It's dreary yall!
My first re-attempt at the newsletter isn't great. Who cares?!
We’re all obsessed with what we’re eating right now. Of course we are. It’s one of the only sources of variety in our days. Sharing videos of ourselves cooking is one of the only ways to remind each other of that thing, concrete and sustained human interaction, that’s physical, and life-affirming.
I would say I’ve been eating well in quarentine, but that’s not entirely true, I just haven’t been eating a lot of pasta or beans, unlike some of you freaks. I got covid almost immediately, and that made me tired and not want to eat for a few weeks, and then by the time I wasn’t tired covid took away my sense of smell and most of my ability to taste things, so I still wasn’t interested in eating.
(We made matzoh this year. It’s still bad.)
Finally, I got my sense of smell back, but now it’s pesach, and listen, the difference between eating matzo with no sense of taste, and eating it with my sense of taste returned is simply the degree of disappointment I feel as I bite into it.
I have learned one thing in quarentine, which is how to better use my food. I’m not worried about there not being enough (because I’m essentially rich, and I can afford it) but being responsible right now means trying to go to the store as rarely as possible. We went to whole foods on saturday and waited in line to get in for an hour, which also really discourages going to the store. So right now we’re really learning a lot about exactly how long different vegetables last in the refrigerator, because the frozen ones are always sold out. Broccoli lasts a pretty long time, if you make sure that the heads are super tight when you get it. Carrots are good. Sweet potatoes, wow I’ve eaten so many of those (they’re KFP and they last forever). Spinach? Why even kid yourself. It’ll be a bag of slime by tomorrow.
Anyway, here’s what I ate yesterday:
Matzoh with cream cheese and jam
Matzoh with cream cheese and smoked salmon
Leftover bejeweled rice from our seder on saturday
Leftover chicken from friday that we reheated with a skilled on top to get the skin crispy (it worked!)
two bunches of kale (that noah bought on Monday!) sauteed with scallions ginger and garlic
A lot of the chocolate dipped macaroons I made
This is boring. I feel boring right now. Maybe once passover is over I can share something exciting with you, but right now I am drinking a smoothie that I made with almond milk, because oats are chametz, and I’m thinking about how oat-centric my diet usually is, and I’m missing going outside.
I miss my friends. I miss the old man who was always sitting just inside the turnstile at my subway station who always said good morning to me. I miss going shopping whenever I wanted to. I miss the guy who owned the Thai place up the street who would always chat with us when we went in. I miss being angry about people walking three abreast on the sidewalks. I miss getting breakfast at my bodega. I miss going into my office, my coworkers, and the books, and the student workers. I miss having a sense of what was happening. I miss people not dying of a pandemic.
Maybe I’ll do this again.