The law of averages is a pretty good indicator that things might change. Say, you haven’t gotten sick in at least four or five years. Year six is your year to get slammed, especially if you happened to be cocky enough about your hand washing routines to talk about them, or heaven forbid, write about them.
I’m not actually sure if I’ve ever written about my crazy sanitizer efforts, but anyone who has ever eaten dinner in a restaurant with me knows that I won’t even touch a glass of water until the menus are gone and I have washed my hands thoroughly with soap.
No amount of hand washing has saved me this year. I have had what seems like the same exact same cold once a month since November. It starts with a stabbing throat pain, followed by immediate congestion that settles into a cough. It’s inconvenient, but not awful. At least it’s not the flu.
When the Kitchen Genius came home on Friday and said he was sick, I wasn’t worried at all. Surely my immune system would kick in. Then Saturday, he coughed over everything in our kitchen as he spent about six hours installing our new dishwasher.
He’s not much of a complainer, so the fact that he was mumbling all day long kept me on alert. I wandered into the kitchen to see if I could help several times. Apparently, he was just talking to the dishwasher and the appliance gods, but I stayed with him for the last hour doing useless things like holding the flashlight while lying on the floor looking at wires and tubes I didn’t understand.
When I woke up the next day with the stabbing throat pain again, I did what I wish every single sick person would do – stay home. We didn’t go to church and I canceled our weekly family dinner. I did not go grocery shopping.
Instead, I laid in bed and thought about what meals we could eat without shopping. In our freezer, we had a ham hock, turkey thighs, chicken breasts, cranberries and homemade stuffing. We even have venison steaks from a friend who hunts in Vermont.
We also had three white potatoes, one sweet potato, two kinds of rice, pasta, bacon, onions and tons of garlic. We had a big container of greens, greenhouse tomatoes, baby cucumbers, blackberries, blueberries, mushrooms, five kinds of cheese, pecans, a bag of split peas, and eggs, eggs, eggs. For snacking, there was halo oranges and roasted pecans. There was also a batch of homemade bread rising in our downstairs refrigerator that was just waiting to be baked.
Then there were the leftovers of stuffed peppers, beef stroganoff and mashed potatoes. There was no chance we would starve or even go hungry.
Everyone handles sickness in a different way. KG prefers to keep moving. In addition to installing the dishwasher, he split wood and cleaned out the chicken coop. Sleep seemed like a better idea to me. Eventually, I got up and made a batch of split pea soup. KG baked the bread.
Now that I feel better, cooking with what we already have for a week seems like a fun challenge. We’ll have turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes, butternut squash and cranberry sauce one night and venison steaks with roasted potatoes and a salad the next. Chicken in a mushroom sauce over pasta is an easy weeknight dinner and so is an egg frittata.
Now that spring in on the way and the chickens are laying eggs like mad, there will be a lot of eggs in our future. Here’s one delicious way to cook them. If you don’t like goat cheese, cheddar would be a great substitute.
Mushroom and Bacon Frittata
Serves 2
3 cocktail size tomatoes, quartered (or 6 cherry tomatoes halved)
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 small onion, diced
2 slices bacon, diced
2 large mushrooms, sliced
4 eggs
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon soft goat cheese, crumbled
Salt and pepper to taste
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place tomatoes, olive oil and half the onions in an 8-inch cast iron skillet. Lightly season with salt and pepper and stir to coat tomatoes and onions. Roast in oven for 20 minutes, stirring once halfway through.
In another cast iron skillet, fry the diced bacon over medium high heat until crisp, about 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon and add mushrooms and remaining onions to the bacon grease in the skillet. Saute until golden, about five minutes, stirring frequently.
Whisk eggs and Dijon mustard together. Season with a little salt and pepper. When tomatoes are done roasting, spoon them into a bowl and set aside. Spread the sautéed mushrooms and onions and bacon evenly in the same skillet the tomatoes cooked in. Pour egg mixture on top and sprinkle with goat cheese. Bake at 400 degrees for 8 minutes. Serve with a green salad and some nice crusty bread.
