I think last night’s dinner was truly the first Pandemic Improv meal I’ve made. It took 42 days!
We’ve had leftovers many times; another thing we do in our house is called Hodge Podge – when you take the odds and ends of things too small to make a whole dinner out of, and graze on them – and we’ve done that too.
Last night, lack of an onion was tripping me up in all sorts of ways. I ended up forging ahead with lentil soup (if you didn’t buy lentils for quarantine, are you even quarantining?) in order to make good use of my leftover faux-tisserie chicken.
If you’re looking at that recipe and thinking: 12 cups of chicken broth? In this economy? Just know that you can use water for some or all of it (I did about 1/3 broth, 2/3 water). And if you don’t have onions and celery, just throw in half a bag of frozen leaf spinach. Maybe some smoked paprika. Maybe several more carrots than are called for! Go nuts. YOLO. Etc.
(The young woman who cuts our hair once giggled at my husband for saying YOLO. “I haven’t heard anyone use that term in forever!” This is tragic because my husband thought he was being cool. After a certain point you can never truly keep up with the young, no matter how much TikTok you consume. How do you do, fellow kids!)
Anyway. I went to the store this morning and now I have onions and many more things. Heinen’s is monitoring how many people are in the store at one time, so it was much more relaxed than last time I went. They’re still out of some things but overall it feels less dystopian than a few weeks ago. If, of course, you ignore the face shields and masks and tape marking off six feet of personal distance. But this is just how things are now.
I think I might have broken or bent my sewing machine needle today. I do have an extra needle but tackling the process of replacing it (for the first time, anyway) feels daunting. How I did this while sewing quilting cotton I have no idea, but here we are.
It’s looking more and more like Ohio’s stay-at-home order won’t be extended past May 1, so we’ll soon be entering a new phase of this pandemic. I personally am fine with continuing to stay home as much as possible, but it’s easier for us than it is for a lot of people so that’s easy for me to say.
I can tell you that one of the first things we’ll do once we’re able is to get our dog trainer back and try to prevent the puppy from being Forever Delayed. A lot of times I find myself giving her commands and expecting her to comply, which, whoops. Right now she is more or less at the convergence point of uncontrolled puppy energy and being big/coordinated enough to climb on/jump off of things, which is truly the worst. Also, if her brother is getting any kind of attention from either of us, she runs over and bashes him out of the way so we can pay attention to her. Undesirable!
That is probably how we will all act once we can be in each others’ presence again.