On and on

So lets see, where did we leave off? looks like last Wednesday.

I, like everyone else, have been cooking a lot, but un-like myself, have not been taking many pictures of the food. I’ve been invited to two pandemic cooking facebook groups, coronavirus lockdown food show! that I joined, and another one I have not joined, not that it looks any better or worse, just that the invite came second. They’re really clogging up my feed.

And I joined a walking together [alone] group, that I’ve only posted to a few times, but has some good pics like this from my friend Jane.

So, here’s breakfast last Tuesday.

 

We got our first delivery from Matt Smith, turkey chorizo and spinach and eggs left in the cooler on the front porch, and I made some of the chorizo and spinach into soup, with some beans.

Tuesday it was warm – up to 70 degrees while we were eating the soup.

Wednesday it rained and got colder. I had meetings and an online class, and around 1:00 we ventured out to the grocery store, wearing our masks. It was a little picked over but we did OK. At 5:00 we drove over to Garver Feed Mill for the last of the local food pickups of the season where in lieu of the indoor farmers market, you could pre-order from the farmers and pick up. They’re still trying to figure out what to do about the outdoor market which should’ve started Saturday, April 11. For now there’s a big Google sheet where you can get instructions to order from local farmers and make arrangements for pickup or delivery. We got potatoes and carrots and more spinach, and a bag of lettuces. We wanted to get pizza from the Ian’s at Garver, but there was a 2-hour wait. We ordered from Glass Nickel instead, and had a dinner we might’ve fed to our kids when they were young – pizza and salad with ranch dressing.

Thursday it was a lot colder, and I think I might’ve baked bread, but we mostly ate leftovers – bean soup heated up in our individual bowls (and I froze one serving) and I ate a toasted wheat roll and Mark made a sandwich.

Somewhere in there, Thursday, I think, when I was kinda working and kinda messing around on the Internet, Rach called and we discussed various online grocery shopping options, and I tried a few. So in addition to my friendly local farmer dropping stuff on my porch, about a week later I got almond flour and vegetable and olive oils from an online merchant. I’m supposed to have some tahini and dry garbanzo beans on the way. The canned ones at Metcalfe’s were $3.79 each – talk about pandemic price gouging! They were organic, so probably not from their usual supplier, but still.

Friday when I walked the Hellebore had gotten droopy from the cold.

We had a very much reduced Passover via zoom. I made spinach kugel and charoset and chocolate matzoh and chicken thighs. And some compote – prunes and apricots with a bit of brown sugar, and a lemon slice, and boiling water poured over. It was good with the chicken. I made bone in thighs so that I’d have a bone for the shank bone on the sedar plate. Which had on it the chicken thigh bone, charoset, cilantro, lettuce, egg, and horse radish. I put more lemons and garlic on top of the chicken before I baked it, and the garlic turned green. It looked weird but tasted OK. The big innovation of this use what you got quarantine year was instead of buying a bottle of Passover grape juice to use 2 tablespoons in the charoset and then throw away months later – when the kids were younger I used to make jigglers, but it still mostly went to waste – I boiled down the open half bottle of red wine I had, with a cinnamon stick, and used that to wet down the charoset.

Molly and David and their kids made a real sedar table, but I told everyone else all they needed was a glass of wine and the scanned Haggadah.

Saturday I got a good amount of exercise. I went for a short walk before yoga, and after I made chocolate chip scones and took a shower, and then I got my bike out and took half a dozen scones and some of the chocolate matzah to Belinda and Stephen’s downtown. We had fried rice for dinner. I had boiled the bones of our Monday pork chops to make stock that I cooked the rice in, and there was shredded pork and shredded chicken to go in the rice, and celery, carrots, egg, purple onion (no scallions) ginger, garlic, and cilantro. Greasy but good.

We watched Apollo 13, which is getting talked about in WI because it’s an anniversary, and plus Jim Lovell is from Milwaukee. In light of Corona virus, he’s been getting interviewed about how to handle disasters, and he says “keep positive”.  Then we watched Saturday Night Live, the first remote edition, fitting with Tom Hank hosting. I missed his opening monologue because I was downstairs cleaning up the kitchen, and I missed the Hal Wilner tribute, too. I came up and saw the start of it, but it was b&w and didn’t seem visually interesting to me, so I got in bed. I didn’t realize it was so cool – Perfect Day – until I watched both the Wilner tribute and Tom Hanks on my phone on Sunday morning.

Sunday morning after I caught up on SNL, Mark and I went for his long route walk, almost two hours. We had scrambled eggs with salami and cheese for our big brunch, and a potato cake made from our leftover colcannon style mashed potatoes, and various toast choices, and a fruit platter. I worked a bit and then made masks to send to John & Megan. Sunday night we had fig-filled (the last of the cuicidati filling from cookie season, mixed with a bit of the reduced red wine) and charoset filed cookies and watched a lot of TV, Outlander, Belgravia, The World On Fire, a bit of John Oliver for me, more for Mark.

As soon as this is over, or as soon as I can, I’m getting a cat. We only have Mark’s fluff cat upstairs in the house now, and I need somebody, or maybe two somebodies, for my part of the house. Megan’s quarantine pictures of Hammie & Khan, who lived with me for two years, including the summer when I was really surrogate mommy because Megan was working in Milwaukee, are great, but not enough to sustain my cat love.

The coolest kitties.

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Written on Tuesday & Wednesday, but now that we made it through the weekend, I think I’m going to leave the rest of the next post.