Cooking and Such

Well I left that bleak post up quite a long while, and I’m sorry about that. Like everyone, I am experiencing the emotional “roller coaster” of quarantine – some days I’m amazing at this and it’s great and I’m loving the family time, and other days I just can’t take another step. I can usually shake off the blahs after a bit of time, and while work is stressful as always, it’s also helpful to keep me bumping along. I cannot wallow too much when I have briefs to write and clients to talk to, and very often when I get to the end of a busy day where I have been effective and useful, I feel better.

Shortly after that post was written, we took a 4th of July trip to my parents’ house along with all four of my siblings and their families. I am sure your coronavirus-fearing heart is shuddering, but it was a calculated risk. We have always stayed at home and masked up at the grocery and such (still and always, until there is a vaccine), so quarantining before the trip was sort of a given. We got corona tests before we went – confirmed negative. While there, we obviously opened ourselves up to a LOT of people, but upon our return we quarantined again. Preventing an outbreak of coronavirus is very important, but you can still take calculated risks to assure your mental health and family relationships survive this thing, and this trip did wonders for everyone’s happiness and mental sturdiness. It took a few days for me to get over the high of the trip once we returned home – then I was very sad for a brief bit, and now I’m back on an even keel.

My parents bought an above-ground pool online for the grandkids. They . . . thought it was gonna be way bigger than this.

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We took a masked-up, timed-entry, one-way path-only trip to the zoo. The ring tailed lemur chillin’ on the fence cracked me up.

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Feeding twenty people at every meal was a challenge, but we got it done. This flag cake was just two angel food cakes from the Publix bakery, torn up and layered with Cool Whip with berries on top.

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The kids did their annual dinosaur excavation one day in the week. My middle sister has been preparing frozen blocks of ice-trapped plastic dinosaurs every year since Craig was a baby, and each year the excavation gets a little more violent and dangerous. This year she made two and had a “babies’ table” and a “big kids’ table,” to prevent broken fingers.

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We had family pictures made. It was easy to distance from the photographer outside, and I’m so glad we did them. Margot, the 9 month old baby in yellow, was NOT HAVING IT but I think we managed a couple of pictures where she isn’t visibly screaming.

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We had lots of fun outside times, including Red Rover games in the sprinkler, blowing bubbles using just bubble solution and our hands, grilling out, a jerry-rigged slip ‘n slide (yes, that’s a bottle of Crisco oil, slippery boys go faster), and a fire.

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We also had good times inside, sitting in Rubbermaid containers to watch movies (???), guarding the stairs from toddlers, playing board games, watching movies, passing babies around, and just being all together.

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We also filmed our latest and greatest movie, The Great Baby Baking Show, which I am still editing together. It was lots of fun – I basically just took a lot of footage of the littlest kids playing with kitchen-ware and am dubbing Liam’s narration over top.

It was a very special time, and I have no regrets (even though baby Margot came down with a fever and we all waited with bated breath for her test, which took SEVEN DAYS to come back – negative. Totally useless.)

After that trip, we came back and resumed the norm. It’s a little harder for me right now, because it is the time of year where we can’t go outside. At the beginning of this thing it was March – the absolute perfect time of year in NOLA. In March, April, and even May I was taking daily walks or bike rides, and sitting on the back deck or the front porch to do work sometimes and expand our usable living space. In June, July, and continuing probably straight through until November, going outside is just miserable. The heat and humidity is oppressive and even if I could use fans and misters to survive those, the mosquitoes always drive me back in the house. I purchased a bike trainer so I could at least get some cardio inside, and the thing makes SO MUCH NOISE. I have to get a different smooth tire and possibly a different trainer, and I sort of lost my momentum with that for now. I still train with my personal trainer three times a week via zoom, and it’s surprisingly effective even though I don’t have a weight rack. I haven’t done a proper deadlift or squat with the bar in a while, but hopping around holding gallons of juice while Danny shouts at me over the Zoom is great cardio, anyway.

I have been trying all kinds of recipes lately, and so I shall end this post with a list of some favorites. My most impressive feat lately was cooking a whole fish – I scaled it, gutted it, and (after cooking) filleted it myself. And it was WAY BETTER, so much less dry – which makes sense since the skin traps the moisture. I’ll definitely do it again!

RECIPES

Vegan winter lentil stew – this was a Lag Liv recommendation, and I was afraid I’d be hungry five minutes after eating it but it was absolutely delicious and hearty and filling and great.

My whole fish was a red snapper. For this meal, I looked up how to gut and scale the fish and did that on the back deck (I was pulling errant scales out of my decolletege for days), how to cook a whole fish, and how to carve and serve a whole fish. I served the fish with mashed potatoes and roasted green beans on the side – and it was GONE in seconds, guys.

Sun-dried tomato pasta with chicken and mozzarella. I have made this before but I never had sun-dried tomatoes around and so I skipped them. They got a bit over-used back in the nineties and aughts, and I tend to think they’re gross, but let me tell you I included them this time and they really made a difference. I think that you just have to be sure you chop them up fine – nobody wants a whole big slab of dried tomato in their mouth, but chopped up fine they really add to the flavor.

Spicy oven fried catfish – everybody LOVES these. Homemade fish sticks, essentially, and spicy and crispy and delish. I served these with crispy baked fries, using all of the voluminous steps in this sweet potato fries recipe but I adjusted the cooking time for regular potatoes (didn’t have any sweet potatoes on hand). We had peas with this too. Oh man, good stuff.

Roasted chiles rellenos with black beans. These were amazing. I only had dried black beans, so I had to cook those separately in the instant pot, but it worked perfectly – and the roasted tomatillo sauce is *chef’s kiss. I served this with rice made with water and a can of Rotel mixed in.

Southern field peas and snaps. I have (had) a ton of dried beans (we were invaded by green weevils in our pantry and I had to throw a distressingly large number of dried beans away, sob). I found this recipe for my dried field peas and holy cow – it was really, really good. The kids could not get enough.

Creamy Parmesan Chicken and mushrooms. Nobody in my house likes mushrooms but I told them to suck it up this time. This was great – I served it over rice.

Turkey meatloaf with homemade potato salad (mayo, mustard, sweet pickle juice, cayenne, celery, celery seed, a tiny sprig of dill). Due to the pantry weevils, I had to not only toss a lot of food but also cook up a whole bag of potatoes. I made mashed, roasted, and left some boiled chunks of potato to make potato salad, which the kids absolutely hated but I think it’s good. The turkey meatloaf was flavorful and moist – and also not very stiff. It ended up being a sort of pile of cooked meat on the plate. But turkey is usually really dry so I was fine with the recipe – it tasted good!