derailed plans

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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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Friday Randomosity: Snow Day Shopping and Request for Recommendations Edition

Due to a series of events, some planned and others not, last weekend was a five-day weekend, followed by one day of school, and now we have begun a three-day weekend. Keep in mind that our two-week winter break ended a mere two weeks ago.

I adore my child. And yet. This is not ideal. 

  • Do you have a planner you love? I think I might need to become A Person Who Uses A Planner, and I don’t really know where to start. I have looked through planners on recent trips to Barnes & Noble, Target, and Joann Fabric. There is no dearth of options, which is probably what’s tripping me up. All I have been able to settle on is that I don’t want a bullet journal. I have a feeling the people in our blogging community have Strong Planner Feelings, though, so I am hoping you will direct me to The One True Planner.
  • Speaking of planning, I am floundering when it comes to finding a workable structure to my days and I keep wanting to post about it (and beg you for advice) but I worry it is too boring a topic? 
  • I can now add “dismantling a doorbell” to my list of skills I never thought I’d need. A month or so ago, our doorbell started making a weird buzzing noise. It did this intermittently for a day or two and then stopped. But then it started again on Monday! And continued buzzing every ten or so seconds, directly outside my office. Fortunately, my doorbell was very low wattage, so it was easy to disconnect the wires from the buzz-causing things they were attached to (I added “doorbell dismantling” to my skillset, not “doorbell understanding”), wrap the exposed wires in electrical tape, and close the whole thing up again. I suppose I will soon be adding “replacing a doorbell” to my list of skills.
  • Snow days are kind of boring these days. We used to do a LOT during snow days of yesteryear – probably I whined, then, about not being able to have time to myself; am impossible to please – Carla loved the snow and seemed entirely impervious to the cold. We’d play outside and make snow angels and build things out of snow and she’d climb up the snow mountains formed by the snowplow. Now, she has no interest. And also it is QUITE chilly so I’m not really pushing for outdoor time. She is similarly uninterested in: watching movies, baking things, playing games, reading, doing chores/homework/instrument practice. So. Screens it is, I guess? “More screens,” I should say, since this is – checks notes – Day 6 of being mainly inside. Maybe there’s a craft we could do together? But that requires having the appropriate tools/materials on hand. Or maybe I just need to lean into the screens thing and read some of the blogs I’ve been neglecting???? 
  • To counteract the cold this week, I made a really good lentil soup. It was based on this recipe, with some major modifications. Instead of crushed tomato, I used a 4-ounce can of tomato paste. I didn’t have much paprika, so threw in a half teaspoon of cayenne instead. I tripled the garlic because that’s how I roll. I used an entire bag of lentils, rather than 2 cups (I think it was about 2 ½ cups, but I didn’t measure; I just didn’t want a little useless scrap of lentils lying around). And I used two 4-cup cartons of chicken stock to compensate for the lack of tomatoes and the additional lentils. It is delicious and hearty. 
  • To pair with the soup, I toasted some store-bought sourdough. Except our toaster has joined the throngs of quiet quitters and is now declining to toast, so I broiled the bread in the oven and it got all black and smoky. Clearly I need a new toaster. I am tempted to replace our toaster with the exact same model – this one lasted at least a decade, after all – but maybe you have a toaster you are gaga about?
  • As long as I’m dabbling in some online shopping, I would also love to buy a travel mug for my tea. This has never been a thing I’ve wanted before, as I drink my tea first thing in the morning and I gulp it down so fast it barely has a chance to cool. But for various boring reasons I think I might prefer to drink my tea while driving Carla to school. I’ve borrowed one of my husband’s to-go mugs for this purpose, and it’s fine – it keeps my tea warm, it fits in my car’s cup holder, it holds the enormous volume of tea I drink – but I want my own mug. Perhaps more importantly, I’ve found that unless I’m very careful, the tea will slosh up over my face when I’m lowering the mug after taking a sip. I do not care for that. My main criteria for a travel mug, in addition to the above, is that it is dishwasher safe. And I don’t mean the wishy-washy “well, you can dishwash it, but we don’t recommend it.” I mean, it is MEANT for the dishwasher. This one looks good, and it comes in purple and doesn’t seem to have any tiny parts I have to dismantle before dishwashing. This is the one my husband has used for years – and has repurchased several times when one mug goes missing or gets dropped one too many times. But I don’t like the lid and I can’t explain why. This one is so pretty, and I feel more kindly toward ceramic as a material than I do toward stainless steel… but the dishwashability seems a little suspect. (How can the product care instructions be “machine wash” but also “hand wash only”?) What is your hot drink to-go mug of choice?
  • I am having a frustrating email communication issue with someone. The communication is not optional, but it feels very one-sided, with me reaching out and waiting for days and then sending a nudge and then also getting a third party involved to nudge from a different direction. And now the person I am communicating with has finally responded and said they would attach a document I need in order to move forward, but they did not attach this document and have not responded to my request to resend the attachment. I guess the only next step is a phone call, which I HATE, but it seems like it might be my only recourse. 
  • Trader Joe’s Italian truffle cheese is my new favorite cheese. It’s soft and truffley and pairs so well with a buttery Ritz cracker that I’m thinking of having some for second breakfast. 
  • Twice in the past three weeks I have borked my back doing strength training. The first time, I have no idea what I did to injure my back. I could barely move for the first day and then sitting and driving were agony for three or four consecutive days. I treated the pain with ice and Advil. This time, I think I injured it either doing squats with weights or back rows. My best guess is that I tweaked my back doing the squats and then the back rows exacerbated the injury to the point where I had to quit. I love squats so I feel quite bereft at the thought of not doing them for awhile. I’m guessing something in my form is off? Maybe I need to hold the weights at my chest instead of at my sides during squats? I don’t know. Immediately after my back tweaked out (I was in the middle of this routine, where we were doing 100 reps each of squats, pushups, kettlebell swings, and back rows. Very frustrating to have to quit at 50 of each! Will I ever know if I could have done 100???), I did a series of back stretches, then took Advil and iced my back. It feels much less painful today than it did the last time I hurt it. This is an extremely boring bullet point, but I am including it for Future Me, who is bound to repeat this injury at some point. 
  • Are you watching the newest season of True Detective? There’s only been one episode so far, but I keep thinking about it and eagerly awaiting the next one. It’s got Jodie Foster and Alaska and supernatural elements and mysterious deaths and disappearances. SO GOOD. I haven’t felt this excited about a TV show in a long time. 

That’s all I have for today, Internet. I am going to try to cajole Carla into doing some sort of screen free activity with me. Brownies, maybe? Who can resist brownies?

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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.