Dish O' The Sea

First the good news: I got flour in my grocery order this week! Yay! What a treat. In ~these times~ it's really the little things that bring a lot of comfort.

The bad news: I realize now that I should not have muttered something about how I was kind of bored in quarantine in such close proximity to our curséd monkey's paw--truly a rookie mistake, in retrospect--because almost immediately, my living room collapsed and my child was hospitalized with pneumonia.

The predictable news, if you know me in real life or have been reading this blog for a long time: I still made everyone eat sardines, for the blog.

(The child in question is okay now, tested negative for the virus, was discharged this morning and did not have to take home her pet oxygen tank.)

American Pandemic

It didn't even affect the outrageous ratings inflation we have going on around here, as evidenced by her assessment of overnight hospitalization:

Slightly more enthusiasm than for beets

And, okay, the living room bit was an exaggeration, it was only the bookshelf that fell apart. But I felt like I underplayed 48 hours in the ICU enough to earn throwing a little rhetorical spice on the crumbling infrastructure part of my week.

It was still very loud and not...you know...great

Anyway, we are here to talk about Dish O' The Sea, which is sardines on top of hash browns. It tasted like fish. Ivy asked for extras.

ASSESSMENT: It is intended to "keep you warm in the cold sea air," which is a thing I do not currently have access to, but I guess it did fortify me against my own air conditioning.

PROJECT STATUS: Honestly after this week it's pretty hard to imagine anything derailing it You know what probably better not to speculate

Vegetable Medley

Back in early March, when going to the grocery store was still normal and easy, I speculated that I should not have wasted this privilege by buying eggplant. Anyway, grocery procurement is now highly fraught and every need/desire must be carefully vetted for worthiness and this week I bought...beets.

Compulsive blog project completionism is a need/desire

I loosely based my Vegetable Medley on this lovely salad. Mine does not look like the lovely salad in question. Mine looks like the shower scene from Psycho.

Honestly, makes me slightly prouder of it

Really thought I would finally get a definitive thumbs down, as beets taste like sweetened dirt, but no. Overly generous ratings abound. 

ASSESSMENT: I like that the Stardew version of this promises nothing beyond "very nutritious." No mention of "will make your kitchen look like a crime scene."

PROJECT STATUS: Currently wearing the same clothes I slept in, as we hurtle towards noon here. I also wasted yet another precious grocery space on an ingredient that Dan eyeballed warily and asked "Is this...for something?" So you have that to look forward to!

Stir Fry

As you know, now is the time for resourcefulness. Is it also the time for dumb blog projects? Per...haps. The time for resourcefulness within dumb blog projects though? Yes, absolutely.

I am pleased to report that I am using every part of this buffalo by remembering that I made and rejected a Stardew recipe last May, intending to retry it at some point. But that was when I lived in a world that involved easily going to the grocery store for more kale and mushrooms and seeing humans outside of my immediate family and putting my bare hands just all over everything, I mean every surface you got, I'm gonna touch it, etc. This is, clearly, no longer that world, and thus I present: my Stir Fry failure of 11 months ago.

Did I follow a recipe? Dunno. Did I make the children eat it? No evidence either way. Was the only thing wrong with it the fact that I personally do not like mushrooms? 85% chance. 

Here is the next picture of the girls in order after the picture of the stir fry. They're at a bus stop. That's going to take them away. To school. 

For an entire day. 

ASSESSMENT: Stir Fry: C-, living in a grocery store and bus stop world: A++++++++++++++

PROJECT STATUS: Might just have several weeks of trying to perfect that Triple Shot Espresso recipe ahead of us

Triple Shot Espresso

Things are pretty touch-and-go regarding ingredients now, so the Stardew project is officially entering the "Well, I tried" phase.* Hence: Triple Shot Espresso, which is neither espresso nor shots. Discuss.

In my defense, I followed the ingredient list exactly.

Mostly I am just trying to get back to the roots of my blogging, which involves pictures of perpetually bemused children.

Finally conquered those automatic thumbs up

ASSESSMENT: Three cups of coffee? Best recipe yet.

PROJECT STATUS: Peppy


*I'm just kidding, this whole blog** falls within the category of "Well, I tried"
**My entire life

Bread

I heard all the white people online are making bread now? So...here I am.

Now, I see you out there with your "perfectly golden crust" and your "successful sourdough starter" and I just want to say that not only did I choose the recipe titled The Easiest Loaf of Bread You'll Ever Bake, I managed to mis-measure one of the four ingredients by a truly hilarious amount.

What I made is not a crusty baguette. You're a crusty baguette.

Also, here is what the rest of that table looks like.

The good news is that even dense, mis-measured bread is not bad. Smells nice. Children love it because they do not have refined enough palates to fully appreciate your failure.

Did we used to brush our hair, ever?

...probably not?

ASSESSMENT: Worth the flour....mostly. Worth the yeast? I guess. Worth all the extra water I absolutely flooded it with? Sure.

PROJECT STATUS: Eh. Here are two new words I learned recently that I enjoy and you might too: 

• automatonophobia
• pseudocide

Rice Pudding

When I mentally categorized rice pudding as a "maybe for lockdown" recipe it was based on the rice and brown sugar being pantry staples that I have in plenty. Somehow I fully overlooked the TWO AND A HALF CUPS OF MILK involved to make four tiny servings. This is...an outrageous amount of milk. It is hard to get milk right now. I own no cows at this time. Did I still make rice pudding? Of course. I am trying to preserve a small degree of normalcy and "pursuing blog projects to my own detriment" is my normal state.

Status quo

The girls liked this, probably because I did not tell them what's about to happen to their morning cereal.

Did we always wear bathrobes to dinner? ....probably, right?

ASSESSMENT: At this point this section just has to be about whether a recipe is worth the ingredients used, and...no. But this would have been a success in the Before Times.

PROJECT STATUS: Sheltering-in-place until at least April 13th

Some things to do if you are also sheltering-in-place:

• "Mindful coloring" with relaxing classical music
• Free books on Audible for all ages
• Educational shows for kids available on streaming
• Keep playing Animal Crossing even though you find it more frustrating than relaxing solely so you can understand the Animal Crossing references on Twitter; lie to yourself that this is not the only reason you do most of the things you do
• Wonder at what point in the apocalypse you get to shave your head and perhaps more enticingly the heads of your children 
• Duolingo, I guess, although between this and Animal Crossing you are starting to feel a surprising resentment toward cartoon owls
• Do one random stretch in the kitchen just to see if your body still...like, works
• Run the dishwasher again
• Spend your allotted 45 minutes per afternoon convinced that you have it, you definitely have it, you can't breathe and you feel terrible 
• Check the Austin allergy report and determine that the lung-squeezing culprit is actually oak pollen, as it has been for like eight days in a row
• Note that you hit an all-time record high temperature for this week in March because your enemy, the sun, has seized its chance to run wild much like the various animals taking over mostly-empty cities
• Check to make sure the local ice cream place is still doing home delivery, just in case
• Look out the window for a very long time
• Crafts!

Miner's Treat

Haha, well. I guess we'll see how long maintaining this keeps up! It's only been a few days of ~all this~ and I'm already having a liiiiiiiiittle trouble remembering what day of the week it is. Probably because each day is about three weeks long. So maybe blogging will drop off entirely along with my access to weird Stardew-specific ingredients or maybe I will go hard the other direction and post like three times a day. Literally no way to know. Not knowing what will happen! It's all the rage.

How are you? Are you okay? Do you normally spend a lot of time outside your house? Because one thing I've noticed is that my personal schedule has actually not changed very much except that there are now people constantly underfoot, creating dirty dishes in an amount that seem...out of proportion to their numbers. So as someone who was apparently already self-isolating: try to wash your face in the morning and wear daytime pants vs. nighttime pants, even if daytime pants are very stretchy. Or don't! Don't wear pants at all, I'm not your mom. I'm not even enforcing this amongst people whomst mom I am. But, you know, if you like having a whisper of structure. A soupçon of stability. Daytime pants.

I hesitate to even post these pictures because I can already envision Me A Month From Now grimacing at the bright colors and smiling children and make-the-best-of-it art project quality of this moment as I survey the abandonment of daytime pants and crumbling moods of my family members who have finally come to realize exactly how many beans I intend to serve them through this ordeal. On the other hand, maybe we won't even have internet a month from now, so:

I did not use "cave carrots" because that is a made up thing and I don't have time for nonsense right now, Stardew Valley. Only for Rainbow Cookie Lollipops.

ASSESSMENT: This is the most I have veered away from the actual game recipe, but it looks pretty good and it was in fact fun to play with the different colors of cookie dough.

PROJECT STATUS: Uuuuuhhhhhhh I guess grimly determined? I don't know. Tell me what TV shows to watch.

Eggplant Parmesan

A few days ago I was eyeing Rice Pudding as this week's recipe, but when I realized it's mostly pantry staples I immediately shifted it over to the "potential quarantine recipe" pile, which was not a joke to myself exactly, but still had a sort of haha, you know, maybe, just in case quality. As of today though it's just on a "potential quarantine recipe" pile without any qualifiers.

Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway.

It's been a while since I did a Stardew recipe that I knew would taste good but would also be a pain to make, so Eggplant Parmesan it is:

I'm not sure the girls even consider whether they like a thing before they give it a thumbs up anymore, I think they have just trained themselves to give the camera a thumbs up. At any rate, it gives me some leverage in the "finish your dinner" battle if they approved of it at the outset, so it's win-win for me.

ASSESSMENT: It's far too much work to make eggplant taste good. Dredging it through flour AND milk AND breadcrumbs THEN cooking it THEN assembling it into the main dish? This is where my extreme aversion to dirtying more cookware/dishes than necessary really rears its head.

PROJECT STATUS: Lol I mean what is the status of literally anything right now honestly

Pale Broth

You know how last week I was complaining about how hard it is to take decent pictures of dinner in the winter darkness? And how soup absolutely suffers the most in the absence of natural lighting? And how I literally only need to wait three more days for that situation to resolve itself? Anyway, I made soup this week.

This might be my worst "eh, close enough" offender of the project so far--when I looked up "white algae" 100% of my results were about removing it from your fish tank. And no offense Marnie, but "a hint of sulfur" is not a huge incentive to go for authenticity on this one. Thus I feel no compunction about my substitution, a pale broth that is both easy to make and very delicious and comforting: miso soup.

Soup is a category of food that I generally find pretty magical, but miso soup is in the special subcategory of "oh, I can actually feel this fixing some of my problems as I eat it." 

Not sure it resolved any of life's problems for my children, and I feel like they asked "what is this part?" about the tofu at least three times each, but in the end they liked it okay.

ASSESSMENT: This was great but the actual dish sounds pretty terrible. Scraping your fish tank for dinner is some sad Depression-era stuff like making cake out of apples and sawdust or whatever.

PROJECT STATUS: ON THE VERGE OF BEING FLATTERINGLY LIT AGAIN

Red Plate, Parsnip Soup

Okay! I'm back on Stardew. I have RETURNED TO THE VALLEY. I have cooked, for you, the most appetizing possible combination of words: Red. Plate.

Mmm, Red Plate, just the sound of it sends your heart soaring

Okay, so this one feels like maybe the last thing that got named? When everyone was tired? I interpreted red cabbage and radish to be a slaw, which was fine. It tasted like the vegetables therein. Was it as good as the twice-baked mashed potatoes with smoked gouda that I served alongside it? No. Sorry. Beige Plate wins the day.

One of the reasons for my heel-dragging on returning to the blog after my break (aside from my heels' natural shape and density giving them a propensity to drag) is that taking pictures of dinner in the winter is a SUCKER'S GAME. For example, I made this Parsnip Soup in late January and this was the best picture to come out of it:

Grim

Said sad winter lighting also causes the children to look especially haunted.

ASSESSMENT:  Red Plate: as advertised. My hopes for the parsnip soup, as for all soups, were high, and I was disappointed to find it thin and blandly sweet. Not "fresh and hearty" at all! Lies!

PROJECT STATUS:  Spring will be here soon and I am at the point in Breath of the Wild where I have done most things other than fight the Big Boss, which I do not want to do, so looks like everything's coming up Stardew!