sick day

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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. 

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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?