Just this morning a dear friend asked on Facebook for guidance on the right quantity of vodka to add to scrambled eggs … without specifiying whether she’d be cooking them for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Adding vodka to scramblies does seem to be a thing, according to what I found on the internet, though I never would have thought of it – I don’t read cookbooks and guides to sophisiticated living articles, where I might have come across it before now. I urged her to let us all know how they turned out – and to remember to photograph the served up results, as surely someone is already compiling a lockdown commemorative cook book! My own recommendation was to simply substitute vodka for a bit less than the usual amount of milk in her recipe. One recipe I checked after advising her was to add one teaspoon per egg !!! 🙂 It could be a nice feature dish for a family or neighbourhood brunch to celebrate the lifting of restrictions …
Twice last week friends in different groups sent around a chain email thing asking for quick and easy recipes to make during this pandemic, shelter-in-place or lockdown that we’re all in. I thought that a bit interesting – after all, the one thing we all have plenty of right now is time, and doubt we really need ‘quick and easy’ at the moment 🙂 I don’t normally do chain letters, and confess I didn’t respond, but one request was from a young mother of two toddlers living out on a farm; and on second thoughts she might be a bit time challenged, so I’ll email one to her out of compassion – I thought of her as I made yesterday’s lunch – cheese pudding the recipe for which is in an article I wrote last year on this blog.
So far Mike and I are sticking to our tried and true favourites, and make sure the shopping lists cover the ingredients we need for them. Perhaps there’s comfort in familiar favourites. We pretty much share the cooking, and so far neither of us has gone into trying new recipes mode in the way that some people have made their pandemic projects. I’m not knocking that – we all need projects, and Mike and I each have a couple in addition to the reading we both enjoy.
Here, I must say how I ‘read’ depends on what else I’m doing at the time.
- If I’m quilting or sewing, I listen to audiobooks.
- Newspapers I read preferably on my desktop.
- If I’m reading a paper book I usually like soft music or am ok with silence, though we’ve had a bit too much of that around this area recently – so I’ve made daily music on tv-radio part of our quarantine environment. It’s a blues station today, and yesterday I had symphony playing all day. I adore military music but there doesn’t seem to be a station there on stingray, but I’ll find some on my computer one day soon.
- And finally we both read a lot on our kindles, and that tends to be in bed or on it. The screens are back lit, so that’s great, and best of all the text can be enlarged or you can change the font for more comfortable reading – a boon to aging eyes. There are limitations, of course, but we are so grateful for modern technology, and one thing I am sure of is that a cookbook on a kindle wouldn’t be nearly as much fun – I’d miss those food splattered pages that bring back many fond memories 🙂