My first grocery trip in more than two weeks was blessedly uneventful.
The parking lots were sparsely populated. A few customers were masked and gloved. And all of us were doing the Alphonse-Gaston routine in the aisles.
“After you, Alfonse.”
“No, you first, my dear Gaston!”
I was surprised to be able to find everything on my list, and doubly so to find everyone bearing up so well. A tip of the Mad Dog chef’s toque to the staffs of Keller’s Farm Stores and Sprouts Farmers Market for keeping the shelves stocked, the checkouts running, and their chins up in trying times.
The ornamental pear is blooming … just in time for the morning low to dip below freezing again.
We’re not down to eating the backyard foliage like Spike the Terrorist Deer. Not yet, anyway.
But it has been about 10 days since our last grocery trip, and we’re having to get creative.
Last night I was scrounging around in the pantry like an old bear fresh from hibernation and thought: “Hmm. Must be something I can do with canned beans other than make emergency burritos.” This is the kind of burrito you make when you don’t feel like going through all the rigamarole involved in making a proper pot of frijoles.
Which I was not. It was my birthday, f’chrissakes.
So I hit The New York Times Cooking site. This is well worth the price of a subscription to The Old Grey Lady. It’s not geared strictly for the condo chef with an eight-burner Wolf gas range and All-Clad out the arse. You’ll find plenty of pantry possibilities too.
I made a few adjustments. Didn’t have any mozzarella, so I used Monterey Jack. Also, I tossed a generous dollop of cilantro-jalapeño salsa in with the tomato paste, and added a pinch of smoked paprika to the spices.
And when it came out of the oven I sprinkled it with some coarsely chopped cilantro and a bit of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Herself contributed a side salad and that was that.
Ali Slagle, who provided the recipe, also offers a snazzier black-bean version. We may try that one down the road. We’re flat out of Jack now, but we still have some sharp Irish Cheddar.
Some driveway artiste was trying to cheer up the passers-by, if any.
I had a Zoom video chat with the BRAINiacs yesterday. My first! Look at me, being all like hep to the jive an’ shit.
The meeting was late in the day, and I burned a whole lot of daylight indoors doing whatever the hell it is that I do around here lately, so instead of kitting up for a ride to the Dark Tower to resupply Herself the Elder I went out for a brisk half-hour limp around the ’hood.
You can see company coming a long ways off out here in the Sandia foothills.
Distancing was social, and I seem to be limping faster, so, yay.
After the Zoom session I test-drove a couple new recipes that met with Herself’s approval: mushroom quesadillas and arroz verde.
For the quesadillas I used flour tortillas and Monterey Jack rather than corn torts and mozzarella. Also, I baked them in the oven instead of frying them in a pan.
For the rice I went with a blend of mild/hot Hatch chile instead of poblano and jalapeño.
Them was the ingredients I had on hand. And y’know what? It did not suck. Didn’t take any pix because I was too busy eatin‘ them sumbitches.
The Zoom thing was cool, too. I got to see some people I haven’t seen in a while, and nobody sneezed on nobody.
We’ve eaten our way through the oven-roasted chicken-and-taters. Likewise the chili con carne (based on me sainted ma’s recipe from our days in Texas). The other day we settled for a simple repast of smoked oysters, cheese, crackers, and salad.
What to cook next?
Mexican, of course.
Herself harvests her latest crop of sprouts.
There were no dried pinto beans to be had on our last hunter-gatherer expedition to Sprouts (gracias, hoarders).
But I found a 2-pound sack stashed away in a cupboard from a months-ago trip to Keller’s. So I cooked up a pound a laSanta Fe School of Cooking, with onion, garlic, chipotle chile, oregano, epazote, cumin, coriander, salt, bay leaf, and chicken broth.
This takes the better part of quite some time, but it’s not as though we’re up to our nalgas in other chores around here.
Flour tortillas we already had. So, burritos, yeah? Claro que si, hombre.
But burritos without green chile sauce are like a day without sunshine. So I thawed some frozen Hatch chile and got after that.
Also, beans without rice? What are you, high? Rick Bayless has a no-frills recipe for red rice in his “Mexican Everyday,” and even a gabacho can make that drunk with one foot in a bucket, or, in my case, sober with one foot in a lace-up ankle brace.
Herself whipped up a couple simple side salads and that was that. Now we have leftovers for a couple days. And then, we’ll switch focus from Mexican to Italian.
We were not Jewish. But whenever one of us was sick, Mom would break out the chicken soup.
Well, kinda, sorta.
It was the sort of soup a harried Midwestern Presbyterian considered suitable for ailing children, a saucepan of rehydrated Lipton chicken noodle, with a side of Premium saltines. And if I played my cards right, I could work Mom for the fake soup and a couple of comic books. Winning!
Well, here we are again. The Plague is upon us, we’re shivering under the comforter, and someone is bringing us a plastic bowl of industrial soup with some dried-up old white crackers.
Say, who is that wearing Mom’s apron? It’s … it’s … oh, my God, it’s. …
• Technical notes: It’s another low-and-slow-fi episode this week. I used an Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB mic, and skipped the Zoom H5 Handy Recorder in favor of recording directly to the MacBook Pro using Rogue Amoeba’s nifty little app Piezo. Editing was as usual, in GarageBand. You’ll recognize Babe and the gang from The Firesign Theatre (“How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All”) and the doctor from “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.” The background music is by Your Humble Narrator, assembled from bits and pieces in the iOS version of GarageBand on a 9.7-inch iPad Pro.
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