Saturday, August 1st was a day of celebration. We welcomed friends of the blog and friends the person behind it, Matt and Jill Cox, for a day of board games and feasting to celebrate Matt’s birthday during their visit to Green Bay. It’s only a slight exaggeration when I say that I slaved over a bubbling vat of oil to create for them the closest thing I could to the perfect Taco Bell potato. I went so far as to test four different varieties, both battered and fried straight. Even in commercial supermarkets, a wide variety of potatoes are open to consumers. I had the great pleasure of acquiring German Butterball potatoes from the Farmers market last week, and the grocery store had the usual suspects: Yukon Golds, Russets, and our wildcard, fingerlings. Of them all, german butterball potatoes are the hardest to find in a grocery store, so I knew from the moment I bought them that I would only call for them if they blew the other varieties out of the water.
0 Comments
We’ve all had a lot of time to get to know ourselves a little better since March of this year. I’ve been alone more than I’ve been with anybody since I was sent to work from home and then later furloughed. My husband still has to go to his office to work (he is a radio news reporter), and so it’s just me, my cat, and my kitchen during the day. I’ve had a lot of time to think, to cook, and to write. It’s taken me almost three months, but I can safely say that during that time, I’ve come to know who I am a little better.
At first, it was just a matter of surviving. The world felt so dark and so terrible that bettering myself in any way, shape, or form felt like a lost cause. I wanted to drink a little more than I should, lazy around a little more than I should, and hope that the storm passed in the meantime. It obviously did not do that. Wisconsin is reopening, sure, but the disease is still a problem out there. Now, we’re not just at war with a disease. There is a war going on for the soul of our country. The one thing I had to fall back on to give myself joy and comfort was food. Baking, cooking, fermenting. It didn’t matter what I was doing. If I could create anything that would give myself and my husband (and occasionally, his coworkers) a little bit of joy, then I was doing something important. It was all I could do when I felt powerless against the goings on in the world outside. The journey that I found myself on with sourdough and fermentation showed me something important. This right here is what I was meant to do. I love food. I love writing about food. I love cooking and sharing what I’ve done with the people that I care about. I stumbled into a profession after college that sits me in a chair for eight hours a day and pays the bills, but it doesn’t give me any sense of accomplishment. It never has, and it probably never will. This right here, though. This does it. My heart soars when an article does even remotely well. Every kind comment makes me smile. When my husband eats five sourdough english muffins in a day because they’re just so damn good, I know that I’m doing something right. This is what I should have been doing all along, and only this moment of quarantine has taught me to embrace it. It may never give me enough to quit a day job, but this moment in time showed me that cooking and writing about food is what I should have been doing with more frequency all along. I’ve also discovered that I’m lactose intolerant, which brings a lot of things about my health in the last few years into question. I’ve suffered from IBS and acid reflux for almost four years now, and most of the time earned a shrug from my doctors. I’ve had so much time in quarantine to sit with my symptoms and begin editing out food that I’ve found milk products are causing me more distress when I include them in my diet. How long has this been a problem? Who knows, but I found it. I wouldn’t be shocked if I was lactose intolerant the whole time, but with the pace of my life outside of quarantine, I wasn’t able to pin it down. I’ve started physical therapy with an actually competent therapist for pain that I've had for years. I feel heard where my therapist in Delaware just put me through the motions. We do something different to address my pain every day. I’ve felt better in the last three weeks than I did the entire time I lived on the East Coast. The Midwest is where I belong, and the people here are taking care of me where I need it. My doctors and bosses hear me. The writer of this blog was always this person. A lactose intolerant, painful mess of a person that liked to cook more than anything else. That person was just buried under the world we all lived in before now. She had to have a real job, making real money, and her time had to go elsewhere. Not anymore. It won’t last forever. But, god…. I’m so thankful for it. This experience has been a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant for all of us that have had to endure it, regardless of our circumstances. I am blessed with a partner that’s working, who hasn’t asked me to put myself on the line to continue bringing money in until my real job calls me back. We don’t all have that luxury, but I’ve been able to use mine to get to know myself better. I’ve found the things that make me happy. While the financial situation isn’t the greatest, I’ve lived through much worse. Some people have been able to go back to work, but many of us are still in limbo, waiting. I am hopeful that I will be able to return to work soon. If the worst comes to pass and I am laid off rather than furloughed, so be it. It might not actually be the worst thing in the world to start fresh again in this city that I’ve grown to love. I will survive. I always have. I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I was when Farmer’s Market season came back around. I’ve been waiting for it as the weather got nicer out of my office window. I’ve been waiting for it since I moved to Green Bay. I had the expectation that the Farmer’s Markets would be miles above any that I went to in the smaller towns that I’ve lived in up until this point, and I was right to hold those expectations. The Saturday Morning Market that’s held on Washington street downtown is apparently smaller than the Wednesday market, but we’ll get to that one soon.
What matters is that this Saturday Market was the perfect way for me to get my feet wet in the local scene of growers, cheese producers, and meat purveyors. With around ninety vendors in attendance, I can say with relative certainty that I probably won’t have to use a big box grocery store for my shopping unless I need canned goods, sodas, or the like to renew our stockpile. I can support the local community for all of my regular cooking needs. I meant when I said that i would give as much of my effort as possible over the next month to highlighting BIPOC (black indigenous persons of color, a term I only recently learned as I started research in this space) food creators over the entirety of June as my show of solidarity with what’s going on in America right now, and we begin that process by highlighting a James Beard Award nominated writer and cookbook author, Nicole A. Taylor. Nicole is our first creator to be highlighted because up until the moment of this pandemic, she occupied an otherwise very white space at the publication Thrillist. Here, she wrote articles that made her a James Beard Award Nominated writer and navigated the space by bringing other black writers into the spotlight for regular publication. She fought the good fight before I realized there was a fight to be made in this space. Nicole is no longer an employee of Thrillist, having been laid off in April like many Americans, but that hasn’t stopped her from using her platform for good. Her twitter feed, @foodculturist, is a buzzing place filled with writing about the current moment in the world. At the moment, much of it is from other writers, but that doesn’t matter. She’s a known voice helping to amplify other voices, and through that remains a catalyst for change in a turbulent era in American History. Although she is no longer a member of Thrillist, her personal work before that spans many years and media outlets. She is most well known for a podcast called Hot Grease, which can be found archived on soundcloud. It does not appear that this podcast has seen recent updates, but the content remains relevant if you are, like me, beginning to research African-American cooking in earnest. She is also the author of the Up South Cookbook: Chasing Dixie in a Brooklyn Kitchen, which is deeply on sale on Amazon at the moment. If you are able, you can also look for this book at bookstores owned by black businessmen within your own community. This cookbook is on its way to me as I write this short article. I could hardly mourn the passing of ten dollars to support a black creator within what I consider to be my own space, food writing, even when my own circumstances are not so great. Many of us are hurting financially from job loss, unemployment problems, and the many other challenges of the pandemic. If you cannot part with the dollars to check out her cookbook, much of her writing is available for viewing for free online, and her twitter account is home to many of those links. With this in mind, please know that I am learning. I’ve spent most of my life pretending I could be apolitical without causing harm, but that’s clearly not the case. I will speak through my learning and direct attention to the people that know much better than me about the things that I care about, and for me, that means highlighting what’s being done in food media by people of color in our country when the world is falling apart. Originally Posted January 8, 2020 in the Archive Day 0: December 31, 2019
Made a big frittata in the morning to serve as breakfast for at least one more day. COOK90 rules say that leftovers count for a max of two meals after the fact. Cheating a bit, I know, but breakfast is my least favorite meal of the day. I gotta get out ahead of it. Did my grocery run. Focused on the ‘sustainability’ aspect of this year’s COOK90 challenge and only bought two meat products. Whole chicken from a previous shopping trip will supplement protein this week. In the middle of festivities preparations with my husband, I roasted off a whole chicken to have access to cooked chicken throughout the first week of COOK90. I drank too much and ate too much. I was greatly looking forward to a new start when my head hit the pillow at 12:01 AM, Jan 1, 2020. Day 1: Jan 1, 2020 Coffee first and always. During my last week as an unemployed woman, I have had my coffee around 6:00 am and haven’t ate breakfast until around 8. Won’t be able to do that next week, so I’m going to move my breakfast time earlier and earlier into the day. Day 1, though? Let’s just go for like, 7:45. Mornings are for coffee and contemplation. Coffee, contemplation, and writing. Breakfast: that frittata I made yesterday. It counts. Ask Epicurious. 11 am: small bowl of rice with butter and salt. Technically cooking. My stomach was in revolt after going too hard New Year's Eve. Water, rice, butter, and salt. That's cooking, kids. 5 pm: Used some more rice and a little of the leftover chicken for dinner as my stomach is still not happy with me. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day for cooking. Day 2: Jan 2, 2020 Coffee first. Coffee always. Slept like shit, so I’m awake late with very little idea what I want to do with my breakfast. There are some frittata slices left, but I’d like to do something else. Thinking of a breakfast scramble with some of the produce I bought. 9 am: Breakfast scramble with red peppers, asparagus, and green onion. Sprinkle of shredded monterey jack cheese over the top. Quick, simple, and nutritious. Could have probably cooked the asparagus longer. I also think I cracked in too much black pepper when I was cooking the produce down a little. Breakfast is my least favorite meal, so I think I’ll struggle here across the board. 11:30 am: lunch was a nacho platter with hot sauce, green onions, and sour cream. Got out of the DMV and wanted a no fuss lunch. Also, a drink. Two hours to get all my Wisconsin stuff done. Yikes. 7 pm: Dinner, a wisconsin old fashioned to go with campanelle pasta with broccoli, leftover chicken, and white sauce. Super cozy. I think I will have to adjust the ratios on the sauce at another date. Day 3: Jan 3, 2020 Woke up at 4 am because my cat was sad and lonely outside the door. Learned yesterday that my shift at my new job starts at 7 am, so I gotta get used to waking up early anyway if I’m going to shower, eat, get coffee, etc before I go to work. Realized I left the milk out overnight after making a white sauce for dinner. So much for reducing food waste! Breakfast was simple this morning, just a bagel with cream cheese spread. It’s on par for the laziest ‘cooking’ I’ve done for COOK90 so far, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I. Hate. Breakfast. 11:00 am: Lunch was a baked potato with sour cream, butter, salt, and spring onion. Didn’t want to do anything too crazy. 1st Cheat meal was tonight when my husband and I went to Al’s Hamburgers in downtown Green Bay. More on that in another article. Day 4: Jan 4, 2020 Woke up at 5 am not feeling tremendously great. Skipped my coffee since my husband and I had plans to go out in the afternoon. Don’t want to add any more stressors to my stomach. By 7:30 I was hungry enough to ignore my previous notions of skipping stressors and whipped up the tiniest breakfast nacho plate with a fried egg over top the cheese and chips. Keeping this log all week has shown me that despite keeping my COOK90 methods going, I am eating poorly. Lunch will be aimed toward something better. I have the ingredients for a good salad in the fridge, and I feel like an idiot for not utilizing them sooner. 3:00 pm: Made Rob and I an orzo pasta with parmesan and basil. Had just one tiny bowl since we ate late. Spent the early afternoon playing warhammer 40k with new friends. Dinner: 5 pm. Started the Roast Chicken Legs with potatoes from Allison Roman's Dining In. Won't actually eat til about 7. Roasted some broccoli on the side. Yum! Saved the elements that we didn’t eat which included at least one chicken leg, some broccoli, and some of the potatoes. I’m thinking we’ll wipe it out for breakfast. Day 5: Jan 5, 2020 Woke up later than I’d like at 6 am. Got to set my alarm tomorrow for 5 am to get into the grove for my new job this coming week. IT’S MY LAST UNEMPLOYED SUNDAY, which means that if I’m doing any project cooking, I’ve got to do it soon. Coffee and contemplation time. 9 am, breakfast. I made a frittata again, this time with red peppers, green onions and asparagus. The red pepper/asparagus combo is one of my favorites in a frittata, and I'm hoping it will last long enough for me to have it as left overs my first day of work. Noon, made another baked potato. It breaks the rule of always trying to have something new, but we are running a bit low on groceries. Tomorrow, I'm going out again. I rely on a lot of things that aren't in my pantry right now. Dinner will be fine, but my lunches have got to be small and light. 6:30 pm, dinner. Tonight was a slow night for a box kit of tacos doctored up with some grated pepperjack cheese, lettuce, and sour cream. Saving the leftovers for breakfast tacos. Day 6: January 6, 2020 Breakfast: Those breakfast tacos were a hit with the husband. We made a small pan of scrambled eggs to supplement the meat and tortillas from the night before. The frittata from yesterday morning has to wait. Lunch: grocery trip made, I whipped together a toasted turkey sandwich with mayo, shredded lettuce, and muenster cheese. A side of wavy chips rounded it out for me. 7 pm: We made mushroom stroganoff for dinner to get my two boxes of mushrooms out of the fridge and use some egg noodles that I bought at the store today. This recipe is one I found on pinterest awhile ago, and I think it may return to the rotation once COOK90 is over. The goal is to not repeat a recipe, so that's going to stick. Day 7: Jan 7, 2020 First day of work. My stomach is CRAZY messed up this morning, which could be anxiety or just not agreeing with what I ate yesterday. Despite wanting to make all 90 meals for the challenge, I have decided to forgo breakfast in order to feel more comfortable going into the orientation for my new job. Lunch is provided, so this is going to be a bad day for COOK90. I would rather cook every meal that I do eat rather than make something for the sake of cooking 90 meals. Lunch: At Noon, they wheeled in a catered lunch of salad, chili, and pasta. I had a bowl of chili despite my rough morning because I can't make it at home. (Looking at you, tomato hating husband). Had a nice lunch with my new supervisor discussing our cats and my future at the job. Turns out I beat internal candidates. I feel very accomplished for that. Dinner: 6:45 rolled in and to honor day seven we used an Epicurious recipe for white chicken chili. It went down so fuckin well my husband told me every other spoonful how 'tasty' it was. This one is going into the repertoire for the end of COOK90. Originally posted January 25, 2020 in the Archive.
You may have noticed that the week two food log for COOK90 hasn’t gone up, much less a week three log. The reason why is this: I failed. My stomach took a turn for the worse when I started my new job, so there was honestly no way I could make a new meal every day and expect to have a normal day every day after that. It was a fun journey, and one that has taught me a lot about cooking, but I don't believe we will keep going while I am getting over the latest spell of my stomach conditions. COOK90 is not a challenge for someone like me, an IBS sufferer with stress triggered attacks. I've been nauseous more days than not in the last two weeks, and even when I did cook new food, I didn't want to eat it. It didn't matter what I did or did not eat. I had attacks starting in my sleep, waking me up in the wee hours of the morning, and continuing their assault well into the afternoon. I didn't want to eat anything, much less make new meals every time I sat down to eat when I didn't want food at all. So, I threw in the gauntlet late last week while I tried to work out what was causing my stronger, more aggressive attacks. What I can say is that COOK90 has forced me to be more creative with what I buy at the grocery store. A new recipe every night had turned up some smash hits in the last two weeks, such as the white chicken chili from Epicurious. I've stretched a container of chicken breasts across three meals, and I probably could have made it four. I have found multiple ways to cook a whole chicken, learned what to do with the carcass. I don't have the time anymore with a new job to make stock every time I get a whole chicken, but knowing I can do it feels good. A big thing of rice can carry a girl through a whole work week, especially on a bad stomach, and there is nothing wrong with that at all. What I do know is that I need a real rice cooker so that I don’t keep screwing it up on the stove top. Rice cooker suggestions are highly welcome, fellow home cooks. Although I haven’t followed through with the ideal of the challenge-- to cook something new every meal but breakfast-- I have found that getting to the root of what’s going on with my stomach is as much an exercise in trial and error as COOK90 itself. Not that any of you come here for my medical problems, but there may be posts in the future about my efforts to figure out just what is helping exaggerate my tummy troubles during times of high stress. Diet has as much to do with this stuff as the stress, I’m told, so we’ve got some work to do there. Keeping a meal log through the first two weeks of COOK90 did teach me that I am not eating as well as I should be for someone with diagnosed IBS. I have a lot of work to do toward being a healthier human being not just by going to doctors and addressing problems that I’ve had for much of my life, but also by taking better care of myself. Reading my own logs in my own words showed me that I KNOW that some of the things I’m eating aren’t doing me any good, but I do it anyway. Why? Because I like it? Because it makes me feel good for the five minutes I get to experience an endorphin rush when I eat a plate of tortilla chips smothered in mediocre bagged cheddar cheese with hot sauce and green onions? Over the course of this journey, I finally hit the wall where I realized that while food can be pleasure, it shouldn’t ALWAYS be pleasure. I can do better for myself with this lesson in mind, and I very much intend to try during 2020. So even though I failed to carry out this journey through the entire month, there we good lessons to be learned. I am hoping that by this time next year, my mysterious stomach problems are mostly ironed out so that we can give it another go. This was another attempt to engage the small community I have built here that largely didn’t turn out due to my own failures to follow through, and I’ve got to face that moving forward. For those of you that did comment on the near daily pictures we started out COOK90 with, I sincerely appreciate your support and interest in what I do. You keep me coming back to this project whenever I start to lose hope. I want to draw some attention to the Eating Normal Patreon, which has been dormant since we have no actual supporters. I want to create extra content for the people that love and support me, and by pledging even a few dollars a month to the project, you’ll keep me motivated to make new recipes and write as much as a woman possibly can. You can go to our support page for other ways to help me keep going. I promise not to shill patreon or Ko-fi more than once a month. No one wants to read or see that every single post. I love you. I won’t do that to you. Originally posted February 23, 2020 in the Archive
I’ve been Meal Kit Curious for years. Ever since Jaime Oliver started advertising Hello Fresh back when he was serious about cooking on youtube, I wanted to know if the whole thing was worth it. Getting curated boxes delivered every week with new recipes every single time had a lot of appeal, but as each new and similar service appeared, they looked more expensive than the last. The cost outweighed the apparent benefits every time I was tempted to order a giant delivery of three or four meals a week. Then I walked into a Target for the first time in two years when we moved to Wisconsin and found Hello Fresh and Local Crate meal kits in the refrigerated section. This was the first I knew about anyone packing individual meals and recipes to sell as a single set instead of part of a bundle. The same type of service is offered at most of the local groceries around here too. We tried one from Festival Foods that taught my husband to love roasted broccoli, but I hadn’t picked one up since. A busy Thursday came where I had not pulled any meat out to defrost, and frankly, I didn’t want to bother defrosting it in the microwave. With a Target visit already planned, I stopped by that section of meal kits and looked upon a Local Crate meal kit of Indian butter chicken with Jasmine rice, and from the four Local Crate options available, chose that one for the evening. Target usually has a sale going on these, and I was able to get a prepacked meal for my husband and I for fifteen bucks. While Hello Fresh kits were sitting right next to it with a much more recognizable brand name, Local Crate was attractive since the entire kit is sourced with ingredients from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa. When I know I can get my food from somewhat local farmers, I’m going to pick that over something else every single time. The recipe itself comes from Food52, which is apparently a website dedicated to a homecooking community. I still haven’t went digging around their platform, but seeing a product highlight what they’re calling a ‘community recipe’ resonates with the message that I think Local Crate wants to portray: community over all. The box itself tells you approximately how long the meal ought to take you to cook, how many it can feed, and any dietary warnings that might be necessary. This meal, for example, is gluten free. It slaps that nice no grain symbol right on the front. Knowing I could get this done in less than an hour was another highlight. The only drawback is that the recipe card is printed onto the inside of the sleeve around the meal kit, which makes it a little hard to preserve the recipe if you find it to be something you want to make on your own later on. It’s huge and unwieldy on the counter when you actually are cooking to make matters worse. The recipe for Indian butter chicken itself was a simple one to follow. They do a good job outlining the individual steps you need to follow to achieve the final result, and they even include a cooking term glossary inside of the huge card if you don’t know what one of the terms they use means. My husband consumed it happily, declaring it a winner. A few bites of the somewhat spicy chicken and accompanying sauce was too much for my sensitive stomach, however. Now that these meal kits are appearing in actual stores as opposed to just being an online delivery service, I think there is more merit to them. An individual meal is much more attractive for someone in a hurry or trying to put a meal on the table after forgetting to plan for the night. I’ve found that most kits I can find in my local area come out for cheaper than a take out meal or ordering pizza. All it takes is a short jaunt into Target on the way home from work. There are companies out there doing it with more finesse than Local Crate. The kit from Festival Foods, for example, had the recipe printed on a card insert you would take out of the box. That card is now stuffed into one of my junk drawers, ready to be referenced at a moment’s notice. Hello Fresh also uses the recipe card format. If you’ve ever been curious about these services, you can now stick your toe in the water with individual kits and experience far less guilt than if you bought a five meal package and didn’t get around to cooking two of them before it all went bad. Originally Posted March 5,2020 in the Archive This month has already been a challenge in terms of cooking from our cookbook of the month. I know when i initially posted about my choice, I knew that sourcing the ingredients would be a problem for me and probably most of my readers. Most of the traffic here comes from the Midwest if my Facebook commenters are any indicator, and the Midwest is not the most friendly location in the world to find specialty dried seaweeds at the supermarket. Any specialty grocer could be as much as two hours away if you want to drive. So, how do we conquer this hurdle when we want to take on a cuisine as challenging as that of Japan? There is always Amazon. We use it for everything, and now that they are partnered with Whole Foods, folks in bigger cities can even use it for their everyday groceries. My first weekend researching this month’s cookbook, I spent more than fifty dollars on Amazon in order to source some of the core ingredients mentioned within the first few pages of the book. It’s fast, and it’s easy. When their boxes arrived in my mailbox, however, I wondered if there was a better way that I had honestly just ignored up until now. We give so much business to Amazon as a country when there are surely better ways to support smaller businesses. In the three years that I’ve been working on cookbooks, I’ve found that most of the writers do the leg work for you if you want to go beyond the giant internet overlord which has wormed their way into literally everything that we do. I’ve just taken the easy way out. Sonoko Sakai is one of those authors that is mindful of the limitations of the modern American grocery store, and she provides a lovely selection of links in the back of the cookbook to help guide you on your way. This time, we explore the long route. I am blessed enough to live in a decently populated area with a large Asian immigrant population that may or may not have what I need in their grocery stores. Not many of these appear to be Japanese focused, but we’ll explore them all the same while we cook our way through Japanese Home Cooking. The eastern side of downtown has a small cluster all close together that I intend to get to later this week. There are also those websites that Sonoko Sakai has so graciously compiled for her readers. Some of the websites in that section are as simple as the King Arthur Flour website, and most of us can get that in our everyday stores. Some of the listed websites don’t actually ship to homes across the country but rather serve to draw attention to Japanese Markets in larger cities. Among the handful that I spot checked, The Japanese Pantry is the most promising. The prices, however, will muscle out anyone who hasn’t dedicated themselves to pursuing this type of cooking. I can get a bottle of kikkoman soy sauce at my local store for maybe two bucks. It’s not the highest quality, but it’s accessible. The high quality Mitsuboshi soy sauce available at the Japanese pantry is thirty-one dollars! It’s clearly the good stuff, directly imported, but my god. The money. Amazon doesn’t sell Mitsuboshi soy sauce, so there isn’t a price point comparison to be made here. As for the suribachi (specialized Japanese mortar and pestle kind of thing), the Japanese Pantry sells one for thirty-five dollars from a respected vendor in Japan. You can purchase what is almost certainly a suribachi of lesser quality on amazon for about twenty bucks. The price differential isn’t that large, but its enough to give anyone pause. It’s the unfortunate reality that adventurous home cooks face when they try to branch out into something that isn’t widely practiced in the United States. We are not all so privileged as to live in places like New York or Los Angeles with large immigrant populations of nearly every ethnicity selling the flavors of home. The rest of us have two options: give our money to Bezos, or spend sometimes twice as much time and money sourcing quality ingredients from smaller vendors. Originally Posted March 13,2020 in the Archive
A lot has been said about how we have all seen this before. I’m a child of the nineties. I saw swine flu and ebola and SARS and West Nile Virus. I remember the general concern in the air, but I lived in a place where all of these things felt so far away. I don’t think I knew anyone who ever got swine flu at the time. Ebola never exploded like we were all terrified of. There is conflicting information out there about the current pandemic that has us all frightened, and I want to believe the people that tell me not to be afraid. But I am afraid. I’m afraid for my older relatives and my friends with chronic health conditions. I’m scared of all of the cancellations pouring in every single day from the NBA to the Overwatch League to Disneyworld. My every day life has already been disrupted in some small way by the abrupt ending of sporting events nationwide. Every time my boss calls us together in the office, I feel my heart leap in a mini panic attack. The world is suddenly very dark, and I had come into 2020 hoping for a brighter tomorrow. I’m 27 and in decent health. I’ve got very little to be afraid of when it comes to my personal health, but the lights are going out everywhere we look. The things that bring us joy-- sports and amusement parks and parties-- they are the sacrifices we have to make to TRY and control a worldwide pandemic. What do we do when the lights go out? We light a candle. It’s a small thing to turn to food when everything else gets hard to handle, but it’s what I’ve done since I was a little girl. I can control what I’m cooking, and it tastes good when I’m done. That’s satisfying to a person with chronic anxiety on a number of levels. What we all need right now is a little bit of comfort. We’re finding it in our own ways. Some people find it by telling themselves and others that it's not as bad as we all think. I find it in a cold beer and a long cook. Friday night, I started peeling shrimp fully prepared to tackle a recipe from our cookbook of the month. Halfway through peeling the shrimp I decided to abandon it and turn to the comfort of a bastardized shrimp scampi instead because I know the power that that dish has in my kitchen. It’s a favorite of my husband. It’s quick, and it’s Lent friendly. I don’t have to worry about if he’ll like the carrot in the tempura fritter. I can show him I’m thinking about him when the world is getting scary. I can’t even imagine what I’d do if we had kids right now. Schools all over Wisconsin are closing next week, and that trend is crossing the entire country literally as I type this article. I joke when I say that I want to go home for quarantine time, but I don’t want quarantine time. I want things to go back to the way they were, as imperfect as they were. Literally the only thing I can do right now to pretend that everything is alright is cook. Cooking is love. Cooking is comfort. When I can’t face the outside world, no matter the reason why, it’s there to remind me that things aren’t so bad. Doesn’t matter if I made the food or if someone else did. This craft makes us all feel a little better. Food carries so much in every bite, and when I bite into that spaghetti tonight, I feel a little bit closer to normal. Originally Posted March 24,2020 in the Archive
We’ve all seen what’s going on in the world around us right now. We have all panic bought two weeks worth of groceries and made fun of people getting too much toilet paper. We’ve watched restaurants close entirely or switch to delivery and carry out only. The world is a little darker than usual right now. There is no end in sight, but we all have to eat. What we do know right now is that businesses and people are suffering as a result of the great measures we have to take to slow the spread of COVID-19, but we can help. Keep in mind that some of these tips will mostly apply to people like me who are at lower risk. Social distancing is important for everyone, but we are safer while trying to support people who are struggling right now. 1. Order Carryout and Delivery from your Favorite Locals Several states have forced restaurants to close their doors and do business through delivery or take out only. This change is going to put the hurt on a lot of people for however long this pandemic continues. Servers will not be making tips. Less cooks will be needed on the line. People will lose their jobs, but we can mitigate some of that by ordering delivery from local restaurants every once and awhile until that option is no longer available to us, if and when that time comes. If you have the means (IE work a secure job in the current climate with reliable income), do yourself a favor by ordering a spot of sunshine in a to go container and do your neighbor a favor by helping them continue to receive their own paycheck. A lot of restaurants in Green Bay are already signed up to the myriad of delivery services, and there are some even setting up their servers as delivery drivers so that they may continue to make tips. These people need us, and we need them. 2. Donate to food banks Food shortages aren’t likely to occur for those of us that have money, but economic distress has already struck a lot of families. Food banks are sometimes the only source of a meal for these communities, and many of those food banks are still open and accepting donations. Paul’s Pantry in Green Bay, Wi for example will remain open for COVID-19 until they are told otherwise. They are also still accepting donations. 3. Learn to Bake Breads The most valuable skill I have gathered from working on this food blog is oddly enough making bread right now. This first week of panic in Wisconsin has left the big box stores downright cleared out, so if the bread apocalypse continues at my local Pick N Save, I can make my own. There are a lot of online recipes for making easy flatbreads with minimal ingredients from your pantry. AP flour is one of the most valuable ingredients right now if you find yourself in a bind. 4. Shop as Normal The entire country isn’t going into lockdown any time soon, so you can do your grocery shopping as normal, save for additional health precautions. Wash your cart handle when you grab it, etc. If you want to pick up a little extra, no one can blame you, but the time for panic buying is over. We all need to eat, and the more of us that try to go about business as usual in regards to our grocery shopping, the better. 5. Be Kind Over the course of this, there will be frustrations. Your grocery store will be out of something. You will be in a long line. There will be someone working in public every single day of their lives when some of us get to go home and self-isolate the vast majority of the time. Those people are putting themselves on the line for all of us just by going in to work to make sure we get our essentials. The Teenager at Target that you harassed once for accidently scanning an item twice or the Grocery Store clerk who couldn’t get your toilet paper deserves as much praise as anyone right now. They get paid like ass, and they’re the ones taking the biggest risk for us. For all of us. Most places don’t let them accept tips, so at the very least, let them know they’re appreciated. Let them know they’re seen. Help who you can help. Do you have a neighbor that is struggling to feed her kids? Make them a meal. Get an extra loaf of bread at the store and give it to them. This is the time to remember the good things about humanity. We’ve seen a lot of bad things for a very long time, but we can’t focus on it anymore. We’ve got to take care of each other. 6. Cook We can’t go out to eat, and ordering delivery isn’t always viable. Teach yourself something new. Cooking is a good stress reliever and a fun group activity if you and the family are stuck in the house for awhile. I find a lot of relief from my anxiety in making bread or stock to store for the future, and every meal is an opportunity for some serotonin. Enjoy the things you have always enjoyed, even if you’re the one who has to make them instead of someone else. The worst thing we can do for ourselves right now is eat poorly. A good diet is good for your health. |
The Mission An idea born in Normal, Illinois, Eating Normal hopes to chronicle the eating Experiences of a Red bird. Pledge monthly to our patreon! Archives
February 2024
Categories
All
|