grocery shopping

What’s For Supper?

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Remember me? I am the one who is constantly thinking of food. A trip to the grocery store is torturous for some, yet I relish in wandering the aisles and seeing what’s new on the food scene. This will eventually lead to me googling recipes that will include my new ingredient. This is my happy place. My world of wonder. That is, until my husband, Wiseguy, calls me at 10am at work and asks, “What’s for supper?” I am not sure what sort of trigger that phrase is for me, but my heart starts palpitating, my blood pressure goes up, and I feel like She Hulk ready to SMASH! I will try and explain.

We have been married for almost three decades (I could have said twenty-seven years, but decades definitely makes it sound longer). The first few years were filled with my desire to create a loving home with delicious home cooked meals. Growing up in a European household, with a stay at home mom, did not provide me with the fortuitous education of any culinary skills. Even when asked to assist my maternal unit, it was to circularly stir something in a pot and I, apparently, did it wrong every time. So, learning to cook for my new husband and stepchildren was at the top of the To Do list. It went so well! Kind of.

Wiseguy actually could cook. So imagine when, I meticulously imitated my mother’s way of making sunnyside up eggs. I poured an inch of oil into the pan, turned the heat on high, cracked the egg over the pan and was immediately assaulted with hot spits of oil upon my person. OUCH! My husband came over to assess the situation and asked two very good questions:

  1. Why did you pour all that oil in?
  2. You do know there is a dial on the stove so you can put the temperature higher or lower?

Hmmmm, lessons learned. For eggs I started using a pat of butter, and most of my cooking was now done on lower heat. That fixed the breakfast portion of my culinary life.

Supper. At my childhood home it was always called dinner. Apparently, the term dinner is for fancy meals. Regular, everyday persons, call it supper, but I digress. My first attempt at roast beef was extraordinary! It was sooooooo good! The pizza, that is. My beef was hard as a rock and you could easily shingle a roof with it. Lesson learned. I would not make roast beef again for another twenty years. Now that’s trauma for you.

Fast forward to today. The children are grown and living on their own. When special occasions occur, I will still go out of my way to make the most wonderful food and spoil my loved ones. With life encompassing just me and my Wiseguy, I have sort of become disinterested and fatigued in the daily need to create creative meals. It appears that after decades of blissful marriage, the only thing left to discuss is: “What’s for supper?” Everyday. And then you die. Right? Does anyone else feel that way?

Again, being brought up in the European standards, we don’t get the luxury of, say, having a bowl of cereal for dinner. That is not an option. The European ethos states: For all dinners (American translation: supper) thou shalt char meat, accompanied by a hot carbohydrate (potatoes / pasta) or rice. Thou shalt attempt to have vegetables of the green variety, cruciferous, if desired by your husband. If not skip the veg and enjoy your meal. Done. My favorite meal if my husband isn’t home? I grab a slice of salami, layer a slice of cheese upon it, and add a pickle. Roll it up. Eat it. Dinner done and there is no clean up! But noooooooo…we are recreating the lives of our ancestors on a nightly basis.

I believe that my creative juices for cooking have gone to the wayside. I have fried, boiled, broiled, grilled, baked for almost thirty years. Add to that working forty five hours a week and then coming home, not to relax after a long day, but to happily prepare a delicious meal in forty-five minutes. (Truth be told, it takes an hour. Still working on that ultimate time goal.) Saturdays used to be my happy-go-hunting day for exciting new foodstuff or newly introduced condiments, to be prepped and ready to surprise my Wiseguy with an exhilarating and adventurous new recipe. Now I prefer to step outside our front door and enjoy life outside the home which would include restaurant lunch dates where SOMEONE ELSE does the cooking for me. No planning. No cooking. No clean up.

Maybe, I’m just in a stagnant cooking funk. This might miraculously lift soon and I’ll be back to pouring over cook books and searching out new meal ideas and then BAM! Back to being gloriously excited about meal making again.

It’s 10:00am. My cell phone will be ringing soon. Oh, there it goes. Hubby is calling me. Wonder what he’s going to ask?

Mask of Mortification

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I wasn’t going to say anything about it. I wasn’t going to talk about it. I wasn’t going to write about it. And yet, here we are. I am going to talk about *hard swallowing noise* – COVID! I know, I know, we are all “Covided out” (meaning: sick and tired of hearing about, talking about, listening about Covid!) However, the reason I am writing about Covid is not really about Covid itself, but the subsequent dangerous and destructive side effects of this disease. I am specifically referring to the wearing of the PPE (personal protective equipment) a.k.a. THE MASK.

THE MASK has become the latest accoutrement and, dare I say, fashion accessory of the year. I myself have a few viable variations of said facial gear.

There is the 3 ply disposable version found in your friendly neighbourhood hospitals. They have a thin metal strip on the inside to ensure you can fold the mask to fit the shape of your nose and the cotton strings that rip right out of the mask as you try to remove this illness barrier off your ears.

hospital mask – 3 ply

There is the 2 ply cotton version with the mesh coating. I have a lovely white one which makes me a wee bit squeemish as it reminds of a pair of children’s tighty-whitey underwear. It is a softer alternative to the paper hospital mask, however, the fine fibres usually end up being inhaled into my nasal cavity thus causing excessive nose twitching or, the more egregious offence of sneezing…in public. Let the Witch Hunt begin!

2 ply mask (tighty-whitey)

There is the 1 ply stretchy version with the stitch down the middle. No metal nose clamp and easily washable and dryable. Probably not nearly as safe at blocking out the Covid as the other two, but c’est la vie!

one ply mask

No matter which mask I prefer (am forced) to wear, there is something they all have in common. Not only do I find that my breathing is impeded, but my sight immediately degenerates as well. Mind you, this incident only occurs when I find the need to exhale. (Statistically speaking, this occurs every 2 seconds as the exhale dutifully follows every inhale). With the exhalation comes a foggy mist on my eyewear thus creating the sensation of walking through a cloud and no foggy idea what’s ahead of me.

Inhale. Exhale. The fog rolls in.

When the whole “mandatory mask wearing” thing was announced I did not realize how debilitating it would be for me. Here is what my first Masked Shopping experience was like.

Me: (fitting mask on face and walking into store)

Me: *gasp* (jump up startled) as someone was standing there to greet me. How did I not see them?

Me: (attempt not to breathe so much to ensure clearer vision. Start to see stars. Grab shopping trolley for support. Back to regular inhaling and exhaling and loss of sight.)

Me: Proceed to indecorously ram shopping cart into wall adjacent to the double sliding doors of entrance. Carbon monoxide vapour issuing from my PPE had once again clouded my sight. With a harrumph of exasperation I backed up my cart, lifted my glasses to gauge direction, realigned myself with the entrance and proceeded to drive the buggy into the store. SUCCESS!

The grocery store I had just entered is a bit more upscale. We regular folk like to jest that it’s the store for the Yoga Moms. You end up feeling pretty hoity-toity buying locally grown, organic produce and hormone free carnivorous delights. So there I was with my pretentious attitude, feeling like a quinoa / kale eating diva, ready to purchase healthful foods for my family. Alas, I had the Disastrous Demolition Derby Cart as my “modus transportationus”.

I drove slowly and cautiously through the bodega, raising my glasses occasionally to ensure I was on a safe path. I felt like a Yoga Mom until I maneuvered my trolley off the beaten path and down the fruit aisle. My shopping cart hit the metal post that housed the roll of plastic bags. CLANG! The post collided into the gorgeous display of green, Granny Smith apples. I held my breath and in doing so the mist on my glasses cleared, just in time for me to witness a row of sumptuous apples begin to cascade one by one from their comfortable perch onto the recently polished floor. I lunged forward in haste and staunched the impeding avalanche of apple suicide. Two of the succulent fruits managed to escape my grasp. Those I relegated to a different section of the fruit aisle in the hopes that someone would recognize the deformity and remove them from any future customer’s grasps. Although elated at my heroic save, I continued my trek, ashamed and wary.

I procured my cruciferous vegetables with nary a knock or a bump and my confidence increased. I boldly moved forward. Me and my trusty buggy full of Yoga Mom-worthy produce. I continued along to the seasonal fruit displays. I successfully wended around the watermelon section and was maneuvering between the strawberries and peaches when I felt a sudden jolt and twinge go up my arms. OMG! Glasses up! (Honestly, I was starting to feel like I was wearing a welding helmet.) A small basket of peaches that had been casually presiding on the corner of the table tipped over when I had unceremoniously rammed my metal Cart of Chaos into the corner of the table. It was a savage end to the stone fruit. I picked up each fuzzy peach and angrily situated them all back into the basket muttering my diatribe of, “stupid mask, can’t see anything, *mutter mutter mutter*”. At this point I was grateful that I was wearing the Mask Of Misery to ensure my secret shameful identity.

Now, you would think that after two such incidents I would book it for the checkout line and get the hell out of Dodge. Not I. I was in it to win it. Blueberries…last thing on my list. Having learned my lesson, I decided to remove my specs in order to reach my final destination and avoid any further fruit genocide. With my blurry vision I arrived at the final checkpoint and slipped my peepers back on to be able to pick a pack. I snatched up the little plastic case where the blueberries resided and, naturally, the clam shell box popped open and all the little blueberries went free-falling like little purple skydivers, landing and rolling around all over the floor. A voice: “It’s ok I’ll get that cleaned up.” Fog glasses raised, me smiling sheepishly inside Mask of Mortification (again, not be seen anyway). I muttered a thanks and walked away. I was not going to chance trying to pick up the sacrifices as I envisioned our heads bumping together as we both went down. Time to get out of Dodge.

I did not see the inside of that store again for 3 months. I also learned something very valuable during that time. If you push the mask up under your eyeglasses, the fogginess stays in the mask and not on your glasses. This is a public service announcement. You’re welcome.