Me: Hey mom. Can you send me the recipe for that marinade for flank steak so I can put it on chicken tomorrow?
Mom: Sure! That's fancy -- we're having that meal tomorrow, too.
Me: Oh, that's weird.
::a few minutes into the conversation later::
Mom: We just finished dinner. I made turkey burgers
Me: ... we had turkey burgers for dinner to. Are we... are we menu planning on the same wavelength tonight?
Mom: We must be.
And I had been thinking for a few days about cataloging the food things I've learned or obsevered since being on lockdown for a month.
1. I actually don't hate leftovers if they're homemade.
I'm a little notorious in our house for not eating leftovers. It drives Jack a little bit crazy but ultimately he wins because he gets all leftovers. But I think what I don't like are restaurant/take out left overs except pizza. I will sometimes tolerate Chinese leftovers, and we rarely have Thai leftovers (sadly), but that's about it. But Jack will eat anything.
However, I've made every single dinner since March 13th except ONE, when we ordered pizza. Everything else I've made. And either I make exactly enough for our single meal, or I make enough for the meal and a few days' worth of lunches. I'm actually enjoying this. Last night, I made fajitas, and that means today for lunch I got to have a quesadilla with fajita chicken inside my 'dilla. Jack loves some leftover spaghetti, and our Instant Pot recipe makes PLENTY. I ate lots of leftover tortilla soup. All of these are things that reheat well -- almost better, sometimes.
2. I eat fried eggs now.
Not ever in my life have I enjoyed fried eggs. I am a scrambled only girl. Well, in breakfast contexts. I enjoy a hard boiled egg and a deviled egg. But for breakfast, I am scrambled only. About a year ago, though, I tried putting a fried egg on top of Smitten Kitchen's bacon corn hash (as she recommends) and ... I didn't hate it. It took awhile before I was willing to try a fried egg all on its own, but during this quarantine time, I've learned to enjoy them with some sausage and toast. I will say, though, that I'm still learning to make them. This is one of the few things Jack is actually better at making than I am. It might be the only thing. I'm getting there, though.
3. I'm coming around on 2% milk and I don't even know who I am any more.
Jack and I have wildly different milk tastes -- I'm sure he'd mainline whole milk if he thought he could get away with it, but he sticks to 2% Lactaid, though we've had to forego the Lactaid for regular in these trying times. I, on the other hand, for years and years and years, have been a skim milk girl. And not even necessarily because of the lack of fat, but I just ... like it thinner. And I think it gets colder. I don't know. But a few months ago, I wanted a small milk to take to work with me for tea and cereal and the store was out of the small cartons of skim and I got 1% and ... I didn't hate it, especially in the cereal. And since we've entered this new world of grocery shopping thunder dome, it's been easier just to buy one milk. He uses way more of it than I do and he's much pickier about it than I am (as recently as February we were trying to find a compromise to buy just ONE milk for our hotel room in Vegas) and so I've been buying 2% and ... it's much tastier in my tea and helping in baked goods.
4. Produce is exciting now.
I mean, I like fruits and vegetables, but I never thought I'd be so excited to see lettuce appear in my Sprouts order this morning. Like nearly in tears at the sight of BOTH a head of iceberg lettuce AND a batch of romaine. AND STRAWBERRIES. So it's the little things, I guess.
5. I'm getting better at timing out my meal making
One of the things that always astounds me about my mom is how perfectly she can time out a meal. Everything is ready all at the same time, and this has always felt like a huge feat to me. No matter how much I try to logic it out, I almost always have one part of the meal not ready when I need it or want it. Cooking so much now, though, I'm getting markedly better at timing out the prep of all the parts. I feel so fancy and accomplished.
All of this being said, I'm not cooking anything super de duper fancy because I'm using what I have stashed or what I can get from online grocery ordering. Our standard go-to meals are...
- turkey burgers
- meatballs, sauce, and ravioli
- Instant pot spaghetti
- Pulled chicken sandwiches
- chicken fingers
- spicy chicken stir fry
- tortilla soup (when I can get cilantro)
- corn dogs
- tacos or fajitas
- DiGiorno pizzas (h/t to Erica for introducing us to these like a year ago)
- sandwiches
- breakfast
- bacon corn hash
- grilled chicken, mac n cheese, and broccoli
I guess that's a wider range of meals than I thought. I'm hoping that tomorrow we can add a new meal to our repertoire, and I have others but I can't quite get ingredients for them. (Meatloaf, for example). I also eventually want to make like a baked chicken/mashed potato/corn meal, one of my favorites. but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
Oh, and y'all, my new pancake hack, of subbing in half the flour with pastry flour? It's the best. I'm never NOT making them this way, unless of course I can't quite get by hands on more pastry flour for the foreseeable future. Honestly, though. Watching my mom eat two pancake tacos the other morning was a triumph in my cooking life.
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