covid

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Dinners We Actually Ate Last Week, Dinner Plans This Week

It’s a good thing that last week’s dinner plans were already kind of light on plans and heavy on shopping my freezer, because I came down with covid on Wednesday morning and that kind of borked everything. 

This is the second time I’ve had covid (is that true?) and it was a rough bout: sore throat, fever, congestion. The worst part was the horrific headache I had for two days straight. I spent pretty much all of Wednesday and Thursday in bed, which is a luxury for which I am very grateful. Also, many thanks to my neighbor and my husband and my in laws for driving Carla around. Even though I felt better by Friday, I didn’t run errands or see anyone besides my immediate family all weekend. Tomorrow, I will have been fever free for five days, so I plan to resume normal activities and go to the grocery store.  (Am I being overly cautious? Not cautious enough? No one knows.)

In the meantime, we’ve still needed to eat. And I am pretty proud that I have produced some fairly decent meals entirely from what I already had in my fridge. Yes, one night I ate a baked potato, but it was a very satisfying baked potato, and I had other options. 

Here’s what we ended up eating last week: We went to a friend’s house for dinner on Monday, then out to dinner on Tuesday (yes, yikes, and also I haven’t heard that anyone else I was in contact with got sick, thank goodness). Wednesday night I ate nothing, my husband ate leftovers from Tuesday’s restaurant meal, and Carla ate salmon and peas that I prepared while wearing a mask and practicing good hand hygiene. Thursday I defrosted the beef birria, which we ate for dinner and then I ate for lunches. No idea what Carla ate; presumably something. Friday I defrosted some short rib ragu and we ate that with rotini and frozen garlic bread; well, Carla ate meatballs and spaghetti noodles. Saturday was the night of the baked potato; my husband had leftover pasta; Carla had leftover salmon. Then last night I made chili – I had an onion in the fridge, a jalapeno from my jalapeno plant, ground beef in the freezer, and beans and tomato sauce in the pantry; Carla had more meatballs and spaghetti noodles. Tonight I will make a stir fry with frozen chicken, the two (2) zucchini my zucchini plant has finally produced (!!!), and some old-ish but still fresh-ish veggies (broccoli, green pepper, onion) that remain in my fridge. I’d say that’s pretty good for not having been inside a grocery store since a week ago Saturday! 

Maybe this isn’t as novel to most people as it is to me, but I love being able to assemble meals out of things I have on hand, rather than buying specific ingredients for specific recipes. And yet I do the former so infrequently that when I can build something reasonable by shopping my own reserves, I feel like a pioneer or something. Clearly, I am easily amused. Do you prefer to buy groceries to suit specific meals, or build meals out of the groceries you typically buy? What’s the most recent “creative” meal you’ve put together out of pantry ingredients?

Of course, now I have to consider the week ahead. I do still have some reserves in the freezer – mainly pork chops, which I tend to buy when on sale – but I have very little in the way of fruits or vegetables. Part of me wants to just buy a bunch of staples and see what happens, but the other part of me much prefers to have A Clear Plan going into the week.

Dinners for the Week of September 8-14

  • Oven Baked Pork Chops with Green Beans Amandine: Let’s call some of those frozen pork chops into action this week, shall we? I’m in the mood for green beans, and we’ll probably do a sweet potato and/or baked potato on the side.
  • Greek Salad with Grilled Chicken: I think you know I’m still in the mood for a Greek salad. It may be beginning to feel like fall around here, but I’m not ready to let go of summer yet.
  • Lemony Roasted Mushroom Pasta: This is such a Me dish – so many of my favorite things (lemon! mushrooms! pasta!) all together. YUM. I wonder if my husband will even like it? Probably he will require some sort of protein on the side.
  • Slow Cooker Honey Chipotle Chicken Tacos: It’s been a minute since I’ve made this, and it’s always good to have a slow cooker item on the meal plan… especially one that produces easy, delicious leftovers.
  • Baked Halibut with Lemon and Dill: It has been forever since I’ve made any sort of fish besides salmon. If halibut looks good at the fish counter tomorrow, I’m making this. With asparagus on the side. YUM.

I wonder how life will intervene to disrupt this week’s plans?

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Party Like It’s 2020

Well, all my carefully calibrated Thanksgiving plans have evaporated – poof! Everyone is fine and feeling well so far, but I think we all understand that when an uninvited guest like Covid shows up to the party, most people will opt out of the festivities. 

This is life. Things happen. We are so lucky that it was a mild case of Covid and not something so much worse or more devastating. So very lucky. 

Nonetheless, I’m feeling…

  • Disappointed. It’s always nice to see family, especially when it’s been a while. (That came out snarkier than I intended, but I’m leaving it because it’s true.) I haven’t seen my niece in far too long, and I wanted to squeeze her and marvel at how much taller and more brilliant she’s become since I last saw her. And I had managed to orchestrate the exact houseguest experience that I preferred: everyone in my house, while we were ALL on a break, for a fixed and doable amount of time. None of those things is happening now. Carla is bereft. She was SO excited to see her cousin. And now: nothing.
  • Cranky. Now my least favorite type of houseguest experience is going to happen. My MIL has a doctor’s appointment the week after Thanksgiving, and instead of staying in a hotel as planned (after staying with us for Thanksgiving for six days), she and my FIL will now be staying at our house. Which is fine in the sense that we DO want to see them both, and spend time with them. But is less fine in the sense that now they will be staying at our house when Carla is in school and my husband is at work and I have all the normal challenges of keeping our workweek schedule running smoothly on top of hosting houseguests. (Who wants to throw me your best Using Up Thanksgiving Leftovers recipes I can try out on my in-laws next week please?)
  • Relieved. All of the pressure of hosting has been postponed by a week. 
  • Deflated. The most prevalent feeling is one of deflation – of all that anxiety and energy being stored up for weeks of planning and then having none of the fanfare of the fun part of hosting: showing people around the house, gathering for a big meal, playing games as a family. Add to that the fact that I have to gear myself up again, a week from now, to host – when I haven’t planned for THAT at all… and I’m reeling a little. 

I am hopeful that Whole Foods will allow us to dramatically downsize our turkey. I am hopeful that they will allow me to not bring home the two enormous veggie sides I already paid for, and that they will refund me. (And, if that’s not possible, I plan to make some Szechuan green beans out of the leftovers.) I am grateful that my little family of three will have time to ourselves. I am grateful it wasn’t something more serious that’s keeping us apart, and that there will be (God willing) opportunities to get together again. 

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Souvenir

Well, we are back from our Road Trip!, which was fabulous. Ten days of driving that paused for a five-day stopover with my parents in the middle. My husband planned the trip in such a way that we didn’t get tired of being in the car until the very end. And then we arrived home, and it was wonderful to be back in our own beds, with a weekend to recover before getting back to normal.

And then I woke up with cold symptoms and rapid tests confirmed that I have Covid. The worst souvenir. 

So far, I am feeling crummy. But mainly CRANKY. 

Cranky at myself. I always anticipated getting Covid at some point; it’s long seemed inevitable. I thought that when I finally got it, I would feel resignation mixed with relief. But I don’t. I am MAD. I got Covid because I took unnecessary risks, and that’s just a fact. Did I expect that * I * was somehow invincible? That Covid would look at the fact that I’ve been pretty measured and cautious over the past two-ish years and say, “Let’s skip her”? That residents of the rural western United States are all roaming around unmasked because Covid doesn’t exist in those areas? Apparently I did expect those things because we relaxed our typical restrictions on our trip and I got Covid. We ate out in restaurants A LOT. We went into museums and gas stations and gift shops and sometimes we just left our masks in the car. We attended events with lots of other people and pretended that the outdoor venues would protect us. I was uncareful and I KNEW I wasn’t being careful and I got Covid. So I feel cranky and mad and a little ashamed and my head feels like a stress ball that’s being squeezed so intensely you can see the little beads inside it through the membrane. PLUS I somehow forgot to do the Wordle yesterday and it RESET my winning streak.

For posterity’s sake, my symptoms: It started with a scratchy throat. So lightly scratchy that it was easy enough to write it off as irritation from staying in so many hotels (I was getting irritated with being on the road, those last couple of days; why not my throat, too?), or the change in atmosphere/climate as we drove eastward toward home. Then a day of an even sorer throat, with an irresistible tickle that could only be soothed by chain-lozenging menthol cough drops. Then a day where the throat felt better and the cough was less persistent. Now, Day 4, I am in the Head in a Vise stage. I am isolating in my bedroom, which fortunately has its own bathroom, but I am resentful and grumpy and have to get up to staunch my runny nose every few minutes. 

Covid. Ugh.