Right out of the oven
Tag: Food
Plants adjusting to the outdoors
Home-grown, of course
As the supply chain breaks down
First, it’s chicken, as we discovered trying to reserve thighs for the local soup kitchen. Our usual supermarket can’t guarantee us it can have them for Thursday.
(Let’s not start a run on the stores, though. They should be smart enough to be limiting purchases to one per customer or so by now.)
Next will be pork, apparently, followed by beef.
Blame the Covid-19 outbreaks out in the big-producer lands. Workers too sick too work.
I’m wondering about eggs, though many of those are grown locally. I hope.
What do you suppose those protesters out in Michigan are going to do about this?
Crystalized sweet
Quick dinner
I’d love to take a train ride but …
My wife mentioned that she’s seeing a lot of deals from Amtrak, and that had me thinking how overdue I am for a trip on the Downeaster to Boston or the other way up to Portland, Maine, or beyond. As a senior, I even get to ride at half-price.
Of course, Covid-19 came into the picture, and I started flashing through the factors.
If the train’s not crowded, I’d have plenty of social distance. I could also carry hand sanitizer and even wear my colorful homemade mask to reduce risk of exposure.
I’ve been wanting to go to a Boston Symphony concert, finally see their new music director in action, but then I paused, realizing all of those concerts have been cancelled.
My considerations moved on to a visit at Harvard’s famed Fogg art museum, which had reopened after extensive renovations. Well, reopened is the wrong word. For the time being, it’s closed again. Hope the renovations hold.
Ditto, too, for a fine meal, maybe even in the North End’s Little Italy a few blocks from North Station. Forget that during the coronavirus shutdowns.
So it looks like that getaway is off, maybe till autumn? Or sometime next year?
This is getting boring. Or something like that.
Even a local ‘soup kitchen’ suffers under Covid restrictions
My Quaker Meeting is part of two local ecumenical groups, one of them providing free twice-a-week community suppers for people in need. Our dinner guests are the homeless, especially, and others living in subsidized housing, but nobody asks questions as we welcome anyone who simply shows up. Each congregation cooks and serves its own menu on a monthly rotation. We Quakers do barbecued chicken thighs, mashed potatoes, and cole slaw, with pulled pork as the previous feature. Hey, it’s yummy and something nearly everyone likes. I love the rare times we have leftovers.
Even though the event is commonly called a soup kitchen, none of us serve soup anymore. The term simply points back to the tradition’s origins. The Methodists do lasagna. The Greek Orthodox do American chop suey and Greek salad. You get the idea.
So when our hosts at the Episcopal church decided to close their hall during the duration of the Covid-19 crisis, a concern for the dinner’s guests led to an exemption. The various congregations could still use the kitchen, but all the food would be takeout, something restaurants were later also ordered to do, while sit-down dining was prohibited.
It’s not the same, of course. We’re getting less than half of the turnout, but many are asking for two meals, to share with others, as well as an extra for the next day. So we’re happily dishing out about the same amount of food.
What we’re really missing is the community interaction. Many of the regulars enjoyed this as a time to socialize without having to spend precious cash on a place to sit. Better yet, this place was free of alcohol. Many would come early and stay till closing time, when an AA group prepared for its own meeting.
Another factor in shifting to takeout is that many of the volunteers are retirees in a Covid-19 susceptible range. Many of them are staying self-isolated, reducing the pool of workers. Usually, with everyone on board, it’s a kind of party, but when everything falls on just a few, things can be stressful. We’ll see.
But I do wonder if that’s what tipped one congregation to call in some caterers. That, or a desire to help our suffering local restaurants, too.
One other influence to consider is transportation. Our region is served by two public bus systems, both of them shut down by the coronavirus, and that may be keeping some of the regulars from getting to the church social hall.
What similar sorts of adjustments are you seeing where you live?
What’s with all the hoarding?
Where I live, any weather forecast of an approaching nor’easter, big snow, or deteriorating hurricane is enough to prompt a run on all of a supermarket’s milk, canned soup, and bread, usually in that order. It’s idiotic, I know, but it is a New England tradition for many households.
Somehow, though, those grocery shelves are always reloaded by the next day or two. Not to worry.
What we’re seeing with Covid-19, however, is something different. I mean, toilet paper? At first, I thought it was a joke, considering all the BS emanating from the hat-guy and the mess we’ve been hoping to clean up through the last three years. But no, not quite that, even if it does make for an easy-to-connect symbol of what’s passing for leadership.
Face it, people are scared.
Scared of something they can’t see, a virus.
They want something to hold on to, a sense of security or invincibility.
No wonder sanitizer suddenly became a valued commodity.
As “it” spread – the virus and the hoarding – the dried bean shelves were soon also emptied of something most Americans normally wouldn’t eat on a bet. (When’s the last time you had bean soup? It raises a specter of soup kitchens and poverty in the Great Depression, right?) So leave the chick peas (garbanzos), lentils, turtle beans, and the like for those of us who really cook with them, will ya? Store after store, ransacked.
‘Fess up. How are using beans in your kitchen? Which ones? Kidney beans in chili count, by the way.
Add to missing in action list all those ramen soup packets, which do reflect changing tastes in the USA. Besides, they’re easy to cook, even for a 10-year-old, so I can understand why they’ve been raided. But the sriracha? Maybe we should spread a rumor that it’s Chinese. (Its roots are Thai or Burmese, actually, but why quibble?)
Coffee and beer supplies, meanwhile, seem to be holding up, at least here.
We’re told of massed shoppers queued up in lines winding around one Costco building in California days on end. We just don’t have one within an hour of home, so we haven’t witnessed that phenomenon for ourselves.
We do know of one independent grocery, however, that’s being shunned – the Chinese one down the road. That’s a shame, for their food’s notable. You want fresh fish? They know their stuff. Where do you think we first found ramen and Sriracha and tofu, anyway?
Well, in all of this, we can add another phrase to our common usage: shelf-stable items.
What empty shelves and missing items have surprised you the most?
Ten reliable wines in our cellar
Let me tell you, for most of the American public, wine has really improved in the past fifty years. Most of what was available back then, except for snobs and wealthy insiders, was pretty nasty. Thankfully, that’s changed. Yes, definitely.
As for those snobs? The typical Trader Joe’s makes some good stuff truly affordable, just for starters.
Here are ten we like, with the caveat they can vary widely in quality from label to label and season to season.
And, for the record, we prefer dry rather than sweet.
- Cotes du Rhones. Lighter in weight than what I’d normally reach for, but oh my, how gorgeously it goes with everything on the table. If I had to limit it to only one, this is it.
- Merlot. OK, I like big, chewy red. Lots of body. Especially for that now-once-a-week red meat. I don’t care how much it’s disparaged by some critics. Bless them, they keep the price down.
- Malbec. A South American equivalent.
- Cabernet sauvignon. Once known as Bordeaux, it’s far outstripped its French confines. Lighter in weight, it’s a red we think goes with nearly everything. Well, maybe not fish. But definitely cheese and crackers beforehand.
- Pinot noir. Another notable red, but definitely tricky in the lower price levels. Never mind what the movie says, either. I mean, sometimes Zinfandel does the job better.
- Sauvignon blanc. We had one that was truly, marvelously stony. It’s our ideal, our holy grail, should we ever encounter it again. It was a unique year, as we learned later. And it remains our ideal of a white wine.
- Prosecco. Look, we love bubbly. And when a daughter discovered this during a semester in Italy, where it was priced like Coca-Cola here, we were soon hooked. Like cava, it’s champagne by any other name. Try it with pizza, if you must.
- Rose’. A summer favorite around here. Don’t snicker. An Austrian bottling knocked our socks off, all eight bottles we were able to clutch up.
- Good Italian and Spanish varietals. They come in so many varieties we won’t attempt to name them. I’ve come a long way from my ex-father-in-law’s bubbly Lambrusco, though I still harbor a fondness for it, as do my now wife and elder daughter after encountering it in Bologna, along with authentic prosciutto that melts in the mouth.
- I’d add Macedonian, but we’ve been able to score just one bottle in New Hampshire before my wife and daughter debarked for that part of the former Yugoslavia republic. As they discovered there, many folks are making great wine in smaller quantities and keeping it home. Heads up, should you chance across any.
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If you notice, there’s no chardonnay on this list. Too much oak, my wife insists, adding if she wanted that, she’d just bite the table.
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What would you add to the list?
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