COVID-Diet

At first, it was an adventure. Digging through the pantry and finding cans of black olives from Costco, supplies of condiments, cans of soup that sounded good but were past their best by date. Getting deliveries or having friends in the building to drop off produce and bread and eggs. Cooking rice and pasta shoved back in the pantry. We discovered (through one of the friends bringing us food) an Indian simmer sauce that dressed up vegetables and chicken and salmon by turns. We stocked up on nacho makings but, oddly, didn't have them too often. We made salads. When friends bringing food brought more of something than we bargained for, we looked up recipes. We clipped recipes and found them online and drug out the few cookbooks we preserved from the big move twelve years ago. I made Welsh Rarebit after securing the Guinness from the deli downstairs that is needed in the Fergus Henderson recipe.

We had spaghetti squash, lots of spaghetti and sauces, wilted spinach salad, Caesar salad, a ton of tuna salad. 

We don't go inside the deli downstairs. Instead, we order and pay on the phone. Drive down from the garage, get food placed in the trunk. That's almost the only beer I've had save a can of Shiner left in the tiny house we rented for July and August by our friendly host. When I'm ordering groceries I don't think to get beer. What beer would I get? I'm too busy getting bread and eggs and such when making grocery orders online or calling the deli. I used to enjoy looking at the choices. In a store. I haven't been inside a store for so long.

Now I have ordered some special foods, though. Caviar. (Well, cheap roe anyway.) White anchovies. I swear if the grocery stores that were taking my online orders had sweetbreads or foie gras I would order them and attempt to cook them. I have a fantastic sweetbread recipe somewhere, that I copied out of someone else's cookbook and then made some adjustments.

We look around, though, and say we have some baking potatoes, cheese, butter, green onions. Make a baked potato dressed in the microwave. I like to add yogurt if I have some and FFP hot sauce since he can't eat yogurt. Say we have an apple, some eggs, and canned tuna. Tuna salad it is. Hopefully, there is some dill relish and mayo or it just won't work.

It gets tiresome. We save the frozen stuff for an emergency. We get a pound or two of ground meat. Will it be burgers, a meat sauce and spaghetti? Or chili. Two pounds of ground pork we got makes an outstanding Texas chili.

If you are inside 270 days plus then (for us) that is over 800 meals (I don't eat breakfast) and snacks. That's a lot of planning and shopping (that has to be done online or over the phone or through messaging friends). FFP usually has oatmeal and almond milk for his breakfast. But, for a while, he switched to eggs. This upset the egg allocation.

We were the eating out elite before this pandemic lockdown. We would have meals at home (especially breakfast and lunch), but, if we felt like it, we would sit in a restaurant for dinner. Lunch even.  We'd take walks and in the middle of it stop for a meal or snack. What a luxury.

I worry about getting the right nutrients, of course. I order V8 and fruit. I get broccoli and other veggies. I get mandarins to get some vitamin C. I put raisins on my salads. And we have lettuce. And BLTs, too!

Getting V8, though, inspired the Bloody Mary phase wherein I tried to use up the vodka we had around. Ah, COVID drinking. But that's another story.

The good news? I have lost five pounds.