more employed (MetaFilter has yet to hire a new staffer so I’m filling in a few shifts a week). I’m not any more anxious than I was before, or, rather, I have an actual thing to hang my anxiety on. So since I am no stranger to this feeling, I can help other people who are having a harder time. Drop-In Time is, of course, cancelled, but I’ve been assisting people with tech stuff over email and keeping Ronni’s technology running.

Being concerned for her health has made me even more conscious of my own, so I’m minimizing trips where I’ll be in contact with others, though I do some socially-distant dog walking with a friend most days (I know this isn’t perfect, I am not perfect). Jim’s been busting his ass doing things for his department, now scattered to the wind, and my sister has been still having to go to work. She’s like my dad was, a good person in a crisis, even though it’s been hard for her.

I’ll be honest, I was hoping to be done hunkering by now, not gearing up for an extended hunker. However, I like my place, I am okay being alone, I don’t mind eating the same thing every day, I like to be able to be doing the right thing just by mostly staying out of things.