Cooking cheers me

Ravioli dinner with
pear/radish/blue cheese salad
One of my few truly gourmet meals

A friend posted recently that after a spell of illness and no energy, she was now back to cooking again and surprised at how much better and more energetic she felt. I think that’s true for me. Cooking renews me.

A confession: I had a pity party yesterday. It had been three days since I had seen another human being, except for two minutes when Jordan, masked, whisked in to deposit grocery bags and once when she came to stand on the patio and talk across the distance, which doesn’t make for easy conversation. It’s clear to all who read my blog that I adore my dog, but her company is not the same as seeing another human, talking with someone. Plainly, I had cabin fever. I was mad at Covid, mad at the cold weather which keeps patio guests away, mad at the rodeo which exposes my family (or so I’m convinced) to omicron, mad at the world in general.

And I wasn’t cooking. I was tired of “pick up” dinners—scrambled eggs, leftover soup from the freezer, a salmon platter. Those things are okay for lunch, but I want a proper dinner. The last good dinner I cooked was meatballs and gravy for the family last Sunday—I kept a portion for me, sent most of it into the main house, and got back enough for leftovers for Monday lunch. I have to say they were extraordinarily good.

It all changed today. In the early afternoon, Jordan and Jacob, masked, brought out the toaster oven/air fryer the children gave me for Christmas. While they unpacked and installed, Jordan made me sit far across the room. The Breville (that’s the brand)  now sits in splendid glory on my counter, unused, because I haven’t had time to read the directions. But the first thing I will fix is lemony chicken drumettes. I can hardly wait. But first I have to read and digest the directions.

My new toaster oven/air fryer
Hoping it ups my cooking game

Tonight, Jean came for dinner, and I got to cook. For some reason I had a dozen wild mushroom/truffle ravioli in the freezer—Christian won’t eat mushrooms, and Jordan’s diet doesn’t allow pasta. Jean got the brunt of my experimenting again. After much online exploration, I decided to serve them with brown butter, something I’d never made before. My report is that if you brown it slowly, as I did, it takes a long time and a lot of stirring, but I was leery of burning it. My big mistake: I added the garlic, didn’t have the tiny bit of spinach suggested, though it would have been good, didn’t want the chopped walnuts (to me they would have been the wrong texture), and—big goof! —forgot the rubbed sage that should have gone in the butter. Still, it was really good, although I could have cooked the ravioli just a tad longer. We ate six, so I have six to cook another time and add the sage.

I accompanied this with a salad of sliced pears, sliced radishes, and blue cheese in a lemon/olive oil dressing and garnished with watercress. I did that particularly for Christian because he loves radishes. I thought it was terrific. Waiting for Christian’s verdict, since I sent some into the house for them.

But I was energized, enjoyed Jean’s company, felt good about the evening.

I have set myself a goal of a thousand words a day on the third Irene story that I’m working on. That, of course, depends on whether or not I have a thousand words worth of inspiration. Today, with having to proof the 28-page neighborhood newsletter and keep up with emails, I managed 991 words. I don’t think I’ll agonize over those last nine words. Maybe tomorrow I can do 1009. Then again, I have set myself another goal—clean out those two out-of-control drawers in my closet. And sometime, I have to do my tax stuff.

Tomorrow, per request, I’m going to cook a beef stew. I am now a convert to an air fryer, but don’t talk to me about InstaPot. I have no room for it, and no patience for the learning curve. I will cook the stew the old-fashioned way—long and slow, all day. I’ll use a recipe I adapted from a popular mystery series set in a coffee house. Yes, it calls for marinating the beef in coffee. Since I don’t drink or make coffee these days, I’ll have to have the Burtons run two cups out to me. But I made this last year and remember that it was good.

I wouldn’t say the world looks better to me tonight. I have a lot of loud opinions on the political scene in America—and the crimes. I may feel I need to rant someday soon but meantime I suggest all of you who are on Facebook read the columns of Heather Cox Richardson, a historian from Boston University. Her last three columns will make you realize how close we came to a coup, how extensive the planning for that was (no, it was not at all spontaneous), and—wait for it—what a roaring success Biden’s first year has been. I can’t repeat that too often!

And me? I’ll be making stew. Long and slow.

Another day of infamy

 

This morning I remarked to a friend that we have had three days of infamy in my lifetime—December 7, September 11, and now January 6. She reminded me I had made an awful omission—November 22, the day of the Kennedy assassination. Still, it’s remarkable to me that my lifetime has seen such catastrophic events in our history. A slight qualifier: I was one year old when Pearl Harbor was hit and have no memory of the event. Still make me old!

If you’re on social media or the internet news at all, there is not much new to be said about yesterday’s attempted coup. But there are questions, a big one being why the Capitol police were not more prepared. Increasingly, talk on the net attributes that to the underlying racism in our society. Law enforcement simply did not expect violence from a bunch of white guys, though they were armed to the teeth and in riot gear for a BLM rally in recent months. My question though is why, since Capitol police basically handled the rioters with kid gloves until the day got away from them, why did they shoot one woman? Granted, she probably knew the risk, and she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it still puzzles me that she was the only apparent victim. Three others are said to have died of medical emergencies.

Today I am in reluctant praise of Vice-president Mike Pence and Leader of the House Mitch McConnell. After sanctioning trump’s antics for four years with their silent complicity, each stood up yesterday and did what they had to do. They probably did more than anything else to defuse the situation. On the other hand, I think Cruz, Hawley and their co-conspirators should not be allowed to help govern our country. The thought of Steve Scalise moaning about violence turns my stomach.

 We’ll be chewing on yesterday’s events for a long time, and we may get some answers. But there are, to me, some good signs—for instance, the Democratic victory in Georgia over two trump supporters. And I bet some trump supporters saw the folly of what they’ve been supporting—too little too late but better than nothing.

Yesterday was sort of a bad day at Black Rock for me even without the national turmoil, though I admit I was glued to the TV all day. I woke in the morning feeling slightly sick to my stomach, a feeling that has bothered me in recent weeks. Never could pinpoint anything I ate and even wondered if it was due to the holidays, covid, and/or the turmoil in our country. Yesterday I contacted my doctor, and he said we would treat it as dyspepsia. The very word conjured up a vision of the gluttonous Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century. But I got a prescription—something not available to Johnson—and expect to feel better from now on.

Then, yesterday, in the midst of the turmoil in Washington, my computer quit. Cold. A black, blank screen. If you know me at all, you know the computer is where I spend my days. I write, I read, I follow some social media, I send and get lots of emails. Without the computer I was at loose ends—seriously considered going back to bed. The plugs and connections for the computer are where my walker and I cannot get to them, so I had to wait for Jordan to finish an extraordinarily long business call. But when she came out to the cottage, she found the problem right away—the monitor had come unplugged. I was back in business.

We had take-out food from our favorite Japanese restaurant last night and then followed our twelfth-night ritual, which we’d almost forgotten in the hectic atmosphere of the day. Jacob was the one who reminded us when he asked at supper, “Isn’t tonight Twelfth night?” Since my childhood, it’s been a family custom for each person to burn a twig from the Christmas tree on Twelfth Night and make a wish for the coming year. Of course, you cannot tell anyone else your wish. So mine was—oh, never mind! Some years we share this custom with neighbors, but this year, because of quarantine, it was just the four of us. At the end of that awful day, I found this custom and a short prayer for Epiphany comforting. It was as a sign that all will be well in the world.

Still, I was grateful last night to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head.