pancake shortage

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Giveth/Taketh; VAXXED!; Dinners This Week

Apparently there is a chicken tender shortage????? 

Okay, maybe there is, maybe there isn’t; I asked All Knowing Google and got three headlines of varying levels of certainty:

Article 1: Is a chicken tender shortage underway?

Article 2: US could experience a chicken tender shortage

Article 3: The US is now facing a chicken tender shortage

Time will tell.

Carla, in typical Carla fashion, won’t eat chicken tenders, instead preferring her chicken in nugget form or shaped into dinosaur-adjacent shapelets. But how can the chicken tender shortage not have a domino effect? Well, perhaps this is the ideal time to wean her off of chicken nuggets for good!

And things are looking up, in other parts of the freezer section. I got my hands on some frozen pancakes this week: some of the mini pancakes at Target and some regular Eggo buttermilk pancakes at my normal grocery store. 

I guess sometimes the good lord taketh away and sometimes the good lord giveth.

Carla is now FULLY VACCINATED against Covid 19! And the flu, but that’s less exciting. No less important, though. 

She had a low fever the day after her vaccine, and complained of arm pain and a headache for most of the day. She also seemed a little more subdued than usual. But the next day, she was back to normal, aside from some lingering arm pain. 

I AM SO RELIEVED OMG. 

It’s not like we’re all going to go out and stick our faces into the mouths of strangers or anything (I am picturing those old-timey lion tamers who stick their heads into the jaws of the beast). But I do feel like maybe we can RELAX a little. I mean, we will continue to wear masks, we will continue to social distance. And I can’t imagine that we’ll be attending packed-house concerts or sporting events. I do think I will unclench a little bit? That sounds nice. And maybe we will explore some of the avenues that we’ve considered mostly-closed for the past eighteen months – travel, restaurants, birthday parties, indoor playdates/dinner parties? I suspect we will move very slowly. 

Although…

My husband and I are – possibly – going to eat dinner in An Actual Restaurant for our anniversary this week. We have childcare (Carla will be at a birthday party, full of masked, mostly-vaccinated children she already sees every day at school). We have a reservation. We are both tentatively committed, which is an oxymoron. Tentatively committed to keeping the reservation, not to one another. I mean, one hopes. But despite all these baby steps, we are both VERY NERVOUS at the idea of eating inside a restaurant. Even my husband’s enduring desire for a real steak (as in a steak that I haven’t prepared at home) hasn’t pushed him over the fulcrum of the Should We Eat in a Restaurant teeter totter. 

We have eaten AT restaurants since March 2020. Three, to be exact. Each time, we ate outside. Each time, we were the only people eating outside. Each time, somehow, it rained. Each time, the wait staff seemed totally unperturbed; each time, I assume, the wait staff talked about “the whack jobs at table four” when they were safe and warm and dry inside.

Anyway, we may decide at the last minute to get takeout instead. We shall see. I, for one, am not opposed to eating steak from the cozy if cramped safety of my car, although perhaps we will need to import our own steak knives for the experience. My husband is less enthused at the prospect. But I don’t think anything says “thirteen years of marriage” like scarfing down fancy steakhouse food between the gear shift and the automatic window buttons while your kid is attending a birthday party. 

Let’s come up with some food to eat on the other, less fraught days, shall we?

Dinners for the Week of December 6-December 13

  • Mediterranean Sheet Pan Cod with Zucchini: This calls for cherry tomatoes, which I may add if I’m feeling generous. It also calls for kalamata olives, which I may subtract because my husband hates them. We shall see.
  • Chicken Tikka Masala: I can’t remember if I’ve tried this recipe before, but it sounds yummy. I will add some sliced bell peppers.
  • Thai Chicken Quinoa Bowls: TSomething about this just sounds good right now – the ingredients make it almost summery, maybe? A good change from the fall/winter fare.
  • Ginger Salmon Salad: We have had this once before and I remember it was refreshingly different. I also think it was one of the rare salmon recipes that my husband liked. 
  • Slow Cooker Short Ribs with Mascarpone Polenta: You guys. I am so embarrassed that I STILL haven’t made the short ribs that are hanging out in my freezer. WHAT is wrong with me?!?! (I know exactly what is wrong, and it is that I don’t want to sear the short ribs before putting them in the slow cooker.)
  • Maybe a Restaurant?
  • Takeout or DIY: My family prefer to call “fend for yourselves” nights “scrounging.” But that sounds a little scrappier than what actually goes on. 

What are you looking forward to this week, food-wise or otherwise?

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Grocery Store Report; Pancakes Detour; Coffee Update; Thanksgiving Memory Erasure; Dinners This Week

The grocery store was a madhouse this morning. Not unexpected, I suppose, considering it is the week of Thanksgiving here in the U.S. But still… I guess I hoped that it wouldn’t be too wild at 8:00 am. Oh well. I emerged unscathed (except for my checking account; hot turkey leg food is EXPENSIVE).

Iceberg lettuce, I am sure you will be relieved to hear, was on sale for $2.50 a head. (Sarcasm font.) Pancakes, of any size, are still completely absent from the frozen section – I need to see an in-depth investigative report on WHY frozen pancakes are a) so much hotter a commodity these days than in The Time Before, and b) so difficult to replenish/keep on the shelves. I read somewhere – oh yes; I googled what in the sizzling griddle is going on with pancakes, and found a tweet by some other miffed mother wanting some pancake clarity. The Eggo twitter account responded, which is kind of cool… but their response was both vague and unsatisfying:

Seriously. WHAT IS GOING ON WITH FROZEN PANCAKES. My grocery store doesn’t even have space for pancakes anymore. It’s not like there is a big gaping pancake hole indicating where the few boxes of pancakes had been before they were snatched immediately off the shelves by lucky pancake hunters… Instead, the waffle selection has swollen to disproportionate sizes, making it seem as though there were never any pancakes at all. When things like lunchables and pasta and flour were hard to come by, there was still space for them on the shelves. So I feel like there just are no pancakes. (I suppose my grocery store could just have gotten really adept at filling shelf gaps, to create the illusion of well-stocked shelves… but there was NO MAPLE SYRUP today, and where they should have been on the shelf was just a gaping nothingness, so…) I am assuming, based on absolutely no data at all, that pancake machinery is being used to support some other in-demand food stuff… but I can’t for the life of me think what it is. Or maybe Big Waffle is trying to eradicate pancakes from the planet. Whatever is going on, the pancake supply chain seems to have completely collapsed, at least in my area.

You may have surmised, based on the frenetic tone of the above, that I am still in the midst of my coffee experiment. Even though I am a regular drinker of both black tea and caffeinated soda, and even though I never notice an appreciable difference in personal caffeination (although if I skip my tea, I do get a headache, so obviously the caffeine is doing something), I feel like coffee is different. It’s like an injection of liquid energy, except not the kind of energy I can direct toward productive things like exercise or work; it’s more like squirrel energy, where my movements become rapid and jerky and I get easily distracted by acorns.

My husband, a legit coffee connoisseur, made me some of his good coffee this morning. He did so yesterday as well. (Saturday, and there is no reason for me to tell you this, but, squirrel, he slept in because he was coming off 12 straight days of work plus he was recovering from his Covid booster, so I drank my regular tea.) He grinds his own beans and has some sort of special drip coffee maker and I am supposed to believe that these things make the coffee much smoother. It is certainly much less bitter/nauseating than the pre-ground pumpkin coffee I drank last week when I began this experiment, but I am still suspicious. Coffee is coffee, right? I do find that I absolutely need to eat something before/during the coffee drinking, otherwise I feel very queasy indeed. This morning, I had a slice of apple cider donut blondie that my husband and daughter made yesterday. It is very tasty, but I have to warn you: it tastes NOTHING of apple cider. Which is deeply disappointing, because my husband had to reduce the apple cider by half and it took close to an hour to do so. Apple cider appearance or no, these blondies are soft and crumbly on the inside and crunchy around the edges and go very nicely with coffee. However, this may prove to be too much sugar for my stomach to handle in tandem with the squirrel surge of caffeine.

I apparently drink coffee much darker than I do tea.

Hey! This week is Thanksgiving, at least at my house, and I am looking forward to a very low-key day with just the three of us. I am making a turkey breast (America’s Test Kitchen recipe) (although I bought a couple of wing pieces to help enhance the drippings for the gravy), and my mother’s goat-cheese-garlic-mashed potatoes, and mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows for my daughter, and cranberry sauce, and apple crisp. It still sounds like a lot of food and cooking, but I don’t have to make dressing (my husband agreed to let me buy it, pre-made, from Whole Foods, where we are getting our turkey breast), and we can sit around in our pajamas all day if we want and I feel like this is going to be a nice break before the crush of the Christmas holiday.

(By the way, in searching for my Thanksgiving recipes, I came across last year’s post about Thanksgiving. And I have ZERO RECOLLECTION OF ANY OF IT. Apparently we didn’t do cranberry sauce or dressing last year, either? Apparently we did a family Zoom? Apparently we made something called an apple sharlotka? NO MEMORY OF ANY OF IT.)

Hanukkah begins the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I am dithering over whether to make sufganiyot again. I really liked them, and it was fun to share them with our neighbor. But they really are best when fresh out of the fryer, so I don’t know if it’s worth doing again. Carla expressed interest in making some cookies, so maybe I will look into that. And maybe we will save a Hanukkah baking project for the end of Hanukkah instead of the beginning.

Dinners for the Week of November 22-November 28

What are you most looking forward to eating this week? If you celebrate Thanksgiving, what will your celebration look like this year? And do YOU remember last year’s Thanksgiving? Why has it been erased so thoroughly from my brain? Is there some sort of insidious black hole that is devouring pancakes and memories?