Food

by

Dinners This Week, Sick Food, Fall Crankiness

Of course, Carla ended up getting sick last week, so all my dinner plans went right out the window. (She is fine now, and also it was neither covid nor strep.) 

Should I even MAKE dinner plans this week? 

Well. I have a few things I can salvage from last week, and a few other ideas. 

Dinners for the Week of September 15-21

Okay. So there’s that sorted. 

Clearly, when someone gets sick around here, the dinner plans go straight out the window. I am very easy to throw off track, I guess. No, wait. I am super flexible when plans change. There, that’s more palatable. My husband and I just end up eating random stuff around the house – which can sometimes include cereal or yogurt. Carla had a pretty decent appetite despite her cold, so she ate things she normally eats (roasted salmon, chicken nuggets, meatballs, bagel with cream cheese). 

Whenever I’m sick, my mom suggests making chicken noodle soup. To her, that’s the ultimate sick food. 

I do remember eating Campbell’s chicken soup when I was a kid, and enjoying it. But as an adult, it doesn’t do anything for me. When I’m under the weather but still able to eat, I usually go for carbs: toast with butter, bagels with butter, baked potatoes with butter. 

Carla will not eat soup, full stop. For her, sick foods typically look like… popsicles. Otherwise, she eats pretty much what she always eats.

My husband likes a bowl of matzah ball soup when he’s feeling rotten. I do not know how to make matzah ball soup; fortunately, there are a few places I can get it as takeout. 

What do you eat when you’re sick? Do you find chicken noodle soup as restorative as my mom does?

In other news, it still feels like summer outside, but it looks like fall. The thing is, I am feeling Extremely Cranky about fall this year. I don’t even know why! I have such a bad attitude. This weekend, my husband and I spent an afternoon by and in the pool – it feels like one of our last opportunities to enjoy it, and the summer didn’t afford as many pool days as I’d hoped – and I tried to take in the beauty of the changing leaves and the scrubbed-clean sky. 

And yet I am so very grumpy. Some of the grouchiness seems to be related to the impending holidays, I think. My family has four birthdays coming up and Thanksgiving and Christmas and Hanukkah, and I am not looking forward to ANY of it. In fact, the other day I asked my husband if we could maybe tell the family that we aren’t doing gifts this year. We could get presents for Carla and my niece, I conceded. But no one else. I don’t know how that will go over, in a family that has Gift Giving as a love language. Who knows. Maybe the grumpiness will subside? 

I really wish I could just get over this feeling. Is there a way to turn things around? I’m being Actively Grateful, which is the only strategy I can think of. Maybe I just need to ride it out. 

by

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?

by

Cat Report, Sports Snacks, Dinners This Week

I am assuming that you want an update on the cat, who, when last we spoke, was at the vet getting neutered. 

He is fine. A little depressed, in my estimation, and possibly a little bit embarrassed and/or miffed by the state of his testicles, but fine. Also, if you’d rather not read several tedious paragraphs about my cat’s post-surgical experience, I urge you to skip right on down to the list of dinners below.

I am FINE.

The recovery period after the neutering procedure is supposedly two weeks. The instruction sheet the vet sent home with me says that under no circumstances are we allowed to remove the cone they sent home with us. (The vet doesn’t call it a cone; they call it an Elizabethan collar, and it cost $20, by the way. For $20, I would think that it wouldn’t rotate so that the Velcro/opaque segment of the cone is directly in front of his sight line, but apparently I’m wrong.) With the cone on, the cat cannot eat well or drink water easily, he cannot clean himself, he keeps running into things, his balance is off so he can’t successful jump onto something even as short as a step, he cannot rest his head comfortably, his neck is constantly itchy, and he adopts various mournful positions that make him look very pitiful indeed. His fur is greasy and he lies around a lot more than is typical. I do not see how this is sustainable for two weeks. 

So: We have been removing the cone as frequently as possible and simply supervising the cat so he doesn’t lick anything. He does wear the cone – excuse me, Elizabethan collar – at night, when he sleeps in a bathroom we’ve converted into a temporary cat cave. 

Image from OldWorldPetPortraits.com where you can buy a print of this fabulous painting or many other works of pet-themed art, and at a 20% discount with email signup.

The vet and the internet insisted that I buy special litter for him, post-surgery. It’s pellets made up of newspaper and it’s probably much better in many ways than the litter we’ve been using since we got him, but he refuses to use it. He has taken to meowing at us when he has to go to the bathroom, and one of us has to escort him to his regular litter box. (The litter box is in a part of the basement we don’t want him in when he’s not in a cone; too many niches for him to hide in and commence furtive licking.) 

One of the other admonitions in the vet’s instructions is to keep him calm. For two weeks. He’s actually been pretty good, so far. We have a shoe box he likes to play in, and he’s been batting springs and fuzzy worms around inside the box, and that seems to occupy him pretty well without requiring a ton of athletic movement. Carla made him a special water toy that we learned about online but he wasn’t super into it. Maybe we’ll have to try it again. He’s also spending a lot of time in the sunroom or at the window in my office, monitoring the bug and squirrel activity outside.

Okay, okay. Here is a photo of him in his Elizabethan collar. Please don’t tell him I shared this with the entire internet. 

Revisiting all his life choices, trying to figure out which one led him here.

Okay! Enough about the cat! Let’s discuss my other favorite topic: FOOD.

Now. It is September, and school is back in session, and I need to get back into the dinner planning groove. Let’s see: we’re visiting friends for dinner tonight. Carla is trying a new sport this fall, and she has games every week. That means I need at least one meal each week that produces enough leftovers for us to eat after her game. We’ve been pretty consistently doing at least one night of Search the House for Your Own Meal, and one night of takeout. So that leaves me with three meals to make. 

Oh – that reminds me: I keep trying to figure out snacks I can send to school with Carla that she can eat before sports practice or before a game. The snacks can’t have nuts, and I would prefer that they have some nourishment in them, rather than just calories. I’m not opposed to “just calories,” and in fact have been sending her with Cheez-Its and cheese ballsand granola bites and fruit snacks because she will eat those things… but I would love ideas for things that have other benefits besides calories. I’m not sure those things exist, though, especially nut-free things that do not require refrigeration. I am happy to BAKE things, as well. And, even though my “she will eat this” expectations are low for most new/nourishing foods, I am willing to TRY things, even if Carla ends up refusing to eat them. If you have any ideas, let me have ’em. 

Okay, back to the dinners. 

Dinners for the Week of September 1-7

  • Greek Salad with Grilled Chicken: My parents return to our part of the country this week, and I want to have them over for dinner and to meet the kitten. Greek salad has kind of become my go-to for guests – it’s so easy to prep in advance, and it’s so tasty. 
  • Beef Birria: You know what else I have in the freezer? Beef birria! And we have enough for at least two meals. I plan to make the tacos in the oven (as in this recipe) rather than on the stove. And then maybe I’ll turn the ingredients into enchiladas (a la these chicken enchiladas) the second night.

What are you eating this first week in September?