WIAW 123 – We Still Need to Eat

Well. Best laid plans and all that…

I wrote last week that we didn’t have any holiday plans – but in fact, Rich was in the process of making tentative arrangements with friends who live in the neighborhood – just a get together in the park… When he suggested that, I said I’d fix some food – visions of potato salad, coleslaw…

Then I got one of Those phone calls. The ones that change everything.

My brother died.

Tom has had a variety of health problems (some serious, some less so but aggravating the serious ones) for at least 15 years, so this fell into the category of unexpected but medically unsurprising. Still a considerable shock for everyone who knew him. I’m the only immediate family – we have cousins scattered about the country, but no one close by, and he never married – so I’m handling everything.

I’m sure you all understand that the blog is on the back burner. I expect to keep up with it to some degree at least, just for the sake of being normal and putting my attention on something good. And there’s this post about polenta you should see soon – I’ve done most of it, it just needs to be finished. “On the back burner” is a useful phrase, here – it hasn’t stopped, it’s simmering away, but not at the front of my attention, while I wind up his affairs.

However, I still need to eat. We all, always, still need to eat – if anything, in a crisis we have even greater need of good food. And, well, not much could be done for my brother over the holiday weekend – there’s paperwork, too many offices closed – so I was home with little practical to do. So I cooked.

I know from experience that I can forget to eat unless food is put in front of me, so I made food Rich will be able to give me. I used the pressure cooker and the pre-browned beef from the freezer to make the most boring stew ever – some kind of seasoning might have been a nice idea, but I wasn’t thinking that clearly. We’ll be able to heat and eat. I made a large pot of pasta sauce. I’d already made that potato salad – used the Potato Salad with Parsley recipe but used dill instead. And I cooked a massive pot of greens, from the CSA… plenty of microwavable green muffins.

On the Fourth, I made blueberry muffins. (I’d said that’s why I needed a good muffin recipe!) I doubled the batch, so I don’t have to think about breakfast for a few days… I made a protein shake with kefir and orange juice, and coffee, none of which I thought to photograph.

No pictures at all for lunch. I was a bit out of it. I’d made some of the spinach hummus I wrote about last year – we had bags and bags of spinach – and Rich put that and cheese on rice cakes and made me eat them… and then a bit of the potato salad and some ham.

For some reason, the last few weeks every store in the neighborhood has been running great sales on Italian sausage. I like to have some in the house. We both like it, and it’s really easy to cook when I’m not feeling well, so we bought a couple of family packs. One of the things I made for the next few weeks was a big pot of pasta sauce with sausage. But Monday night, I just sliced it and browned it, then tossed in some tatsoi, and put the whole thing over microwaved polenta left over from the upcoming post.

So – I may not post regularly, I’ll be scattered. If I sound disconnected over the next while, you know why. Right now, I’m still in disbelief stage. I expect it to sink in when I can do more… I thought of skipping this post, but it seemed the most logical way to tell you what is going on.

And, well – we still all need to eat.

Take care of yourselves…

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