Scribblings

And the quarantine continues

Is it week two or three… or forty?

What do you do if you are Italian and stuck at home all day? You order a gabillion dollars’ worth of groceries and cook it all even if there is no one else in the house to eat it except you. Based on this premise, I am proud to now announce that I have chicken broth, chicken soup, chicken salad, broiled chicken, boiled chicken and a meatloaf in my refrigerator. I have a gallon of my mom’s Sunday sauce in the freezer accompanied by about three gallons of beans and cabbage soup. Yep, I may die of Covid 19 but I will be the most well fed dead person you will ever see.

Here’s a tip I learned while experimenting in my kitchen. If you make your meatloaf exactly the same way you make your meatballs, you end up with one giant meatball. And that means that if you want to make a nice tomato sauce for spaghetti, you just cut up some in the sauce and simmer it until the meat is falling apart. Add to pasta with some Parmesan cheese on the top and enjoy.

If you are not a person attempting to eat their body weight through this epidemic, I’m not sure what other indoor activities I can recommend. Washing your sheets twice a week seems a futile exercise. Rearranging tea bag boxes that you never use but always buy because the names seem so tasty only takes ten minutes at best – and that’s even if you do it alphabetically based on real fruit content. I have straightened our everything in the house that could possibly be straightened. I washed all the dogs’ toys and spent an hour carefully dividing them between upstairs and downstairs. Because as we all know so well, dogs will never carry their toys from one floor to another in your house.

I know we will probably all survive this, no matter how scary it seems right now. And it seems very scary. I am honestly terrified of putting my head out the door for fear some long lasting air born virus will find me. So, I will continue on my quest to find things to keep me occupied that don’t scare the dogs or birds. I make no promises but I might soon have some great suggestions for walking around your house putting plants in different spots to see where they look good and get lots of sunlight. You can kill an hour easy with this if you walk slowly enough. I’ll check back with you in a week to tell you if it is a good exercise or if my plants are now trying to run away from home. Sheesh – you finally give them all the attention they seem to have been craving and what is your reward? They look at you as though you’ve lost your mind and try to back away as quickly as possible when you start heading for them. You know it’s bad when even the plants are running away from you.

            I’ve decided that I will only read books about how hard life was in the past so that the present will not seem so insurmountable. Once you’ve read about how people handled human waste in places like London in the 1700s or 1800s, having to parse your toilet paper squares is suddenly not such a hardship. It also reminds me that as bad as the world may seem right now, there were times in the past when it was so much worse. Our ancestors survived and so will we.

Now let’s get back in that kitchen and see what you can make with all those items at the back of your closet and refrigerator that you bought swearing you would use. Now’s the time. What can you make with that strange flour, weird condiments and unrecognizable left over from the freezer? My nonna would have fed her family for a week on that. So now you have the challenge.