⚡ March 22, 2020
The First To Go 🐔
I am heartbroken at the turn of things in the world and I don’t know who to blame and I am worried. We have a variety of leaders covering the globe like a patchwork quilt of crazy ideas and governing styles, and we are seeing the various results on global maps that look like a backdrop from a movie called We’re all gonna die!
Which we are, of course, and all in good time, I hope. I hope this is a Potemkin pandemonium, and if so, we’ll be OK. But first, let’s roll up our sleeves and wash our hands and get to work. Things need saving.
The minute this started to darken the horizon – which for me was easily sometime in January because I have curated a lively Twitter feed which keeps me up to date with what people I trust are thinking and saying. So, by following leads and clues, I’ve felt that things might change. Twitter, for me, is a piece of the hive mind I can reliably listen to, bit I slip in and out of Facebook with trepidation because my age group is taking incoming pretty hard. We’re dropping like flies around here, and that’s not even counting the Plague. Twitter can be as impersonal as you want it to be; Facebook, not so much.
Do we really have a plague or is it pretty much like SARS or MERS and I’m not even sure about either of them. I pretty much don’t get a cold or the flu until I do … and then I get over it as soon as possible. I’ve always believed that you catch your headcold or flu or sniffles or sneezes from a particular commercial during the cold and flu season. Every season there’s one that will get you if you need a rest. I’m alert to this threat and so I’m immune. [[They live.]] I don’t ever get a shot, but Bill always doea, and sometimes we share a cold and sometimes we don’t. I’ve often told my kids this TV-meme-catching theory, which is why they are as jumpy as I am, but for opposite reasons. Nonetheless, watching too much gloom and doom can make you feel gloomy and then what?
You actually have to shake it off, which means it isn’t something trivial that’s going on in your head. So, to work: the first thing you have to do is to look over all your food – in the freezer, in the weird cubboards you use that the mice can’t reach (so far) – everywhere. Look it over and look especially for anythhing that’s going bad. Usually, such things lurk in the vegetable bin, in the back. I wrote a whole novel about this, which I will also be giving away when I finish this blog entry. I was working on a cookbook, ironically, when all this hit. So, I’m going to share the recipes and the things I’ve learned just recently, in the hope that it might help someone.
Make sure to grab the free Cheaper & Better until midnight tomorrow, March 23. If we’re all still here … I am so worried. What if … what if … you can fill in the blanks. This is all so horrible. If you happen to have cucumbers and onions getting ready to give up the ghost, attend to them first. No matter what is ailing and/or expiring at the bottom of your fridge, put it out on the counter and google some recipes for that particular thing. It might be an eggplant, for example. Go! Google it!
Here’s what I did with the cucumbers and onions:
'Tis Just Tzatziki (Cucumber Yogurt Salad)
- 2 cucumbers, peeled, quartered lengthwise, then sliced
- 1/2 onion, sliced thinly
- Plain yogurt, about 1 cup
- 1 teaspoon dried dill, or a couple of teaspoons of fresh dill
- 1 teaspoon chia seeds
- Sprinkling of salt and pepper
It’s not that the cucumbers were totally soft; they just weren’t as hard as they first were when they came home from the store. The store. We have loved having a farmer’s market, a health food store, a speciality grocery called McCaffrey’s that’s a wonderland, and then of course, there’s the trusty old Giant, where they barely lift a finger and they already have a robot. Who’s going to work in the stores if there’s a virus? OMG? I just realized what my mother, who worked at a Pathmark, would already have figured out the minute she laid eyes on that creepy robot. Of course. They knew.
