The masks are off

I, like everyone else, am feeling uncertain about how to emerge from isolation and rejoin un-masked society, as the pandemic seems to be ending.

The last couple weeks I’ve been feeling really awkward – like heading out for a walk in the morning thinking, “is it OK I’m doing this? I must look weird … be dressed weird ….” and just generally feeling like I’m doing it wrong all the time.

I’ve had a couple of situations where I feel like I’m not good at the stuff I’m supposed to be good at and that’s pretty hard to take when you’ve reached as old an age as I have, and have been doing said things for so long.

I keep having those times where I’m mentally playing back an embarrassing situation in my head and blurt out a (usually unrelated) word or phrase; it’s kind of tourettes-like. Or maybe those times are unfamiliar to y’all, and they only happen to me … it’s rare that anyone actually catches me doing it – I’m in the car, or on my bike and saying things like, “good enough for me” or “not this time”.

Case in point – I’m writing recipes for my CSA this summer (this link goes to some of them), and the first batch I handed in were not all usable. You’d think after 15 years of blogging and teaching cooking classes on using CSA produce, and even taking a few recipe writing classes, not to mention being an avid recipe reader since the age of 9, I would have been able to ace the first batch. But no. And then the second time, I confused two types of produce: endive, a.k.a. Belgian endive, that’s like a little yellow cabbage-like head (you go to a fancy party and there’s an appetizer that’s shrimp salad on the end of an endive leaf)  and curly endive, a.k.a. frisée, that’s a big shaggy head.  D’oh, I suggested using the endive that some folks got in their boxes for dip, because I was thinking the cabbage-y thing, not the shaggy leafs. And I missed my chance to provide a recipe for salade lyonnaise, that’s the traditional thing to do with frisée.

Oh, well only up from here, right? To judge from the facebook group people are trying the recipes and liking them, so that’s got to be good.

And I know I’ve had several successful cooking adventures on the home front, but I’ve been forgetting to put dinners into my diet & exercise app so let’s see …. Sunday I didn’t enter anything; I think we had scrambled eggs and bacon and toast for our big brunch, using up the last of the sourdough because the challah was still rising.  Monday for dinner we had brats and baked beans and leftover salads from our Saturday cookout. Tuesday we had brown rice bowls with shiitake mushrooms and asparagus and scallion-ginger rice, that I thought would be one of my CSA recipes because we were getting shiitakes and scallions in the box – but I wrote up these turkey lettuce wraps instead, and then made them for dinner Thursday after I brought the box home. I can’t remember Wednesday … must’ve been leftovers.

Today for brunch we had ham and asparagus quiche, and challah toast and slices of cranberry bread I got out of the freezer topped with the fresh ricotta I made yesterday. And strawberry milk.

And it’s two-pie day – that has to be significant. We’ll have this blueberry buttermilk pie for our traditional Sunday night post-brunch dessert with TV. I put together a couple of different recipes, and I think I used too much sugar in the filling. The recipe that I thought had too much butter (a whole stick) only had 2/3 cup sugar, and that’s what I should’ve used, while the recipe that I thought had a good amount of butter (1/4 cup, half a stick) but probably too much flour and too much sugar, 1 and 3/4 cups that I cut back to 1 and 1/2, and I didn’t put it all together until I’d already mixed up the custard with all that sugar. I don’t have much experience with buttermilk pies, and custard pies in general I’m not as good at as fruit. See rhubarb custard pie.

And, after 15 months of WFH, I finally spent $26 to get an extra camera that I could mount on top of the big monitor my laptop is connected to, so I could  have more variety of camera angles on the zoom than what I get from the camera in the lid of my laptop. I think it’s better, but I still don’t look as good as I look to myself in the bathroom mirror. Maybe I need to cough up another ten bucks for one of those ring lights.